Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
July, 1998
Cybercultures
Jenny Sundn
Back in late 1993, when I interviewed Swedish MUD users for an essay in
sociology, nobody in my department had the slightest idea of what I was
doing. At that time, the population in MUDs and other text-based social online spaces consisted largely of young, male college students in computer
science or related fields, who, more or less, identified themselves as
"hackers". The group of people I interviewed was no exception. They
constructed and wandered these subcultural spaces freely and imaginatively,
heavily inspired by role-playing, fantasy and science fiction. The world
around them did not seem to notice anything, but deep down in dark computer
labs these young men with red-rimmed eyes from lack of sleep were almost
inseparable from their machines.
If earlier, they had been captured by the internal logic of the computer,
by the way a sense of control could be generated through coding, they now
experienced something completely different. They were communicating. They
literally lived in the wires, temporarily disconnected from their physical
bodies, with the keyboard as an extension of their senses. During some
periods, they never saw the light of day, only the pale blue flicker from
the screen in front of them as they participated in discussions with people
from other continents. They were connected. Absorbed. Lost in the ambiguous
borderland between "real" and "virtual", "life" and "fiction". In their
negotiation with these contradictions they learned a new language, but this
time it had nothing to do with programming. They learned how to translate
themselves into pure text, how to move around in virtual locations and how
to deal with bodily absence and loss of non-verbal expressions. Some of
them made friends, others fell in love, and one of them even traveled
thousands of miles to encounter the object of his affection "in the flesh".
But almost nobody knew what they were doing, nobody really understood.
When William Gibson in his book Neuromancer (1984) coined the word
cyberspace[1], it was described in terms of a "consensual hallucination",
an electronic alternative to physical reality. It was constructed by means
of human brains directly connected to a global network, inhabited by
people's minds while their material bodies were left in physical space.
While reading it I realized that the young men I was in contact with had
already, in their own way, transferred this fiction into lived experience.
And so had a lot of other people without realizing it. As far as the
cyberspatial metaphor incorporates late-twentieth-century communication
technologies, such as financial systems, data banks and computer networks,
this fiction was becoming reality. After this, everything happened very
quickly. Almost over night, cyberspace as a virtual scene for science
fiction and the inner circles of an underground computer culture was turned
into an integral part of many peoples every day lives, transformed "from an
interesting fantasy to a hotly contested financial, cultural, and ethical
frontier."[2]. Even though the World Wide Web at first was merely a cool
application, it did not take long before it became a widespread medium for
communication, a space in which people projected their hopes, dreams and
desires. According to Jan Fernback:
METAPHORS
The most interesting way to consider the Internet is to construct a
metaphorical understanding of it. This brings the imagined into the
realms of the experienced. However, the Internet is not something
that we can imagine by thinking of villages, communities, nations or
even geographical spaces, although all these familiar images may
enable us to form some kind of cognitive understanding of it.[7]
How can we start thinking about and visualize something as abstract and
elusive as cyberspace? One way of turning the ephemeral architecture of the
Net into something more comprehensible, is the use of metaphors. The number
of references to physical systems of transportation and communication ("the
Information Superhighway", "database navigation" etc.), that have been
circulating in mass media and popular culture during the last years, are
innumerable. Among (cyber)feminists, countermetaphors have been created to
add the dimension of communication between people, that might be
overshadowed by allusions to immense quantities of information, speed and
accessibility. Instead, images of weaving[8] and networking have been
Colonizing cyberspace
Several cultural theorists working on different aspects of cyberspace have
been analyzing this virtual landscape in terms of Columbian voyages of
discovery and "new world" narratives.[9] They have formulated a metaphor of
aerial "mapping" of a newly discovered electronic terrain that is currently
being "colonized". The difference this time is that the frontier before us
does not consist of unmapped physical space, but rather of unmappable,
endlessly expandable virtual space. One of the questions put forth in the
geographical thinking of cyberspace is if we at all would be able to see a
new world being discovered today; "would its contours conform to our
understanding of "world" and "discovery"? Would it take place as a taking
of place? Would it supervene as an uncovering and drawing into appearance
of that which had been covered, hidden, withdrawn?"[10] By applying the
name "new world" to cyberspace, an encounter with a recently discovered
environment with what seems to be infinite possibilities is brought into
view. It is a world where nothing is solid or determined, but open to
different interpretations, returning to an era when there were worlds
without boundaries and sources beyond imagination. At the same time, the
use of the new world narrative also clearly points out the element of
exploitation, the execution of power that is imbedded in every act of
discovery and colonization.
