Self-Respect in Cyberspace
Julian Dibbell, one of the victims of the famous cyberspace rape incident in LambdaMOO, wrote about his experiences as he saw the crimes occur in front of his eyes. An analysis of his work shows us just how important it is to be able to protect our online identities.
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Dibbell, Julian. “A Rape in Cyberspace.” Scribble, Scribble, Scribble: Selected Texts, Published and Unpublished. 1 Apr. 2010.
Julian Dibbell, the author of the blog post titled “A Rape in Cyberspace”, talks about a sexually disturbing virtual case within the website called LambdaMOO, a virtual imaginary space where people were able to socialize with other avatars, using their own avatar as a representation of themselves. Julian Dibbell starts by telling us the horrible things that Mr. Bungle, an avatar of a supposed male college student, did to other representations, or avatars, within the mansion halls of this imaginary place, which shows up only as texts running across the screen of your laptop. Mr. Bungle’s words of sexual offense against the others in the room became a case of serious insult against others, and was made into a big issue.
Dibbell, when explaining what Mr. Bungle, the name of the suspect, and his voodoo doll avatar, did to the others in the room, does it in a very vague way. His argument is obviously against Mr. Bungle and his actions and he negatively describes the situation that occurred in the year 1993. Dibbell states that “you could hear Mr. Bungle laughing evilly in the distance”, stating that he believes Mr. Bungle really was an evil character, at least in the virtual LambdaMOO world. His argument, as I said, was conveyed in a very vague manner. At the beginning for example, it was difficult for the reader to fully understand the entire context of how LambdaMOO is set up. Later, the reader is able to partially understand that LambdaMOO is, in fact, a world of words running up the computer screen. The reality of a physical mansion or home of the residents of LambdaMOO existed only in the imaginations of those who were involved with the website. What the participants read on the screen, were conveyed in their heads as images, like reading a book. This message, however, is vague from Dibbell’s words in his text. When he starts off his article, he states that he “may have shape-shifted (the story) by the digital moonlight one too many times to be quite up to the task”, thereby questioning the reliability of what he wrote. He himself is not sure if he can effectively explain the Bungle case to us, neither is he sure about being reliable to tell it to us properly. This is why his reliability, and ethos, is automatically low from the very beginning. Dibbell tries to present an argument, the fact that what Mr. Bungle did through the internet, may only be true in the virtual world, but is still a serious crime against the minds of those who were also playing the online game. However, because of the statement he makes, he immediately loses a lot of his ethos, because the audience is now less likely to trust him to be able to correctly define the situation, since he says it has been shape-shifted.
Even though Dibbell tries to use ethos to make his argument, and fails in doing it, he mostly uses pathos to describe the Bungle case and present the argument to the audience. He describes Mr. Bungle almost as a dreaded avatar figure, making his readers afraid of him and erupting a feeling of disgust within them about this horrible character and the horrible sexual acts he committed against his fellow gamers. Dibbell creates a fear within his readers about the queer thought this case brought to the world: if this could happen online, without actually physically affecting the lives of those involved in any way that’s real, is it still considered to be an act of crime? After all, the avatar one creates online is a representation of themselves and when one messes with this avatar it can be just as frightening a though it were happening in real life. Dibbell may have failed to use proper ethos in presenting his argument, but he uses pathos in a very efficient manner to describes the frightening case of Mr. Bungle and his horrible crimes within the halls of a once-upon-a-time mansion called LambdaMOO.
