Like most generations, mine bleed. Indeed, a significant portion of our second generation of cyberculture scholarship, cyberculture studies, can be characterized by its descriptive nature, binary dualism, and frontier metaphors, and, as such, could easily be referred to as popular cyberculture. Conversely, some of the early journalists made important explorations into and observations about cyberspace, thereby allowing them membership into the second generation. One such journalist was Julian Dibbell, whose provocatively titled "A Rape in Cyberspace; or How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society," appeared in The Village Voice in 1993. In the article, Dibbell presents the now-endlessly-recounted tale of "Mr. Bungle," a member of LambdaMOO (a popular multi-user domain, or MUD) who uses a voodoo doll -- a program that allows one user to control the online "actions" of another -- to rape, violently attack, and force unwanted liaisons upon a number of LambdaMOOers. Dibbell describes the attack, the violated users' emotional reactions, the community's outrage, and the public discussion of Mr. Bungle's punishment, including the possibility of 'toading,' a process by which a MUD wizard turns a player into a toad, eliminating the player's identity and description. Noting that the chief wizard of the MUD recently revoked the toading process in an attempt to foster self-governance, Dibbell traces the steps of one user, JoeFeedback, who decides on his own to eliminate the Mr. Bungle character. Besides offering readers a provocative glimpse into the online environment, Dibbell brilliantly portrays the complex individual and social negotiations existing within LambdaMOO, negotiations which, when viewed together, constitute very real identities and communities.
Using Dibbell as a starting point, we can characterize our second generation with a single passage by cybertheorist Allucquere Rosanne Stone (1991) who defines cyberspace as "incontrovertibly social spaces in which people still meet face-to-face, but under new definitions of both 'meet' and 'face'" (85). In other words, while cyberspace may lack for the most part the physical geography found in, say, a neighborhood, city, or country, it offers users very real opportunities for collective communities and individual identities. It is upon these twin pillars -- virtual communities and online identities -- that cyberculture studies rests.
Using Dibbell as a starting point, we can characterize our second generation with a single passage by cybertheorist Allucquere Rosanne Stone (1991) who defines cyberspace as "incontrovertibly social spaces in which people still meet face-to-face, but under new definitions of both 'meet' and 'face'" (85). In other words, while cyberspace may lack for the most part the physical geography found in, say, a neighborhood, city, or country, it offers users very real opportunities for collective communities and individual identities. It is upon these twin pillars -- virtual communities and online identities -- that cyberculture studies rests.
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