The question is if we can think of the exploration of virtual space in
other and different ways from those related to the discovery of physical
places. Is there a way out of a scheme of thought where the old world, with
a certain violence, forces the new world under its conceptual domination?
Following Michael Benedikt; "We are contemplating the arising shape of a
new world, a world that must, in multitude of ways, begin, at least, as
both an extension and a transcription of the world as we know it and have
built it thus far".[11] According to Benedikt, we are determined by the
culture we come from as we enter virtual spaces, predestined to almost
automatically reconstruct its structures of power in the Net. The value of
such analysis is that it addresses the question of how power works in a
capitalist society, and an on-line world with roots in this culture can
hardly exist unaffected by its powers. At the same time, every attempt to
somewhere in between these power relations form strategies of resistance is
excluded. Every creative initiative starting with the individual is made
impossible. Furthermore, in a fixation of cyberspace by extending and
transcribing principles derived from the old "real" world, naturalizes and
universalizes the cultural power in motion and the very foundation upon
which the Western world is created. If we, when entering virtual worlds,
must build on an extension of "the world as we know it", there is something
more at work than a confinement to replicate our cultural backgrounds.
This replication is made completely natural. An alternative performance
does not exist.
In contrast to this deterministic worldview, Mary Fuller and Henry Jenkins
provide a more open way of looking upon exploration and colonization of
narratives. Inspired by De Certau, they illustrate the way narratives turn
"places" into "spaces", how places only exist as potential, not yet
Bodily transcendence
Such ontological and epistemological issues as the nature of the
human, the real, experience, sensation, cognition, identity and
gender are all placed, if not under erasure, then certainly in
question around the discursive object of virtual reality and the
postulated existence of perfect, simulated environments. Virtual
NARRATIVES
Narratives do not just occupy our time as we read, write and imagine
them, they determine the passage of time... and let us know that in
fact time was not empty, it was abundant with activities and
experiences we assigned to it. Such assignation is a profoundly
political act, for it not only establishes what happened (according
to the writer/thinker) but fixes an identity in time for those who
are part of the narrative.[20]
Hyperlinked
Texts in information spaces come closest to the traditional notion of what
a "text" is, due to their relative stability. The dominating textform in
these spaces is hypertext, which might be the group of computer text that
has been explored the most by cultural theorists.[26] Hypertext in these
writings is assumed to have the potential to construct non-linear textual
modes through "webs of footnotes without central points, organizing
principles, hierarchies."[27] Hypertext is a construction of a set of
different documents (text, images, video clips etc.) connected to each
other with hyperlinks. Stories written in hypertext appear on the Web as
scrolling pages, but are maybe best thought of in George Landows term
"lexias"[28] or reading units. Where pages of paper in a book are bound
together in a terminate sequence, pages on a screen become lexias by the
possibility to both connect them to each other and follow them in a myriad
of ways. Stories written in hypertext have often more than one point of
entry, a lot of internal connections, and no clear ending. These stories
further unfold in many different ways while the reader navigates between
lexias in a movement through the spaces these units inhabit.
Hypertextual structure, in contrast to more traditional text forms, is
according to several theorists, through its allusiveness and
indeterminableness thought of as more capable of liberating the reader's
interpretation from the original intentions of the author. The hypertext
fiction writer and theorist Stuart Moulthrop puts it this way:
Seen from the viewpoint of textual theory, hypertext systems appear
as the practical implementation of a conceptual movement that ...
rejects authoritarian, "logocentric" (i.e., truth-affirming)
hierarchies of language, whose modes of operation are linear and
deductive, and seeks instead systems of discourse that admit
plurality of meanings where the operative modes are hypothesis and
interpretive play.[29]
There are several problems with this argument. First, it is very difficult
to imagine a hypertext as something else than linear. Even though the
reader decides which hyperlink to follow, how to navigate the system, s/he
is still limited by a finite number of links created by the hypertext
author. The fact that it is possible to jump back and forth between
different lexias in a hypertextual structure does not make the act of
reading less linear than reading the pages in a book in any order.
