Session 9: Controversial Issues in Cyberlife

5th Global Conference

Friday 12th March – Sunday 14th March 2010
Salzburg, Austria

Back to the Future: In Search of an Understanding of Crime and Punishment in Second Life
Sara M. Smyth
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

This article is about how Second Life is being used as an innovative tool of criminal activity. In a few short years since its public release, it has provided new opportunities for crime because of its global reach, its relatively low cost, and the near perfect anonymity that it provides users. In addition, traditional law enforcement mechanisms have been rendered less effective because it is far more difficult to locate and identify perpetrators after they have committed crimes anonymously in this vast online world. In spite of this, certain features of Second Life provide opportunities for meaningful regulation and control. This includes the fact that the client software is open source, as well as the strong sense of identity and attachment shared by Residents, which is largely the result of a policy established by Linden Lab to give users full ownership of the content they create.

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Social Representations of the Difference in Online Hate Groups and Hate Sites
Adela Fofiu
“Babes-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Today’s democratic and technologically advanced societies create an ideal setting for the development of various perspectives on difference. Democracy and its actor, civil society, promote multiculturalism and its social expression, cultural diversity. On the other hand, the technological development creates the premises for an extended freedom of speech, as the constant growth and the relative temporality of the Internet allow individuals to express themselves in the alternative social context – Cyberspace.

Our interest in Internet, in this context, is motivated by the side effect of the technological advancement: extended freedom of speech does not guarantee the use and creation of politically correct or appropriated discourses. On the contrary, it allows negative perspectives on difference to be expressed, acknowledged and multiplied.

This article examines the virtual construction of social identity in online hate groups, on the premise that the Internet is the last resort for a discriminating discourse in the contemporary western society. We use Tajfel’s theory of social identity and the content analysis on three foreign and three Romanian online hate groups. Our objective is to demonstrate how virtual hatred uses exhaustive positive selfstereotypes and negative heterostereotypes.

As the Internet is a cultural product and, at the same time, it produces culture, we reassess our findings through a classical social research methodology. We want to analyze the social representations of individuals that frequent and consume online hate groups and hate information. We, thus, conduct semi-structured interviews with three to five individuals selected from the online hate sites of interest, in order to obtain their social representations of the different ones, by using the same schema of Tajfel’s theory. Our hypothesis is that, apart from the written absolute hatred discourse, these individuals are able to develop negative selfstereotypes and positive heterostereotypes.

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Cybertrauma and Technocultural Shock in Contemporary Culture
Aris Mousoutzanis
Kingston University, United Kingdom

This paper brings together two very different areas of research that have emerged from the 1980s onwards, the so-called ‘cyborg theory’ and ‘trauma theory’. Epitomised by Donna Haraway’s ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’, cyborg theory has been concerned with the ways in which the saturation of Western societies with information technologies has affected contemporary ideas of subjectivity, embodiment, ‘reality’ and politics of identity. Trauma theory, often represented by the work of Cathy Caruth, has been investigating the theoretical implications of trauma for ideas of representation and referentiality, memory and history, truth and narrative, particularly with regard to major events like the Holocaust, the Vietnam war, and 9/11, among others. This paper combines these two disciplines in two ways. First, it illustrates the extent to which the ‘interface’ between the biological and the technological has not been represented in popular SF narratives as either ‘subversive’ or ‘liberating’, as Haraway would have it, but mostly as traumatic. Second, it investigates the ways in which theorisations of trauma, from Freud to Lacan to contemporary psychiatry, have relied on terms and metaphors from cybernetics and other technological discourses, suggesting a model of the psyche as an information system. ‘Cybertrauma’ thus stands as a term registering a feedback loop between the discourses of cyberculture and traumaculture. As ‘trauma’ has often been theorised in relation to the concept of ‘shock’, ‘cybertrauma’ will be seen as a response to the ‘technocultural shock’ of the Information Revolution of the late twentieth century. Trauma has always been linked to technology, as its official theorisations emerged due to the proliferation of railway accidents around the mid-nineteenth century; its current interaction with discourses of cyberculture will accordingly be seen as symptomatic of an acceleration – and crisis – of technological modernity.

E-mortality: Pathological Narcissism and Death in Cyberspace
Eva Vrtacic and Anamarija Sporcic
Academy for Theatre, Radio, Film and Television and Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

Pathological narcissism represents the dominant form of subjectivity in post-industrial society and its consumerist ideals: authenticity, pursuing one’s desire, determination no matter what (beautifully represented in the slogan “just do it”), creativity, non-inhibition, contempt for society, paradoxically accompanied by the desire for 15 minutes of fame.

Pathological narcissism makes cyberspace, virtual reality, video games etc. possible and sensible (more than just a waste of time). When such subject enters the cyberspace, they become immortal. Leaving the body behind, one can now begin the game of numerous possibilities and virtual realities and enter the era of e-mortality.

The anthropological assumption of culture as human “natural environment” could now be safely reinterpreted: cyberspace and digital technologies represent a “natural environment” for pathological narcissism; a place where “game over” is never final – it is always followed by “new game”.

The paralysing fear of one’s death, characteristic of pathological narcissism is usually manifested as a complete denial, the annulment of the idea of mortal Self. Freud contested that primary narcissism prevents one from thinking about or imagining their own death – in the realm of the Unconscious, death does not exist. Similarly, death is absent from cyberspace. In this sense cyberspace represents a prefect metaphor of the Unconscious.

One cannot disregard the fact that “netizens”, “digital natives” are still young and are not dying of natural causes. Thus, most cyber-deaths are tragedies and reactions to them not yet “standardized”. We have not yet negotiated the “correct”, “proper” and “normal” actions, following one’s (bodily) death in cyberspace.

However, the question of death is gradually being raised in cyberspace, but the cyber-initiatives that do already exist, have one symptomatic thing in common: they hide the fact that they are dealing with death.