tutorial presentation - A Rape in Cyberspace

Julian Dibbell’s article “A Rape in Cyberspace” discusses a sexual attack, the Bungle Affair, that occurred in an online world called LambdaMOO, and what this attack implies about online ethics and identity. This attack, Dibbell says, “raises questions that ... demand a clear-eyed, sober, and unmystified consideration. It asks us to ... look without illusion upon the present possibilities for building, in the on-line spaces of this world, societies more decent and free than those mapped onto dirt and concrete and capital. It asks us to behold the new bodies awaiting us in virtual space undazzled by their phantom powers, and to get to the crucial work of sorting out the socially meaningful differences between those bodies and our physical ones. And ... it asks us to wrap our late-modern ontologies, epistemologies, sexual ethics, and common sense around the curious notion of rape by voodoo doll – and to try not to warp them beyond recognition in the process.” (p. 200)

The most obvious question to come out of “A Rape in Cyberspace” is: was it rape? What would qualify it as rape? Is rape even possible in cyberspace? The title Dibbell chose for his article is provocative. I remember reading (although it’s a long time ago, and I don’t have references, sorry) criticisms of “A Rape in Cyberspace” as sensationalist and perhaps even scaremongering. Common sense tells us that rape is physical, and MUD and MOO worlds are constructed entirely of text, so clearly Mr. Bungle’s attack wasn’t rape, right? But if LambdaMOO’s reality is textual, then isn’t textual rape as real as anything else that might happen there? The Bungle Affair brings into question the reality of all of LambdaMOO.

Perhaps the best way to think about Mr. Bungle’s attack is as a kind of crime that doesn’t quite exist in “real life”, not exactly rape but more than “just” sexual harassment. The LambdaMOO residents seem to have mostly felt this; Dibbell says that Mr. Bungle “had committed a MOO crime, and his punishment, if any, would be meted out via the MOO.” (p. 208) This touches on the ethics topics we looked at a couple of weeks ago. If Mr. Bungle’s attack was a MOO crime, rather than a “real life” crime, does that mean that ethics and/or morals are different in cyberspace? Does the medium change the ethical and/or moral aspects of an action? Could there be crimes such as rapes in cyberspace which have no “real life” equivalent?

Identity is a a theme which comes through strongly. To a certain extent, LambdaMOO formed a space for identity experimentation; but at the same time, it was not entirely fluid. The mapping of character to user was not one-to-one. Dibbell mentions that he sometimes took on different characters in LambdaMOO, and Mr. Bungle was reborn after his “toading” as Dr. Jest, but having more than one character per person was discouraged. Sometimes a character might also be controlled by more than one person. The version of “A Rape in Cyberspace” which is in the course reader doesn’t mention this (see p. 29 of My Tiny Life), but “Mr. Bungle” was in fact a group of university students, and the attack was a communal affair. At the same time, however, LambdaMOO was more than just a “vast playpen in which [users] might act out their wildest fantasies”. Dibbell describes a user’s “concern for their character’s reputation” as “mark[ing] the attainment of virtual adulthood” (p. 209).

Gender is also a factor in the attack. The software of LambdaMOO allowed for fluidity in gender – typing “@gender female” or whatever you wanted to be was all it took to change your sex – and there were many gender options that were neither male nor female. However, the users brought their offline gender biases into LambdaMOO with them. Dibbell notes that Mr. Bungle’s attacks were aimed at female-presenting and gender-neutral characters, and that many female-presenting characters had suffered sexual harassment on LambdaMOO at some time or another. He also quotes (in My Tiny Life, p. 126) the creator of LambdaMOO, Pavel Curtis, who pointed out that female-presenting characters were often challenged to “prove” that they were really women, although male-presenting characters were rarely asked to prove themselves men.

(If anyone is interested in following up on this article, Dibbell's book about LambdaMOO, My Tiny Life, is available online. I've read it - you could probably tell from my references to it - and it's a fascinating study. Well worth the read, if you're interested in the issues he raises.)

Culture Jamming...

I thought of a couple more possible examples of culture jamming… One is UK graffiti artist Banksy, who plays around with a lot of images from art and popular culture and mainly critiques capitalism, government and basically the establishment in general. He also pulled off a prank a couple of years ago where he replaced hundreds of Paris Hilton singles in music stores with fake cds that parodied her image. His artworks do raise some pretty valid points, but I’m a bit skeptical about how effective culture jamming can really be at eliciting change or getting people to take a look at themselves and their lives. For example, I doubt that the manipulated ipod advertisements shown in Thursday’s workshop made anyone think twice about having one (I still really want one). I kind of agree with the idea that, because culture jamming in the form of parody is a reaction and reworks existing imagery, it does not offer anything new and possibly even reinforces the status quo.