Secondly, as Janet Murray points out in her Hamlet on the Holodeck,
hypertext is nothing new. Literary work are hypertextual in their
allusions, through their intertextual references to one another. Murray
exemplifies with a work like James Joyce's Ulysses, which is nearly
impossible to understand without directives to other works. She continues;
"although hypertext is not new as a way of thinking and organizing
experiences, it is only with the emergence of the computer that hypertext
writing has been attempted on a large scale"[30] This statement takes away
the originality attached to the reading and writing of hypertext by
theorists like Moulthrop, without underestimating the significance of the
computer for making this process widespread and easily accessible.
Thirdly, and maybe most importantly, it is far from clear how a structure
that consists of pre- marked keywords and routes in itself can liberate the
reader from its creator. A question about hypertext that according to Paul
Gilster people fail to ask is: "Who creates the hyperlinks?"[31] His point
is that since the links are already there, the hypertext is given a clear
politics and certain readings are determined. Rather than experience a
release from the author, the reader might instead feel a great boundedness
to perspectives put forth by the links, without the possibility of
exploring what is not hyperlinked. To state that more traditional forms of
text consist of 'authoritarian, "logocentric" ... hierarchies of language,
whose modes of operation are linear and deductive', and that hypertext in
itself disrupts this authority and liberates the reader, is further to
seriously undervalue the creativity of any reader. The liberating potential
hypertext theorists today ascribe to hypertext structures, can be seen as a
later version of what many theorists in literature already have been doing
for a couple of decades in relation to any text. When Roland Barthes 1977
in his "Image-Music-Text" proclaimed the death of the author, the reader
was empowered over the writer. Barthes showed how the act of writing is
itself an act of reading, how positions of creation and interpretation are
constantly shifting. He describes a text as:
not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the
message of the Author-god) but a multi-dimensional space in which a
variety of writing, none of them original, blend and clash. The text
is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centers of
culture.[32]
From this point of view, there is no finished work, but rather parts that
might be explored without constituting a determined wholeness. This opens
up multiple readings and possibilities, for textual journeys in a landscape
which will never look the same twice. This perspective comes very close to
the recently formed rhetoric of hypertext, but with the significant
difference that hypertext theory sets traditional texts back in a position
where the author prevails while multilinearity and "interpretive play" is
reserved for hypertextual structures only.
An alternative way of laying out the guide-lines for a theory of texts,
hypertext included, is to emphasize how possibilities for multiple readings
and different interpretations are present in any text, no matter if it is
moving over a computer screen or frozen on pages of paper. The advantage of
studying hypertext might be that these possibilities, through the textual
structure of links and multiple entries, become particularly visible. The
way lexias are connected to one another, and the many journeys that might
be taken through or around them, might be seen as a manifestation on a very
concrete level of the potential for a never ending variety of readings.
VIRTUAL WORLDS
It is when the motivating expectation of sociability in cyberspace
confronts the essential ambiguity and facelessness of the Internet
medium that the resulting interactions begin to take on a distinctive
shape, bringing the cultural contours of this space into view. As
participants adjust to the prevailing conditions of anonymity and to
the potentially disconcerting experience of being reduced to a
detached voice floating in an amorphous electronic void, they become
adept as well at reconstituting the faceless words around them into
bodies, histories, lives: an imaginative engagement by which they
become fully vested co-producers of the virtual worlds they inhabit,
and the boundaries distinguishing "real" from "virtual" experience
begin to fade.[43]
Multi User Dungeon, or MUD, are sometimes defined as text-based virtual
reality.[44] The term "virtual reality" is often thought of as representing
a highly complex computerized environment that users, dressed in body
suits, helmets and gloves, can explore and interact. MUDs are something
completely different. Instead of providing a sensory experience in
solitude, they offer social experiences based on shared, imagined worlds in
text. Virtual reality in these terms is not so much a technological
construction, (since the technology involved is very simple), as it is a
cultural construction that takes shape among those who inhabit these
worlds.
