Barbelith Underground > Head Shop > De-individuation online

Well, quite. I was about to post in the "liberties and taking liberties", but this is interesting in itself. The Internet is to a very great extent anonymous (perhaps rather less than people often believe) - see my earlier stuff on Sanford Lewin in your other thread. The Internet has also been passed from one group with limited understanding of social cause and effect (programmers, then academics) onto another (teenagers) without there being very much of a handover.

So, the apparent absence of consequences among groups with a limited comprehension of consequences anyway is a fairly major element. Julian Dibbell, in "My Tiny Life", looks at one of the early examples of "cyberrape", on LamdaMOO. There's a relevant chapter here. This actually covers some of the same ground as some of our "rehabilitated" trolls, who expressed physically and/or sexually aggressive comments towards those they felt were restricting their freedom of expression (innercircle took an interesting step on freedom of expression, incidentally, as he invoked both copyright laws and article 19 of the UN Declaration on Human Rights, albeit in both cases without any real understanding of what they actually were, thus trying to feed a big chunk of the "real" world into the synthetic environment of an Internet bulletin board). At the moment, in the "Mark Millar from another persepective" thread here, we can see a good example of the "sex and violence" riposte:

unless you are haus. in which case I give you the power to go and hurt yourself. and i will never take it away.

i mean, what?
huh? are you calling me to arms?
trying to come to terms with being attracted to me?.

This is a pretty standard go at physicalising the narrative, which relies on its effect, I suspect, on a form of transgressiveness - the involvement of generally irrelevant or more precisely excluded elements. The term "voodoo doll" in the context of the LambdaMOO rape is interesting here - to do this you pretty much have to imagine a scenario in which you have some control over the other party's physciality or sexuality, or in this case both.

And why is physicalising the narrative important? Because disindividuation (although actually, I think you mean "anonymity" or something here, S. - in some ways, people in these environments are very sharply indivuated) relies on boundaries and barriers. To presuppose a connection to the physical implies that the character in the BBS can be tied firmly to the individual in the chair, and thus to that individual in every other walk of life. thus. That's not so much reindividuation as merging - a form of semiological persona voodoo?

By the same token, when Knodger was at the height of his trolliness, the unprecedented step was taken by an individual of tracking him through a few of his pronouncements and revealing first his activity on other bulletin boards, and finally his name and general geographical location, in an attempt to remind him that the illusion of consequence-free action and the disjunct of meatspace and cyberspace was in fact precisely that: an illusion. He subsequently complained, whether correctly, incorrectly, or mendaciously we may never know, that his mother had received nuisance calls from Barbeloids. Again, it's an attempt to create a nexus between action and consequence, with a hierarchical pattern between physical and online interaction tied through the idea that the "knot" - the point at which all the threads pass, has an official existence, and that official existence is subject to consequences in a way that a fictionsuit or email address is not.

The adversarial model is also possibly culturally guided by the increasing popularity of online shoot-em-ups, rather than the collaborative model of the MUD, but I don't really know enough about that to push it for the moment. One thing I would suggest would be necessary for this one might be a look at how gender functions in fora, but that's something that might develop....