Rethinking Plato's Dialogues.. In the Ivy Room!!

In reading the Dibbell, we initially started discussing the idea of legality and illegality in the virtual as opposed to the real world…

Nick: I thought it was funny to think about committing a “crime” in the MOO and what that meant in the way of consequences for “myself” both in the real and virtual worlds..

Allie: Yeah. I also think that goes well with the idea of how legality and crime have to do with the body and the biological…Like viruses are still so rooted in the words of the natural world like “jungle” and “worm,” but then virtual rape is no longer a gross physical violation but a “breach in civility” as one MOOer calls it.

N: Buliding on the idea of “rape” and expanding it from a personal act to a more general invasion of larger ideas/groups of people. Ie. New World exploration and the spread of new disease/contagion in populations.

A: Right! And because the people spreading diseases were the colonizers (like the Spanish bringing smallpox to the Americas) they weren’t punished at all, even when the spread was an intentional method of genocide, because they were the authorities in the situation.

N: Coming back to the Wired article and paralleling it to the consequences of colonization, there’s something to be gained from the spread of viruses, just like the work done by the people mentioned in Wired.. But there are some harms associated with the whole process..

A: Do you think in terms of viruses the advances outweigh the dangers, or vice versa, or something else? Should we be playing with this fire, or leaving it alone?

N: I feel like the computer variety of viruses, no matter how similar they are in nature to biological diseases, lack some of the larger, looming consequences that smallpox or syphilis are linked to. But still, the argument can be made the computer viruses threaten the accumulation and preservation of knowledge in the virtual..

A: Alright. I think that line of reasoning could also be applied to virtual rape—the consequences might not be as damaging for the victim or as grave for the perpetrator than if the action were to occur in RL. Emmeline, for example, identifies herself as a “survivor” or virtual and physical rape, but I feel like “surviving” virtual rape would be a very different experience than surviving physical rape. I mean, how different would it be if she were a survivor of physical rape rather than virtual rape “many times over?”


N: Interesting. The way I eventually came to think of virtual and “real” rape was that both have a very common psychological trauma to them; part of the emotional and psychological problems that accompany rape victims is the association of fear and violation with the event, purely psychological factors. The initial act is accessed through two very different means (virtual versus real), yet the aftermath is the same.

A: Ok. I think we’ve opened up a few cans of worms (no pun intended) to make for good section this week. Want to call it a night?

N: Agreed.