Abstract
Throughout the course of this essay I will attempt to construct a picture of modern techno cultures in respect of the laws and norms of the world they inhabit but don’t necessarily fit into. I will try to display to the reader that these techno cultures live within our world but outside our laws, they themselves construct their own laws as they live in their own worlds, they live in our world but in another world of their choosing.
I will in a sense try to find reality in these virtual worlds and try to discover what is real and what is false; try to tell the dreams from the reality, like peeling an onion. I will then move onto the more important issue of the conceptualisation of crimes such as rape in a virtual setting and how this relates into our society and try to answer questions around the effects these cultures have on real crime and society as a whole.
I will also briefly talk about how violence and deviance is presented in video games and other such media and how this can distort, undermine or strengthen ideologies.
Today we live in a society where we can literally escape the trappings of our bodies and travel to worlds unlike our own, a world that is entirely digital, where we leave all notions of irreducible limits and natural laws behind and it is in this essay I want to discuss these new worlds. (Curtis Karnow 1994 p. 1)
Answering questions such as; do the old laws apply in this new world or will these new worlds come with their own laws which supersede the law of the real world?
Today thriving communities of people exist in online games and because these games like World of Warcraft exist in a fantasy world, so to comes this fantasy culture, a community of people linked by computers; a cyber culture.
These cyber cultures do not so much borrow from real culture but invent and replace real culture with an entirely new one. These are cultures which do not necessarily rise from a specific agenda they are communities forged by commonality. In some cases not feeling a part of a real culture can lead people to a created culture, we have seen this type of scenario before in Stanley Cohen’s work on sub-cultures.
People who do not fit in make their own sub-cultures, but obviously these cultures still exist in the real world therefore are still governed by laws. Which is why cyber cultures are so interesting because not only are they devoid of specific legal laws some are not even governed by simple laws of nature or physics, for example; in world of warcraft you can use magic, which is as far as I know impossible.
Although specific legally binding laws do not apply in virtual worlds we have become accustomed in our time with technology utilized as a vehicle for crime, for example; a bullet from a gun killing someone, or tying in with our subject; people who use the internet as a medium for spreading offensive material and/or raping someone virtually, i.e. making someone feel as if they’d been physically raped with the use of a chat room or an online game.
Disembodiment and Deception
Whenever we log on to our computers we are essentially entering an alternate dimension, we no longer exist in our physical setting, instead we are relocated to a generalised everywhere, where we can experience people and places only dreamt of before now. We are not so much moving into a post-human society but more so into a post-body society as it is a common occurrence in modern life to form bonds with people you may never have met nor had any human contact with. (Morley and Robbins 1995: 132)
In fact often people marry in games like World of Warcraft and never even meet their partner until after the wedding if at all. There are even cases of real couples divorcing over virtual adultery taking place in an online game.
Humans today are computer mediated; we have found a way to do the normal things we do every day without having to move from the comfort of our homes. This relationship is symbolised as a computer ‘oneness’ humans have formed a symbiotic relationship with machines.
This raises many questions around culpability as it becomes harder to tell where the human begins and the machine ends. How can the law punish a machine? Are actions like assault or rape less severe if they are mediated by a machine? Establishing harm is hard enough in the real world; in a virtual world it becomes virtually impossible.
How far does the human consciousness actually transcend into the virtual world? We cannot very well say all the way, we cannot say we exist in cyberspace in the same context as we exist in real space so there is a clear difference between the two states of being, a gap if you will, it is this gap that complicates virtual crime.
Virtual crime is not the same as real crime in my opinion; in the world of video games for example you can torture, murder and engage in numerous virtual criminal activities including rape (RapeLay 2006) without consequence, when does this become crime?
People make fictional characters on online games all the time the only difference is if they are killed it becomes an annoyance to the person who created them and wanted to continue playing as that character.
A characters worth in this context is measured in regards to whether it will be missed or not, whether the loss of the character causes inconvenience for its creator. Quite a sobering thought if you compare it to the context of a mother losing her child. As we have established that bonds can be formed without bodies so in theory we can say someone could mourn a fictional character’s death if they felt emotionally connected in some way.
Think about this in the context of films as well, why does a sad film make us cry? Surely we have no vested interest, no connection to the fictional characters involved. Now we come to a point where we understand the purpose of this media is to engage the viewer or the player, their intention is to connect you emotionally to these fictional characters, immersing you into the storyline simply to keep you playing or watching.
Deviance made easy
In the past a person might have had to go into a shop and make contact with another person to purchase pornographic material but these days it’s the click of a mouse away. The internet gives people the means and the privacy to be as deviant as they want (John Naughton 1999: 34-35).
The internet makes a safe home for paedophiles, giving them the ability to appear to be a child or the opposite sex in order to snare an unwilling victim. The anonymity of the internet grants stalkers the ability to ‘follow’ numerous targets at once gleaming pages of information from a single website. The internet is a breeding ground of crime because it makes crime and the ability to offend easier because there is little to no consequence. (M. Taylor, 1999)
Censorship of the internet is virtually impossible which is one of its greatest attractions, but if we are to assume that people or societies as a whole can be harmed by having access to certain material, we must conclude that the potential for harm is increased by the existence of the internet.
