Online Enforcement

This week in class we read “A Rape in Cyberspace” by Julian Dibbell. It discussed the reaction of a chat room community to the offensive scenes keyed by the user “Mr. Bungle”. The victims of Mr. Bungle’s assault called for his total removal from the chat room. Which grew into a large almost entirely community wide debate on whether “capital punishment” was fitting for this crime, or whether Mr. Bungle’s right of free speech and expression should be honored. It was determined by one of the “Wizards” (admin) of the site to execute his character and delete his account. To no ones great surprise, Mr. Bungle was back in three days as Dr. Jest.

The deletion of Mr. Bungle’s account was in no way a hindrance to the live person behind the account. He spent a little time to create his new profile but soon enough he had entered that chat room again as a new person, who resembled in text the old character. In this world of many online communities, do we live in anarchy where anyone is free to as they see fit without fear of punishment or reprisal? The chat room’s community responded to the pleas of the victims and made it clear to the administrators that this was, in fact, a cyber crime and should be dealt with. However, simply deleting an account does not permanently hinder the perpetrator.

In earlier societies, when everyone had to have a static IP address it made it possible to limit access for a time by blocking that IP address. Due to the shortage of IP addresses, however, dynamic IP addresses and public IP addresses make blocking nearly impossible. The attempt to black list certain names and other identifying information is not logical or reasonable. For security purposes I input bogus information into unimportant and unreliable sites. For what little it does deleting accounts seems to be the only acceptable answer to social cyber crimes.

The article also brought up that control of the community would shift from the admins to the users. They weren’t giving control of the database and other executive commands but the governing of the community to the users. It turned into a huge democracy where the majority ruled. Yet, there were only a minority of users who actively appeared to participate in deciding how the community would be run. In a community that could hold thousands if not hundreds of thousands, and only a few hundred respond to a call to govern. How does a democracy thrive in that environment? Granted everyone has a voice but only a few are making theirs heard, the minority is making decisions for a majority turning it into an authoritarian government where the Few rule the Many.

People have used online communities to escape reality, and the pressures brought on by their current status. I feel that to escape is to leave everything behind, but to some I guess it is to only change shoes from the oppressed to the oppressor.

I wonder what laws are being used to regulate Internet use? I found a website The Best and Worst Internet Laws . In it it lists 6 laws, the two best, the two that accomplish their goals but aren't necessarily good, and the top ten worst Internet laws, Utah made number 5, 4, and 2. Reading about these laws only four were posted that were considered good by this author, however the author, Eric Goldman, is biased towards the free flow of information, and only regulation to make things easier, and cheaper for consumers. He does a good job on the bad laws by pointing out how hard they are to enforce, or how little good they actually could do.