At first, MUD was a fusion of traditional role-playing and text-adventure
computer games, where a single player by typing short commands could move a
character through various settings and solve puzzles. This blend produced a
global form of interactive, computer based role-playing games, in which
Internet users could create characters, get together and play. Some MUDs
use graphics to envisualize places, characters and movements, but most of
them are constructed entirely by plain (written) text. MUDs originally
stood for Multi User Dungeons, where the term "dungeon" was directly
transferred from the genre of face-to-face role-playing games known as
Dungeons & Dragons to its high-tech version on-line. As the MUD culture
spread, and more and more people without previous experience of roleplaying began to participate, the terms Multi User Domain or Multi User
Dimension were put to use. This attempt to change the name might well have
been an effort to gain respectability and to take away some of the gamelike
and purely playful qualities.
Today, many MUDs are still closely related to the original system, and
people can log on to the computer on which the MUD program is running to
kill monsters, solve puzzles, find treasures, interact with each other and
with objects created within the program. The purpose is to gain as many
experience points as possible, which are transformed into power. When a
player has obtained a certain amount of experience points, s/he can leave
the level of the mortals, and instead join an exclusive, immortal crowd
with almost unlimited power over the virtual world. Other MUDs, sometimes
called social MUDs, provide spaces for a kind of role-playing more related
to improvisational theater than to a game with well defined rules and
hierarchies. These MUDs are in some cases inspired by fantasy and science
fiction works such as Star Trek, Tolkien's The Lord of the Ring-trilogy,
and the work of Terry Pratchett, to mention a few. They can also be more
loosely structured around different imaginary themes, which in contrast to
organized game settings give a feeling of relatively open social space.
These spaces constitute virtual meeting places without any other purpose
than hanging out and socializing.
Architecture
Programming, rather than being part of the flow of what is being
communicated, allows players to alter the environment in which the
communication is taking place. As much as it may blend into the
linguistic terrain, programming must always be recognized as the
privileged language game of cyberspace. As such, it is capable of
purely constructing reality rather than in any sense reflecting it.
It is the difference between creation and utilization.[45]
Building in MUDs, as Sherry Turkle puts it, is "something of a hybrid
between computer programming and writing fiction."[46] A MUD is constructed
by hundreds of rooms connected to each other, each carrying its own
description. These texts can always be subjects to change, but often
persist the way they originally were written over long periods of time.
Compared to other texts in a MUD, they are relatively stable. This is what
appears on the screen if someone connects to ForestMOO:
Lodge
The big lodge sits in the middle of a forest clearing. Well worn
paths leading in all directions suggest that it is the social hub of
the area. Large over-stuffed couches rest on the green carpet that
covers the floor. The great pine paneled walls smell wonderful
combined with the wood-smoke escaping from the fireplace, which is
always kept burning. The atmosphere is relaxed and lazy. You see two
old men contemplating a scrabble board in the next room. There is a
circle here, engraved in the floor. A huge Red-Gold Dragon is sitting
here in the middle of the lodge, letting smoke escape it's nose.
Squirrel sits on the ground observing all that happens in the Lodge.
You see a sign [look at sign], a rock, Encryption Enabled PC for
terminally paranoid players with something to hide, and Scott here.
You may go: north to Dirt Road, museum to Museum, up to Game Room,
south to The Beaten Path.
But the description of a room is only one part of its creation. For the
room to be related to other rooms in the MUD (in this case to "Dirt Road",
"Museum", "Game Room" or "The Beaten Path"), and for objects in the room to
"perform" something when someone is "using" them, some formal coding is
required. Even though MUD spaces are collaborataly created and constantly
under construction, what remains for those who do not master the art of
coding is thus to utilize what others have already built. In other words,
even though the crowd who inhabit virtual worlds might be increasingly
diverse, the production of MUDs is still dominated by a technological
elite.
