Week 10 presentation: Online Community

BY Anna and Audrey
Our presentation in this week is online community. There are two readings for this week. The first reading is related to the Bungle Affair happened in LambdaMOO and the second reading is more factual, talking about the concept of online community and the author’s experience in it.

First of all, what is online community? Quoted from the second reading, Rheingold explained it in this way,"Social aggregation that emerges from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace." We can interpret it as the social network which formed by individuals and these individuals interact through specific media. These kinds of interaction do not restricted by geographical and political boundaries.

In the first reading, the Bungle Affair had happened in LambdaMOO. LambdaMOO is a text-based virtual community, which means people use texts to interact. The characteristics of LambdaMOO is that it allows all people around the world to chat; even you are not a member. Its membership is free; you can simply apply it with an email account. Also, LambdaMOO is like a real community, there are many rooms, like living room, city hall, etc. Those rooms are actually created by the members. Furthermore, there are also no elaborate graphical avatars or 3-dimensional space warriors.

Mr. Bungle is one of the members in LambdaMOO. He used voodoo dolls to control people and raped the some female members in LambdaMOO through texts. Those female characters felt hurt in both mentally and physically. This led to a controversy if this kind of case belongs to virtual rape.

This became a hot topic in LambdaMOO. Some people suggested kicking Mr. Bungle out and some disagreed. For those which support kicking Mr. Bungle out, they thought that Mr. Bungle was disturbing the order in this community. If there was no punishment on him, there may be second, third and even more people follow Mr. Bungle and do the same things on the others. And for those who disagreed to kick Mr. Bungle out, they believed that toads are all around the world, it is impossible to avoid them. Also, there are no regulations for using this virtual community; it was unfair to prove Mr. Bungle has done wrong things.

In this controversial issue, the administrator decided to kick Mr. Bungle out. The last sentence is that “Mr. Bungle was truly dead and truly gone.” Later on, LamdaMOO introduced a new petitions and ballots system. Members can vote and the side with more people support will become the stand of LamdaMOO.
It comes to nearly the end of this issue; however, a member named Dr. Jest started to do something strange in the community, like forcing people to put their head into jars. Some people thought that this might be another identity of Mr. Bungle. Since there were not enough votes, others failed to toad him out and it ends with left of Dr. Jest.

After having a summary of the readings, it comes to our discussion time.

1a. Do you think that the Virtual Rape (like Bungle Affair) is really a crime? Why?
We think that it is a shitty things, but not as serious as a crime. Unlike the rape case in reality, virtual rape in this case does not include any physical touches. People may argue that those texts would mentally hurt the victim, however, is it really so powerful to do so? In our opinion, the victims in a rape case in real community are passive. It is hard for them to resist the violators. On the other hand, victims in virtual community can be relatively more active. When they receive those messages or requests, they can immediately reject, ignore or even block violators to prevent getting hurt.

1b. If you say virtual rape is really a crime, then how about stealing crops in Facebook?
(We think it is not. Actually, it depends on the seriousness of the issue. Like those facebook games, it does not really affect us in reality. Although those virtual crops stolen by the others, we did not have any actual lost in this case.)

In the video, the man shows the things that we will not do in reality but in facebook. However, in the second reading, Rheingold mentioned “People in virtual communities do just about everything people do in real life, but we leave our bodies behind.”
2a. Are there any differences for the things that you have done/ will do in the reality and virtual community?

Yes. We may do some different things between the real life and virtual communities. Just like in real life, we will not suddenly speakthose sentences in poem. And the use of signs or texts in the internet, like “lol”, “xd” or even the “like” function in facebook may not really express people’s emotion in ture.
A reason causes this maybe because of the moral standard in reality. Most people will not talk to strangers in street, but they will add strangers in Facebook. Another example is that people may choose downloading and watching pornography through computer, but not buying pornography in the streets.

2b. Is it because of the level of freedom in virtual community differ from the reality?
Yes. Actually, we have a doubt in the gender of Mr. Bungle in reality. No one can ensure Mr. Bungle is a man. How about if Mr. Bungle is a woman in reality? Or the victims are men? Or even those victims are another online identity of Mr. Bungle? We cannot ascertain others in the virtual community.
There is no classification of gender, race and positions in virtual community; we can have the identity(s) that we like. Since the function of internet advancing, users can create or have different masks and role play in the internet. In our daily life, the norms and standard in society restrict the things that we can do and should do. The freedom in internet may help people to rebuild and orientate their identity that do not accept by others in reality.

3. Is it necessary to have a set of online regulations for us to follow? If yes, who do you think would be the one to decide those rules and how to determine them?
We think that there maybe a need to set some regulations for the virtual communities, however, it is hardly to be achieved. The Network is universal, to a certain extent, there is no geographical distinction, because it is established by the individual all over the world. It is difficult to set a standards of the regulation to fully comply the distinct of standards, laws, and even law and culture for different countries.
Moreover, China and foreign countries as an example, they have a different standards to manage the network, if you played some microblogging which is adverse the central or China, the consequences may be not the same as playing it in a foreign country, that is, the account may be canceled, or worse, the user will be arrested. Ignoring the issue of the human rights, it has been able to demonstrate the own culture of different countries, based on the regulation and how to treat that problem of the network are respectively.
Even after setting the regulations, the users can auto-proxy, for example, the AV of Japanese,Yu Aoi, opened the twitter, and around 20000 users in China have become her follower in overnight. Therefore, it is difficult to establish a set of regulation to practice in virtual communities effectively and practically.

4. Do you think if it is feasible to use the norms and standards in real society to cope with the problems happened in the internet?
It is hard to decide what is the real life or virtual communities. We can not lack of network, but it is a borderless space ultimately, and even the moral standards of each region are different. To use as a standard if real-world to apply in the cyberspace, it may violate the original purpose of the network and limits itself of the human.
Furthermore, does the real norms must certainly correct? it is also an important issue which worth considering for the people. We can use the space of virtual communities to accomplish the inner role who we desire, explore and construct the self-identity, even realize the self-confidence and recognition which we can not achieve in the reality. Furthermore, it can be combined with "marginal groups", so that they can gather together, attain the self identity, more than, the recognition of gender.

To conclude, we can not lack of virtual communities, but it cannot replace our real life completely. Or, to a certain extent, like mentioned in the reading, ”Not only do I inhabit my virtual communities, to the degree that I carry around their conversation in my head and begin to mix it up with them in real life, my virtual communities also inhabit my life.” We have mixed the blur boundaries of the real life and virtual worlds, what is more both of them are influence each other.