Another example I thought of was from a documentary I saw a couple of years ago called The Yes Men. Has anyone else seen it? It was about a couple of guys who make fake websites for government organisations and corporations, satirising them and highlighting social injustices they perpetrate. It was a really interesting and funny film, but I think that the kinds of people who would watch the film or be amused by their pranks already agree with their arguments anyway, ie they're sort of preaching to the converted...

Ad Parodies

Images taken from punknews.org

The topic Culture Jamming reminded me of Nike's stint in using Minor Threat's album cover for a skateboarding advertising promotion (Nike's Major Threat Skate Tour) back in 2005. Does anyone know/remember this? Minor Threat was a hardcore punk band from the United States who projected the DIY subculture in their music. Based on my knowledge, the DIY (Do-It-Yourself) culture began as a punk and political movement decades ago which includes being anti multi-national corporations and mass productions etc. The band had been well-known for resisting against huge corporations such as Nike. Anyway, Nike used the band's iconic album cover without the band's permission which created a furore by band member Ian MacKaye. Nike apologized later on publicly saying that it was a 'poor judgement call'. You can read about it here.

Nike claimed that the band is iconic and used the album cover to attract skateboaders to the marketing campaign. Minor Threat may have been legendary amongst the punk community but how well do skateboarders nowdays actually know about the band in the first place? While some may argue that the main problem lies in Nike stealing the artwork without permission, the multi-billion dollar corporation had ultimately used it as a parody against the band. So the 'pop-culture marketers' had used the same strategy towards their own critics and made them taste their own medicine. Based on your previous judgements on culture jamming and ad parodies, is it now acceptable for the tables to be turned?

I thought it'd be interesting to bring this up for the tutorial discussion. Hope it's relevant enough. Have a good week!

Women's digital activism through gaming; The good, the bad, and the virtual

Hi there, I'm sorry for posting late...just realised last night that it was this week that I was supposed to carry out the discussion..below are some questions that I thought of as I read the 1st article in the readings for the week..

Question no 1

Are the ethical values and standards universally applicable in media, irrespective of time and place?
Every profession has its ethical guidelines and a profession without ethics cannot survive in a civilized society. Hence all the respected professions are guided by professional ethics. The professional ethics are guiding principles and a kind of self regulatory mechanism for keeping the profession updated bonded by ethical guidelines. Media is a profession guided by its own ethical guidelines. In most of the developed world press councils develop the guidelines of ethics and keep vigil eye on the professional conduct.

Media have a complex relation with ethical practice. Many of the critics have raised doubts over the electronic media and the doubts are not baseless. By the advent of electronic media the readers of print media raised their eyebrows and hoped a deterioration of ethical values. The good, the bad and the ugly opines the binary good bad a third term, ugly which destabilizes the opposition into a non-logical list. The meaning of these words in binary fashion represents different meanings. The author of the “The Good, the Bad and the virtual” Mr. Mark Poster suggest that the virtual meaning of these words may not fit into existing definitions of the good and bad, This means a situation where the issue of ethical standard or definition may be appropriate but may not be appropriate in the same degree in another situation or time.

Since the new trend of change of media has brought out virtual values by mediation the use of ethical norms may not universally apply at all places and time. The acts that are distanced information machines cannot be judged by the same one which is used for evaluating the face-to-face speeches. Do the standards deployed in real life serve us well in the virtual domains of cyberspace, film, radio, television, telephone and print in short, in the media? According to Mr. Poster there is specificity to ethics that limits its range of applicability to what is now, after the vast dissemination of media, called real life. Perhaps the virtual imposes a species of cultural life that is to use Friedrich Nietzsche’s phrase, beyond good and evil. The problem then is not to introduce and determine a means to apply ethics to a recalcitrant sand strange domain of the virtual, but to invent new systems of valuation that adhere effectively to mediated life.

Another question arises just as the first is posed; if new ethical rules are required for mediated culture, perhaps the earlier system of ethics was itself flawed. Perhaps ethics as we have known it is put into question when the virtual complicates the real. Perhaps certain problems with the ethical emerge when one attempts to extend its reach to mediated acts. As long as media were contained top particular times and spaces, ethics was arguable not in question. To read a printed novel, newspaper, or treatie4s is a special act, easily delimited from real life and face0-to face relation by the very materiality of the printed page. It is simple to distinguish between talking to a person and reading a novel, even if the novel is more arresting that the conversant. The medium of the film is similarly bounded by its reception and its form: films are shown in specific places at specific times. They are determined in time and place. After the credits have rolled the audience leaves the theatre and encounters other people perhaps to discuss the film.

These familiar boundaries between relations among people and the media are now beginning to crumble. Walkman and radios permit a person to listen to music regardless of location.

Thus we can say that certain standards and norms of ethic for media cannot be universal. They might become obsolete in different times and places but certain ethical values remain unchanged regardless of time and place.

