A Rape in Cyberspace...

“What happens inside a MUD-made world is neither exactly real nor exactly make-believe, but profoundly, compellingly, and emotionally meaningful.”

The tone of Dibbell’s article resembles a craftily written fantasy narrative. This may seem out of place at first considering the serious nature of the topic at hand, but upon reflection, fits perfectly with the setting of the crime in a place which Dibbell describes as a “semi-fictional otherworld”. One of the most significant themes I took from this reading was the exploration of online experience with reference to ‘RL’ and ‘VR.’

I don’t think that ‘rape’ is really the right word to describe what happened in LambdaMOO. The article also works awkwardly with this term alluding to both its excess (in the physical sense) and lacking (in that the actions were of a nature that is indescribable by current technology.) This mismatching of old terminology with phenomena created through digital technology has resonances within other areas of the course such as the theory surrounding weblogs. This use of terminology is just one way we look to use things in ‘real life’ that are readily understood to describe actions ‘online’. It is evident that these two spheres are not mutually exclusive. Our physical and online lives give and take meaning from each other.

The people who interact in online communities are the same people that exist in the offline communities. As we have seen in the Blacksburg Electronic Village, existing prejudices and concerns in the ‘real life’ community are transferred into the online realm. This can be seen in the way the users of LambdaMOO dealt with their ‘rapist’ and indeed with the act of rape itself. As Dibbell states “[legba] suffered a brand of degradation all-too-customarily reserved for the embodied female.” In the lecture, Tama discussed whether gendered power relations could exist in a completely textual space. I think the fact that these relations do occur shows that the embodied person behind the online persona cannot be separated from it. Dibbell describes the different sectors of the online community, which are similar to sectors found in a geographical community. As in ‘RL’ a serious common cause was able to bind the community together in order to action some form of social justice. A judiciary system was put in place that resembled their ideals of a democratic system experienced in real life.

A note on narrative ideals: I was recently reading a book that discussed the use of terra australis as a space of utopian narrative prior to European settlement. The book said that after Australia became a colonized space, other spaces such as outer space became the sites of narrative utopias. I would like to extend this proposition further, to say that since the entire of the planet and indeed our immediate spacial areas have been colonized, they are no longer available as utopian sites. Around the time of these writings, the Internet was being created as the next utopian narrative site. (“techno-utopian ecstasies of West Coast cyperhippies”) The significance of the ‘rape’ was that it shattered, for the users of LambdaMOO, this idea of a safe place, a utopia. So in the absence of this a community was created, where they attempted to create a utopian democracy. The impossibility of an Internet utopia comes from the idea I discussed earlier about bringing offline ‘baggage’ online, we cannot create a utopia and exist in it too, so to speak.