“Rape in Cyberspace”
While people determine their identities online, disturbing things can occur. After reading the article Rape in Cyberspace, I knew became aware of a lot of new terms such as ‘voodoo doll’ (make other users say thing they really didn’t say), ‘virtual rape’ (rape people online) and ‘toading’ (eliminate someone from an online community). The character of Mr. Bungle virtually rapes two women and there is a real feeling of violation on the part of the um..victims? I find this a compelling yet hard concept to grasp. How can something like virtual rape cross over to create emotions that one would experience after a real life rape? Are people so naive as to believe that their online personas represent real life events? I stuggle with this entire online/offline dichotomy, mainly because I have experienced life before the internet and found it to be better, without such deception. When people no longer have the ability or the desire for that matter to see the difference between what is real and what is fake, communication breaks down to the point of no return, no matter what medium it is a part of. Because there are no real life consequences for Mr. Bungle, he can not see the true horror of what he has done, in essence that is. When online and offline personas meld there is a sense of what is right and wrong that does not coincide with how traditional social norms are constructed in relation to behavior online. The attitude is that people like Mr. Bungle think that because ‘it was just online’ that it doesn’t mean anything and there was no real harm done. The harm is however, that people who invest their real personality into virtual life are bound to be the ones to suffer the most because of this investment. “Many were the casual references to Bungle’s deed as simply “rape,” but these in no way implied that the players had lost sight of all distinctions between the virtual and physical versions, or that they believed Bungle should be dealt with in the same way a real-life criminal would. He had committed a MOO crime, and his punishment, if any, would be meted out via the MOO (Dibble, 1993).”