Question No 2

Is there a likelihood of getting ethical values diluted in advancement and popularization of electronic media?

According to Mr Poster religion, the cultural dominant of the pre-modern era does not give ethics the pride of place it has in modern society. The present age understands the challenge the media presents for ethics and for spiritual life in general (Dreyfus 1999) He regards the pres as a danger to humanity because of the anonymity it introduces. For him, “the power of impersonality of the press is nothing less than a dreadful calamity”.

Mr Poster further mentions his fears by outlining some directions for the genealogy of morals in an age populated not only by humans but also by information machines, particularly Internet machines. People have begun to flock around Internet machines.

The incursion of information machines into daily life elicited considerable worry about ethics. On the internet itself there are many discussion groups working on the topic. Until the Web was created in 1993 the culture of computer scientists and the ethos of the university community dominated the morale tone of communication on the Internet. A vague ethic of the sharing of information characterized exchanges on the Net. In fact the architecture of networked computing promotes just such rapid decentralized information flows.

Civility was presumed and largely prevailed on the Net from 1969 to 1993. Users were for the most part convinced that a utopian communication device had been set in place that surpassed the moral tone of real life meetings as well as encounters in other media. Gradually the Net users increased. The population of Net users grew quickly from 20 million to 200 million by the end of the decade overwhelming the Net culture of the earlier period. In the new conditions of mass usage the netiquette could not keep up.

The problem of Net ethics attracted the attention of other media like print, news paper and magazines. In Net spamming and flaming became very common problems. The use of Net became a market driven medium. When the topic of ethics on the Net turns to its presentation in the broadcasting media the medium is so coarse that the message in this case ethics is difficult to discern.

By grabbing the Net use by private and global market the ethical issues have got a back seat and hence it is a high time to think that the ethical values have got dilution in the era of Net.

Question No 3

Is it feasible to maintain the transcendental ethical principles in media in contemporary society?

Given the complexity of the challenges and situation the author of “The Good, the Bad and the Virtual”, Mr. Mark Poster suggest that a transcendental ethical principle is not possible to maintain in the current conjuncture of mediated information society, its elaboration does not adequately constitute the conditions of ethics, does not illuminate the dynamics of good and bad in the various cultural contexts of cyberspace and broadcast and print media. Instead according to Nietzsche’s perspective where he has explored the good and the bad in the culture of virtual. The moral positions of the master and the slave, which Nietzsche analyzed so trenchantly, take as their communication context oral and print cultures. Moralities of good /bad and good/evil growing out of these contexts apply at best partially to information society.
Nietzsche advocated, paradoxically, an aesthetic process of moral creation. His “free spirit” of superman resembles nothing so much as an artist, a spiritual warrior, one who wrestles with her own limitations to move beyond them, to get to a place where new values are possible. The moral elite explores its own values, dissects them, reject them devalues them and purposefully seeks the pain of being lost, uncertain, without direction. She suggests an introspection of oneself wherein she struggles with herself, the free spirit experiments with “living dangerously”, risking her beliefs, deliberately placing herself amid the unfamiliar and the strange. This internal struggle of her own experiment is a formula for cultural innovation.

According to Nietzsche only after such a self reflective struggle an individual may arrive at a position to find new values, new ways of valuing that he/she thinks are less self-destr5uctive than both the noble and the democratic moral mechanisms.

Having undergone a rigorous process of self transformation, the free spirit is capable of expressing beautiful values, values that will attract others to join in their celebration of them.

Many philosophers and critics reject the Nietzsche’s theory in modern age. According to many of the critics Nietzsche’s utopia beyond good and evil may be impossible or wrongheaded or undesirable.
Many argue that Nietzsche’s theory of transformation does not really resemble with the theory and process of moral transformation; superman and the condition of moral judgment in the age of mediated information.

The internet enacts a massive deterritorialization of cultural values and by doing so doing links or reterritorializes the ethical and political issues. One innovation, then, of the Internet is a call for a new theory of the political as a collective determination of the good in a context in which the ethical, the individual determination of the good, receives somewhat less prominence than in the modern or print age.

Due to the possibility of exchange of information online availability of communication there is possibility of very constructive and positive communication but there is an equal possibility of disruption of ethics, norms and standards. The establishment of ethical norms, for instance those of netiquette in cyberspace occurs in the process of forming new relations of force, giving shape to the emergent zone of cyberspace. Ethics and politics appear mutually imbricated in networked computing. Whereas ethical concerns in information age include topics of censorship and overload, as these challenge existing norms and attitudes, the more serious issues point to the possibility of a transvaluation of values and the political aspects of forming subjects in the domain of the virtual. Thus the possibility of getting ethical concerns, norms and standard deteriorated from one situation to another is very likely to get deteriorated and socially obsolete. Hence we can say that it is not feasible to maintain the transcendental ethical principles in media in contemporary society for reasons beyond our control.