When it comes to the division of gender in MUDs, there are still far fever
women than men participating in these environments (even though the
population varies between MUDs). Lori Kendall in her work on MUDs states
that she would never have stayed on the MUD she is researching, or any
other MUD, if she had not had a research agenda that motivated her to find
out what was happening on-line. She describes the rudeness she has
experienced, the continual allusions to and jokes about penises and blowjobs, and continues; "Most women don't have my research agenda, and most
are unlikely to find much of interest to them on MUDs, unless they are
science fiction fans ... Even these women are likely to find most MUDs
unwelcoming."[47]
Women, as well as men, might nevertheless find the collaboratively created
and imagined spaces in MUDs, at the point where "fantasy" bleeds into "real
life", both inspiring and amusing. Mizuko Ito, influenced by Janice Radway
and her Reading the Romance[48], analyzes MUD practices precisely in the
tension between fantasy worlds of texts and "real" social situations and
contexts in which these texts are grounded and interpreted. In a reading
across the gap between the text and the social, she attempts to incorporate
both textual and material realities into her analysis. In contrast to
Radway, she also wants to show how the textual worlds in themselves can be
seen as constituting "real" social relations, and that involvement in
fantasy can be "a social event to be analyzed in terms not ultimately
reducible to a social reality outside the text."[49] As with reading of
novels, MUDs involve physically separated bodies that interact with
immersive worlds of texts, but:
MUDs differ from novels in that they foreground interactivity and
travel to alternative domains through an explicitly networked
sociality. So instead of focusing on how textual artifacts
constructed on the Net circulate through "real" social contexts at
large, I would like to examine the inter- and intra-textuality of the
Net as itself a social and political context where history, politics,
and discourse are being constituted. By insisting on the reality of
the virtual I do not intend to reduce social practice to language
games, but rather to foreground the inseparability of semiotic and
material technologies.[50]
Ito's starting point of analysis does not only put forward the way fantasy
blends into "real" life where a reader bring text and society together
through the act of reading, but that the distinction between "real" and
"virtual" has ceased to exist. Imagination is from her perspective a social
practice in itself, rather than "merely a commentary on, or a reflection
of, "real" social relations whose ultimate ground is a singular
subjectivity localized by the biological body."[51] Drawing from examples
of MUD marriage, romance and sex, as well as cases of violence in the MUD
and virtual death, she illustrates how virtual worlds can be realities that
matter.
Without neglecting the material technologies of computers and computer
networks, a similar analysis of the way bodies and identities are created
and rendered meaningful in MUDs would be very useful. These virtual bodies
arise exactly at the point where flesh, by the means of technology and
imagination, is transformed into text. They are neither disengaged from,
nor reducible to, an identity grounded in a concrete, locally situated,
material body, but rather (re)embodied through prosthetic computer
technologies. Their mere existence further shows the need for a
representation of physical presence in on-line encounters. The question
that remains to be asked is; what kind of self(re)presentations can be
found in the Net, and how can they be interpreted? The following discussion
will still be restricted to MUD cultures, which of course not is
representative for on-line selfpresentations in general. Nevertheless, they
might serve as an illustrative example of how these configurations of body
and self take shape in a limited corner of cyberspace.
Cyber identities
The acts of interpretation that color and enliven the virtual
universe are neither fortuitous nor random. If the allure of the
Internet is the possibility of interaction with other people, this
desire for human contact, in turn, insists on the appearance of
humanity at the other end of the wire. ... The defining interaction
of Internet culture lies not in the interface between user and the
computer, but rather in that between the user and the collective
imagination of the vast virtual audience to whom one submits an
endless succession of enticing, exasperating, evocative figments of
one's being.[52]
To become an inhabitant in a MUD, a "character" must be created. A
character consists of a name, a gender, and a textual description of any
length (available to other participants through the "look" command).
Elizabeth Reid put forth that the only identity trait that is always "hard
coded" into MUD programs, is gender. Some MUDs in adventure game style do
ask players to choose a racial belonging, "but the choices are more likely
to be between Elvish, Dwarvish, and Klingon than between Caucasian, Black
and Asian"[53]. Choosing a gender is more complicated than it first might
appear. In LambdaMOO, for example, the following choices are available:
male, female, neuter, either, Spivak, splat, plural, egotistical, royal and
2nd. The "gender flag" controls which pronouns will be used by the MUD
program in referring to the player. "Neuter" uses the pronoun it, "either"
uses the s/he and her/him practice, "Spivak" uses a set of gender neutral
pronouns such as e and em, "splat", in the same way, uses *e and h*,
"plural" uses they and them, "egotistical" uses I and me, "royal" uses we
and us, and "2nd" uses you.
