I have chosen to cover Julian Dibbell's article, "A Rape in Cyberspace" this week. This article starts off by discussing Mr. Bungle, an online user of LambdaMOO who entered a room with many other people and used character emotes to virtually rape many of the other users. He used many different vulgar and explicit emotes on different people that left many of them feeling violated in real life due to their connection to their virtual persona.
After that night, the users that were violated or that witnessed the event banded together to attempt to get Mr. Bungle deleted from the LambdaMOO server so that he could never do anything to them again. However by this time the administrators to the server had stopped actively participating in it and had changed their stance on unruly users. To get someone deleted, instead of an admin just doing it themselves, the community now had to have a general consensus to do it, which meant community itself had to be defined in an online medium, which was still very new. The users had to get together and form their own judicial system, setting up rules and parameters for using the LambdaMOO system and what punishments were reserved for people that broke them.
I found it very interesting reading this article and seeing how this online community had to grow and govern itself after a traumatic event happened. Being a gamer myself I have had my share of run ins with immature people. I find that for the most part I have become deaf to the types of attacks that Mr. Bungle and other people attempt online. I have ran into a lot of people that have said the same things in games that I don't take anything seriously or personally anymore. I can only imagine what it was actually like to the people of LambdaMOO because these types of virtual attacks were really unprecedented at the time, and those people probably felt a much greater connection to their online persona than gamers nowadays do.
Today gamers have to govern themselves similarly to what the LambdaMOO community did. Gamers can often rent game servers and allow people to play on them so that they can have administrative access and control what maps people play on, and to have the ability to kick or ban people that are unruly.
It is amazing to see how people react in an online environment where anonymity allows for them to get away with just about anything without repercussions. I'm sure 99% of the immature people online that say these things would never say them in person because they might get beat up or shunned. Perhaps society just has to learn to live with these type of people and try not to give them the attention they crave, because there is always going to be people that feel they are invincible online and that they can say whatever they want.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Friday, February 12, 2010
Race in the Movies
I enjoyed Thursday's discussion a lot because I'm a big fan of the Matrix movies. The reason I like them (the original Matrix more than the sequels) is not for the action in them but more the philosophical undertones to the story. Before this week however, I never really paid much attention to the use of race in the films and whether it was planned the way Nakamura talks about. I noticed the contrast between the dark and dingy real world compared to the clean and "ideal" world of The Matrix, but to throw in race into that and how white people are seen as "the man" that the predominantly minority community of Zion has to rise up against seemed like a bit of a stretch to me.
I'll run with it though, and the argument that I chose to use of Nakamura's is one she made on the bottom of page 100. She describes the use of agents in The Matrix to represent the power of "white male privilege" and that they "embody the uniformity of white male culture." This contrasts the large minority population of Zion, and Nakamura sums it up by saying the agents represent a machine culture that is "viral, oppressive, and assimilative"; while "Blackness retains its identity in the face of technological change, white power, and privilege, and racism" (100).
When I was reading this chapter I couldn't help but think of the use of storm troopers in Star Wars and how they are all white and faceless, in a way representing "the man" similar to the role of agents. Like with Agent Smith, all storm troopers in the films look alike and seem to be in endless supply. In contrast the Rebel Alliance doesn't wear full body suits, and every person has their own identity like the people of Zion do. As Nakamura put it "Afro-futurist mojo and black identity are generally depicted as singular, 'natural,' and, as Ebert puts it, unassimilable and 'authentic'" (100). And like the quote I used earlier, the Rebels retain their identity much like "blackness" does as Nakamura says.
Just like in The Matrix, The Empire is a machine similar to the matrix itself while the Rebel Alliance is the Zion resistance. The Rebels have minorities serving with them while at all times the storm troopers are anonymous.
I really don't know whether the movie makers really planned all of this out when making their films to inject these racial undertones or if it's something that people just picked up on. It still leads to some interesting thought provoking conversations. Looking forward to see the other films people make connections with for this assignment.
Works Cited
Nakamura, Lisa. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
I'll run with it though, and the argument that I chose to use of Nakamura's is one she made on the bottom of page 100. She describes the use of agents in The Matrix to represent the power of "white male privilege" and that they "embody the uniformity of white male culture." This contrasts the large minority population of Zion, and Nakamura sums it up by saying the agents represent a machine culture that is "viral, oppressive, and assimilative"; while "Blackness retains its identity in the face of technological change, white power, and privilege, and racism" (100).