A response to 'The Ethics of Porn on the Net'

I also change my mind all the time on whether or not I’m ‘okay’ with porn. I don’t think Kath Albury explored the problematics of porn in enough depth in her article. On one hand I think it’s important for female (and male) sexuality to be depicted in diverse ways, and if people want to choose to participate in or watch pornography they should be able to. However, a small part of me does agree with Andrea Dworkin’s argument that women who participate in porn are practising a form of prostitution.

Kath Albury talked about how internet porn has an ‘ethical sensibility’ because it allows people with more diverse or kinky sexual tastes to be represented and catered for. She mentions that some websites do have guidelines and rules, but the internet is so unregulated, obviously there would be a lot of unethical stuff going on. I remember a documentary I watched a while ago about men with fat fetishes overfeeding their partners in order to have more control over them In my opinion, I don’t see how a porn site with images of amputees or really hairy women is necessarily any more ethical than one with fake-breasted conventional porn women. Porn can be hilarious and harmless, but it also tends to promote and perpetuate some pretty distorted and unrealistic ideas about sex and the potential for exploitation is too great for me to be completely comfortable with it.

workshop4

Okay so a tad late, better late than never I guess.

I don't rmemeber if anyone else noted this, but in the Second Life sign up page, in the 'country' slide, it has 5 or so countries that are isolated from the rest - clearly 2nd life either has a lot of users in these countries, or is aiming at these people (USA, UK, Germany, Japan, South Korea). Yahoo in signing up already had Australia down as my country, though I wasn't using the Australian version. I guess they're already picking up my location through my IP address or something. Lavalife assumed that I was a female looking for casual dating between 25-34 or something.

I'm trying to think whether I'd call any of this racist/sexist. Was anyone in our tute offended by the assumptions any of the sign up pages made? I'm trying to think if I'd say any of the pages I saw were inherently racist.. I'd probably agree with what other people in the tute have been saying about the assumption being the user is white/middle class or above, etc etc. Has anyone thought about things the other way - there's millions of websites out there directed at specific groups that are not the norm? For example, VampireFreaks. On one hand, the obvious assumption is that to be using this website, you'll be into the goth/emo/alternative etc etc community/fashion/culture. That said, on the signup page, you're basically asked for age, name, gender (m/f). At least at that stage of the signup, there isn't anything about country etc.

Does this say the website is making more or less assumptions than say yahoo, and therefore is less racist/sexist? I don't really know. Where I was trying to go with this is that, given the openess of the internet, even if the premier websites (eg massive corporation stuff like microsoft passport, yahoo, etc) don't cater to everyone, I think there's probably a website out there serving that groups needs. Should they face scrutiny because they're assuming the user isn't part of the norm? I don't know. I kinda feel its good to have variety? But really i'm saying this to try put something fresh on this blog.

If this has been especially rambly, I have gotten the 'proper'/full cold thats doing the rounds, and is currently making me feel pretty average. Do i end every post talking about how crap i feel? i have a sneaking suspicion i might.. haha. oh well.

Racial Identity Online

In response to Therese's post, I think that race is less fixed in cyberspace. As can be seen in the critique of the website ICERED, people are a lot more confident and outspoken in cyberspace . The anonymity that can be found online means that people are less likely to fear retribution for their opinions, and they can also shield and reveal whatever parts of their identity they wish to (age, gender, race, etc) because most communication is done with text.

I believe that abolition of race in cyberspace would have negative affects in regards to “real life” interaction between different races. Prejudices would still exist in face to face interaction, because the initial issue of racial assumptions would not have been dealt with. Of course, abolition would assist in the lessening of prejudice online on the surface but not the assumptions that individuals attach to the idea of race. This applies to issues such as sexism and homophobia as well (as can be seen in the discriminatory thread posted on ICERED entitled "Homosexual on ICERED"; which, as well as being homophobic, depicts the incorrect assumption that homosexuality is a "feature" of western countries and no where else) .

Stereotypes regarding women, men, homosexuals and different races have been present in media forms in the past, such as movies and television but can also be generated by cultural and religious beliefs. It’d be foolish to assume that there’s a “quick fix” for the problem of prejudice, but abolition would appear to be more problematic with regards to real life. If race were to be obscured, no presumably warped views would be changed. People would bring their own values to cyberspace and (as indicated in “Menu-Driven Identities: Making Race Happen Online”) it is often presumed that white is the “default race” of the internet.

Integration would also have its set backs; what about those people who are unwilling to interact with people of different races, sexualities, etc? This unwillingness could provide a barrier, stopping potential interactions between races. However, it does appear more favourable than abolition as it attempts to eradicate the problem rather than just ignore it. Eventual integration appears to be the best option in challenging and eradicating prejudice. If people are able to remove initial assumptions, they will be able to accept different races, sexualities, etc.