one of the alternative gender that some MUDs offer can be a way to avoid
traditional gender assumptions. In her investigation of virtual bodies and
netsex, she has found that, for instance, the spivak gender "has encouraged
some people to invent entirely new bodies and eroticize them in ways that
render categories of female or male meaningless... a spivak can have any
morphological form and genital structure e devises for emself."[57] The
creation of alternative genders illustrates how netsex, rather than being
merely a sexual act, is to a great extent an act of creative reading and
writing. Rather than being a crucial part of human identity, gender is
altered into a mere abstraction, one of several features of the bodies that
are written. McRae also believes that pleasure can operate as a form of
resistance against technologies that would isolate us from each other, that
the use of machines has become a way to experience profound sensuality with
others: "Eroticizing our technology might not mean giving up the ghost, but
rather giving in to the pleasures of corporeality that render meaningless
the arbitrary divisions of animal, spirit and machine."[58]
The only way to get a deeper understanding of the way bodies and identities
are being created and given meaning on their way through the Net, is
continuous empirical investigations of different cyberspaces. When virtual
bodies and their participation in on-line worlds are in focus, the question
of the "real" and the "virtual" in computer technologies, is crucial. In
the discourse of virtual worlds as scenes for disembodied performances,
where the machine overshadows bodily processes toward a perfect fantasy of
abstractions, something very important is excluded. Left out are
heterogenities, variations, different and maybe marginalized versions. What
can never be included in the discourse of a global web of information,
where bodies are made both invisible and equal, is the particular, local
and concrete, what Mizuko Ito calls "the materiality of
information"[59].The problem is that this materiality is utterly absent in
the interface of on-line worlds, efficiently erased from its surface. But;
"beyond these absences lie the many agents and agencies implicated in the
production and maintenance of computers and computer networks-multinational
corporations, microelectronics factory workers, and military funding
agencies, to name a few."[60]
What enables us to create beings and lives on-line, with a feeling of a
prosthetic extension that dissolves the real/virtual distinction, is
probably exactly the erasure of these materialities. They nevertheless form
the political conditions for our on-line existence, and therefore must be
taken into account in cultural studies of technology. This is not an easy
mission, since the virtual ethnographer in on-line "field work" is part of
the same systems of erasure as the people s/he studies. This difficulty,
however, does not exclude an awareness of the existence of these agencies
and power relations that structures the Net.
Neither does this material invisibility withhold on-line participants from
constant efforts to reinscribe a sense of physicality in their
presentations. This process of bodily transformation into text on the
screen is even for the researcher the first, necessary move in a work on
MUD worlds. But in contrast to many other selfpresentations in these
spaces, this description can not, for ethical reasons, deviate too much
from the "truth". The final questions must be: How on earth can I even
start to write those strings of text that are supposed to mediate something
of what is "me", physically and mentally? Exactly what would be an
efficient textual strategy in encounters with forthcoming informants? Who
am I anyway?
Name:
Jenny
Gender: Female
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[26]See for example Landow & Delany, 1993, and Landow, 1997.
[27] Plant, 1997, p 10.
[28]See Landow, 1997. The term lexias is here borrowed from Roland Barthes,
who as a part of his theory of texts invented it as a concept for "reading
unit".
[29]Moulthrop, 1988, p 1.
[30]Murray, 1997, p 56.
[31]Gilster, 1997, p 130.
[32]Barthes, 1977, p 142-143.
[33]Yaross Lee, 1996, p 294.
[34]Ibid. p 291.
[35]Hayles, 1996, p 1-2. ("Immersed in technology"...)
[36]Wakeford, 1997, p 53.
[37] Wakeford, 1996, p 102
[38]Hall, 1996, 147-170.
[39]See, for example, Herring, 1993, and Sutton, 1994.
[40]Hall, 1996, p 154.
[41]See Brail, 1996, Kendall, 1996, Sutton, 1996.
[42]Sutton, 1996, p 171.
[43]Porter, 1997, p XII.
[44]See, for example, Turkle, 1995.
[45]Beaubien, 1996, p 186-187.
[46]Turkle, 1995, p 181.
[47]Kendall, 1996, p 208.
[48]See Radway, 1984.
[49]Ito, 1997, p 92.
[50]Ibid. p 93.
[51]Ibid.
[52]Porter, 1997, p XII-XIII.
[53]Reid, 199X, p 179.
[54]Kendall, 1996.