When I was reading this chapter I couldn't help but think of the use of storm troopers in Star Wars and how they are all white and faceless, in a way representing "the man" similar to the role of agents. Like with Agent Smith, all storm troopers in the films look alike and seem to be in endless supply. In contrast the Rebel Alliance doesn't wear full body suits, and every person has their own identity like the people of Zion do. As Nakamura put it "Afro-futurist mojo and black identity are generally depicted as singular, 'natural,' and, as Ebert puts it, unassimilable and 'authentic'" (100). And like the quote I used earlier, the Rebels retain their identity much like "blackness" does as Nakamura says.
Just like in The Matrix, The Empire is a machine similar to the matrix itself while the Rebel Alliance is the Zion resistance. The Rebels have minorities serving with them while at all times the storm troopers are anonymous.
I really don't know whether the movie makers really planned all of this out when making their films to inject these racial undertones or if it's something that people just picked up on. It still leads to some interesting thought provoking conversations. Looking forward to see the other films people make connections with for this assignment.
Works Cited
Nakamura, Lisa. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Friday, February 5, 2010
"Primate Vision" by Donna Haraway
I'll start off by saying I wasn't able to follow completely what this entire book was about. The author is explaining in it how the field of science is being used like a fiction book at times to give us information. She uses examples of how books and movies that involve primates give us a false knowledge about them, and how that is affecting how we view different primates and treat them.
Examples were given about how this has led to our choice to send chimpanzees into space, or to demonize gorillas if a human goes into their controlled habitat in a zoo and ends up getting attacked.
Haraway explains one of the points of her book when she says the main argument is "about an Order, a taxonomic and therefore political order that works by the negotiation of boundaries achieved through ordering differences (12). She was referencing also how humans want to use racial and gender differences to create separations amongst people and other species. It is as if we strive to set ourselves apart from other primates because we don't want to face that we have evolved from them. Haraway also tackles this view with respect to religion, and how creationism has factored into it.
I see how we view visual differences amongst other humans and species as an immediate way to classify them in the hierarchy we create as Haraway discussed. But what happens when this visual identification is not available? Online we are not always able to see the person we are talking to, and most of the time all we see what they have typed out on the screen. I can't help but wonder how much this really effects our ability to identify with the other person. If you take out our ability to judge them at first glance we then get to know them for who they really are, by their thoughts and attitude. By doing this we are bypassing our habit of classifying immediately and I think we're better off because of it.
Haraway may be talking about this in reference to primate species and how we can learn more about them if we take them for who we are, but I believe we can say the exact same thing in respect for other people. The internet and the anonymous interactivity it provides allows us to evolve even further and treat humans equally regardless of their physical traits.
Works Cited
Haraway, Donna. "Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science." American Historical Review 96.3 (1991): 1-15. EBSCOhost. Local University Library Service, Washington State University Lib. 3 Feb 2010 http://ntserver1.wsulibs.wsu.edu:2060/scripts/wsuall.pl?url=http://ntserver1.wsulibs.wsu.edu:2056/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=9110140255&site=ehost-live
Examples were given about how this has led to our choice to send chimpanzees into space, or to demonize gorillas if a human goes into their controlled habitat in a zoo and ends up getting attacked.
Haraway explains one of the points of her book when she says the main argument is "about an Order, a taxonomic and therefore political order that works by the negotiation of boundaries achieved through ordering differences (12). She was referencing also how humans want to use racial and gender differences to create separations amongst people and other species. It is as if we strive to set ourselves apart from other primates because we don't want to face that we have evolved from them. Haraway also tackles this view with respect to religion, and how creationism has factored into it.
I see how we view visual differences amongst other humans and species as an immediate way to classify them in the hierarchy we create as Haraway discussed. But what happens when this visual identification is not available? Online we are not always able to see the person we are talking to, and most of the time all we see what they have typed out on the screen. I can't help but wonder how much this really effects our ability to identify with the other person. If you take out our ability to judge them at first glance we then get to know them for who they really are, by their thoughts and attitude. By doing this we are bypassing our habit of classifying immediately and I think we're better off because of it.
Haraway may be talking about this in reference to primate species and how we can learn more about them if we take them for who we are, but I believe we can say the exact same thing in respect for other people. The internet and the anonymous interactivity it provides allows us to evolve even further and treat humans equally regardless of their physical traits.
Works Cited
Haraway, Donna. "Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science." American Historical Review 96.3 (1991): 1-15. EBSCOhost. Local University Library Service, Washington State University Lib. 3 Feb 2010 http://ntserver1.wsulibs.wsu.edu:2060/scripts/wsuall.pl?url=http://ntserver1.wsulibs.wsu.edu:2056/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=9110140255&site=ehost-live
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Haraway Blog Post
Just letting everyone in my group know I'm going to cover Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science for my blog post this week. I plan to hopefully tie the writing into the race and gender discussions we are having in the technology field.
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