A Blog in Cyberspace

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.