The internet allows complete freedom of speech, it takes control over content out of the hands of the powerful and places it at the feet of the individual. This may sound like a positive thing and for all intensive purposes it is as more people have the ability to get their point across but wherever there is power like this, there are those willing to abuse it. (Yvonne Jewkes and Keith Sharp 2003: 03)
In this struggle we have a constant tug of war between the democratic rights of an individual and their rights of free speech and the offence or harm it could cause someone on the receiving end. (Mill 1859)
The internet has in fact confused the very notion of what is acceptable and what is deviant, so what is completely unacceptable in person like asking inappropriate sexual questions to a woman is normal in a chat room or an online game because there’s barrier of anonymity, deviance is now essentially in the eye of the beholder. (Becker 1963)
The content of sensitive material hasn’t changed its just been enhanced by technology, paedophiles, rapists and stalkers weren’t invented by the internet, they’ve just become more visible and that’s a good thing because although they have the power of anonymity granted to them by the internet, we have increased awareness of their activity. (Slevin 2000)
Stick and Stones?
What is classified as obscene material is subjective, and there is this constant struggle between what it is our right to see for purposes of our expression and freedom and what the government wants to keep from us, so it is our duty essentially to keep the government at bay as it is theirs to keep us at bay.
People today are arrested when they’re found in the possession of child pornography, no crime is committed but the innocence of children is seen as so precious it is a sort of pre-emptive strike as it’s assumed that this fantasy will escalate into an actual act on a child.
Paedophilia is a very sensitive subject and thus it is politicized and sensationalized by the media, it is a moral panic and when you create this taboo and try to suppress it, it more than likely actually causes it. (Adler, 2001:273)
Does the internet satisfy curiosity or erode the browsers view of right and wrong? (Matza, 1964) Drift theory suggests that child pornography only works to fuel the paedophiles sexual appetite, propelling them to further deviance, the same can be said for violent pornography for rapists. The serial killer Ted Bundy in fact blamed his spree of killings on the influence of violent pornography and his killings took place before the internet was even invented.
Information on the internet can lead to violence, bomb making, names and addresses of abortionists and paedophiles can be made public to incite hate groups, Internet gangs are formed, and online bullying is an everyday occurrence. The internet used to circulate propaganda and change viewpoints, mislead and confuse people into believing urban myths and stereotypes.
Chat rooms are dangerous because they allow children to have relationships and form emotional bounds on their own terms and not of their parents, children are too trusting of their peers and this is dangerous. Chat rooms are secretive and subversive and children don’t understand what is inappropriate and what isn’t.
LambdaMoo is an online mmo (Mass Multiplayer online game) where people interact using avatars. This game was the first game in which a case of ‘cyborg body rape’ or virtual rape occurred. A Character named Mr. Bungle managed to hack other people’s accounts and force their avatars to enact virtual sexual acts upon each other as a means to offend other people in the game and the rightful owners of the avatars.
So many people were offended by this that Mr. Bungle was kicked off the site all together and the policy of LambdaMoo was altered to prohibit sexual abuse. This is one of the major drawbacks of the online community in that some people intend to offend and to scare more sensitive people on the internet and they don’t care who they hurt but is it possible to have real moral wrongs in a virtual setting? (Powers 2003)
Attacks on internet games sexual or otherwise are mostly texted based but the point is the identities people make on these games are in the same respect text based and maintained so there is a connection to the person, so psychological harm can be done. (Williams 2001) Real and virtual are connected in these circumstances so real lives can be affected by the workings of virtual ones.
Throughout the course of this essay I’ve tried to establish the effects (if any) virtual worlds have on our own in regards to law and deviance and whether or not someone can be virtually raped.
Power (2003) argues that it is certainly possible to have real moral wrongs in virtual communities people can act in virtual communities in ways that both establish practices and moral expectations and warrant strong identifications between themselves and their online identities (Powers 2003).
So you cannot deny that virtual worlds have the power and in some cases intent to warp the ideologies of the people in them, and that there are people in these virtual worlds who seek to intentionally cause harm and offence, but establishing harm is still almost impossible as it is too subjective.
Harm in these circumstances relies on the sensitivity of the individuals involved. Words cannot physically harm in normal circumstances and attacks on internets games are mostly texted based, but the point is the identities people make on these games as I’ve already established are in the same respect text based and maintained so there is a connection to the person, so psychological harm can without a doubt be done. (Williams 2001)
In terms of offline video games like Manhunt or RapeLay, they both have an eighteen age certificates for a reason, a mature mind can look at such material and be simply entertained and realise that this material has no effect on how they perceive the world.
Obviously it is harder to differentiate real from virtual for children. Children can still get their hands on games like this over the internet but it is far easier for children to get on websites and internet games where they can be exposed to offensive people and material even if there are age restrictions because they just lie.
In summary I do think techno cultures have the ability to distort conceptions of crime but only those of a sensitive disposition might consider offensive behaviour as in the case of Mr. Bungle in LambdaMoo as rape, but virtual rape will never be classified as seriously as real bodily rape.
At the end of the day we could restrict access or just ban the internet to avoid obscene behaviour from obscene people but do so would be to restrain freedom of speech and freedom of expression. It should be the right of every person to have the freedom to offend whomever they choose as long as no physical or mental damage is caused. (Mill 1859)
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