It may well be a case of small things amusing small minds. But I’m midstream in the process of updating some criminology teaching materials, and it both amuses and pleases me that in a section discussing the ethics of criminal justice, I’ve legitimately been able to ask students to consider and discuss the following question:
– Do you think Mr Bungle should have been toaded? Why, or why not?
Note for those who don’t get the reference: ‘Mr Bungle’ was the username of an individual in a multi-user chatroom who committed a ‘rape’ of another character there, essentially through a series of textual descriptions of actions. This wasn’t, clearly, a ‘real’ rape of an actual person but nonetheless had a significant impact on the real person whose online identity was the target of the descriptions. It was the first time this online user community had encountered this situation and they had to create rules for how to behave in the virtual environment. And, yes, he was toaded (slang used at that time for being thrown off the site).
More information: Dibbell, J. (1993) ‘A Rape in Cyberspace: How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database Into a Society’. First published in The Village Voice, December 23, 1993; available online at Dibbell’s website. And yes, the students were supposed to read that article before answering the question.
A serious point underlies the arcane frivolity. Most of us, these days, lead at least a proportion of our lives online and some of us invest a great deal of our personal identity in our online presence and avatars, in forums and chatrooms, social networking websites, Second Life and so forth. We’re also hooked up to mobile phones, text messaging, emails and other computer-based communications. What happens over the wires and airwaves and in these virtual locations can and does have an impact on our ‘real’ selves. Ask anyone who’s been cyber-bullied, flamed or harassed online.
Of course part of the point of Second Life is that we can do things we wouldn’t necessarily want to do in our first lives, and there are people who actually seek out the role of victim in ‘nonconsensual’ sex scenarios (you can also, incidentally, be impregnated by a devil and spend the next few months being pregnant and then giving birth to demons: I’ll avoid the obvious quips about that…). However, those who don’t want and aren’t expecting online nonconsensual sex can still be distressed by the experience. Quite a lot of effort and technical advice has been expended on SL in particular to ensure users’ avatars aren’t suddenly subject to such things.
On a side note, there are also articles pointing out that a great deal of SL is depressingly like the real world. See more on this at Dangerous Ideas and the architecture blog Archinect.
However, the point underlying all this, I guess, is that humans spend a lot of time imagining things, manipulating symbols, investing them with emotional significance and incorporating them into their own identity. And when that happens, ethical problems emerge that can spill over into real life. There are some old but still interesting discussions on this in Wired and TheFWord, from 2007. And the question I posed to my students about Mr Bungle and whether he should have been toaded? That was one of the first cases where the ethics of online interaction became a widely-discussed issue.
Jon Vagg 
The toading of Mr Bungle and why it’s still relevant
It may well be a case of small things amusing small minds. But I’m midstream in the process of updating some criminology teaching materials, and it both amuses and pleases me that in a section discussing the ethics of criminal justice, I’ve legitimately been able to ask students to consider and discuss the following question:
– Do you think Mr Bungle should have been toaded? Why, or why not?
Note for those who don’t get the reference: ‘Mr Bungle’ was the username of an individual in a multi-user chatroom who committed a ‘rape’ of another character there, essentially through a series of textual descriptions of actions. This wasn’t, clearly, a ‘real’ rape of an actual person but nonetheless had a significant impact on the real person whose online identity was the target of the descriptions. It was the first time this online user community had encountered this situation and they had to create rules for how to behave in the virtual environment. And, yes, he was toaded (slang used at that time for being thrown off the site).
More information: Dibbell, J. (1993) ‘A Rape in Cyberspace: How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database Into a Society’. First published in The Village Voice, December 23, 1993; available online at Dibbell’s website. And yes, the students were supposed to read that article before answering the question.
A serious point underlies the arcane frivolity. Most of us, these days, lead at least a proportion of our lives online and some of us invest a great deal of our personal identity in our online presence and avatars, in forums and chatrooms, social networking websites, Second Life and so forth. We’re also hooked up to mobile phones, text messaging, emails and other computer-based communications. What happens over the wires and airwaves and in these virtual locations can and does have an impact on our ‘real’ selves. Ask anyone who’s been cyber-bullied, flamed or harassed online.
Of course part of the point of Second Life is that we can do things we wouldn’t necessarily want to do in our first lives, and there are people who actually seek out the role of victim in ‘nonconsensual’ sex scenarios (you can also, incidentally, be impregnated by a devil and spend the next few months being pregnant and then giving birth to demons: I’ll avoid the obvious quips about that…). However, those who don’t want and aren’t expecting online nonconsensual sex can still be distressed by the experience. Quite a lot of effort and technical advice has been expended on SL in particular to ensure users’ avatars aren’t suddenly subject to such things.
On a side note, there are also articles pointing out that a great deal of SL is depressingly like the real world. See more on this at Dangerous Ideas and the architecture blog Archinect.
However, the point underlying all this, I guess, is that humans spend a lot of time imagining things, manipulating symbols, investing them with emotional significance and incorporating them into their own identity. And when that happens, ethical problems emerge that can spill over into real life. There are some old but still interesting discussions on this in Wired and TheFWord, from 2007. And the question I posed to my students about Mr Bungle and whether he should have been toaded? That was one of the first cases where the ethics of online interaction became a widely-discussed issue.
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