Monday, April 16, 2007

Kendal- Rape in Cyberspace

Like most of my collegues, this article was hard for me to relate to because I don't spend my time in these virtual worlds creating characters out of myself. It was hard for me to imagine how someone could say that they were "raped" online. It's true that what Mr. Bungle did was dispicable and disgusting, but when people go online, they are willingly opening themselves up to the public. When this happened, they could have just signed off or deleted that person and come up with a new one. I can see how one would be annoyed at what he did, but I don't understand how they can actually feel physically violated by something that happened in this virtual world. The internet is a place that is open to all sorts of people from normal ones to complete wackos. It would be hard to control these kinds of actions because there will always be people who know how to get around the system and do what they like in VR. I also found it strange that in the virtual world, all these people were set in punishing Bungle to the highest degree possible but when it came to prosecuting him in real life for seuxal harassment, no one really showed any interest. The virutal world is a dangerous place that almost anyone has access to so those who choose to socialize there need to realize that there is really no way to control this.

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