http://www.humanities.uci.edu/mposter/syllabi/readings/nakamura.html
A cute cartoon dog sits in front of a computer,
gazing at the monitor and typing away busily. The cartoon's caption jubilantly
proclaims, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog!" This image
resonates with particular intensity for those members of a rapidly expanding
subculture which congregates within the consensual hallucination defined as
cyberspace. Users define their presence within this textual and graphical space
through a variety of different activities‹commercial interaction, academic
research, netsurfing, real time interaction and chatting with interlocutors who
are similarly "connected"‹but all can see the humor in this image
because it illustrates so graphically a common condition of being and self
definition within this space. Users of the Internet represent themselves within
it solely through the medium of keystrokes and mouse-clicks, and through this
medium they can describe themselves and their physical bodies any way they like;
they perform their bodies as text. On the Internet, nobody knows that you're a
dog; it is possible to "computer crossdress" (Stone 84) and represent
yourself as a different gender, age, race, etc. The technology of the Internet
offers its participants unprecedented possibilities for communicating with each
other in real time, and for controlling the conditions of their own self-representations
in ways impossible in face to face interaction. The cartoon seems to celebrate
access to the Internet as a social leveler which permits even dogs to express
freely themselves in discourse to their masters, who are deceived into thinking
that they are their peers, rather than their property. The element of difference,
in this cartoon the difference between species, is comically subverted in this
image; in the medium of cyberspace, distinctions and imbalances in power between
beings who perform themselves solely through writing seem to have deferred, if
not effaced.
This utopian vision of cyberspace as a promoter of a radically democratic form
of discourse should not be underestimated. Yet the image can be read on several
other levels as well. The freedom which the dog chooses to avail itself of is
the freedom to "pass" as part of a privileged group, i.e. human
computer users with access to the Internet. This is possible because of the
discursive dynamic of the Internet, particularly in chat spaces like LambdaMOO
where users are known to others by self authored names which they give their
"characters" rather than more telling email addresses with domain
names. Defining gender is a central part of the discourse‹players who choose
to present themselves as "neuter," one of the several genders
available to players on LambdaMOO, are often asked to "set gender," as
if the choice to have a neuter gender is not a choice at all, or at least one
that other players choose to recognize. Gender is an element of identity which
must be defined by each player‹though the creators of LambdaMOO try to
contribute towards a reimagining of gender by offering four, two more than are
acknowledged in "real life," still, one must be chosen‹the choice is
not optional. Each player must "enunciate" the gender that they choose,
since this gender will be visible to other players who call up other players'
physical descriptions on their screens. However, race is not an "option"
which must be chosen‹though players can elect to write it into their
descriptions, it is not required that they do so. My study, which I would
characterize as ethnographic, with certain important reservations, focuses on
the ways in which race is "written" In the cyberspace locus called
LambdaMOO, as well as the ways it is read by other players, the conditions under
which it is enunciated, contested, and ultimately erased and suppressed, and the
ideological implications of these performative acts of writing and reading
otherness. What does the way race is written in Lambda MOO reveal about the
enunciation of difference in new electronic media? Have the rules of the game
changed, and if so, how?
Role playing sites on the Internet such as LambdaMOO offer their participants
programming features such as the ability to physically "set" one's
gender, race, and physical appearance, through which they can, indeed are
required to, project a version of the self which is inherently theatrical. Since
the "real" identities of the interlocutors at Lambda are unverifiable
(except by crackers and hackers, whose outlaw manipulations of code are
unanimously construed by the Internet's citizens as a violation of both privacy
and personal freedom) it can be said that everyone who participates is &q
uot;passing," as it impossible to tell if a character's description matches
a player's physical characteristics. Some the uses to which this infixed
theatricality are put are benign and even funny‹descriptions of self as a
human-size pickle or pot bellied pig are not uncommon, and generally are
received in a positive, amused, tolerant way by other players. Players who elect
to describe themselves in racial terms, as Asian, African American, Latino, or
other members of oppressed and marginalized minorities, are often seen as
engaging in a form of hostile performance, since they introduce what many
consider a real life "divisive issue" into the phantasmatic world of
cybernetic textual interaction. The borders and frontiers of cyberspace which
had previously seemed so amorphous take on a keen sharpness when the enunciation
of racial otherness is put into play as performance. While everyone is "passing,"
some forms of racial passing are condoned and practiced since they do not
threaten the integrity of a national sense of self which is defined as white.
The first act a participant in LambdaMOO performs is that of writing a self
description‹it is the primal scene of cybernetic identity, a postmodern
performance of the mirror stage:
Identity is the first thing you create in a MUD. You have to decide the name of
your alternate identity‹what MUDders call your character. And you have to
describe who this character is, for the benefit of the other people who inhabit
the same MUD. By creating your identity, you help create a world. Your
character's role and the roles of the others who play with you are part of the
architecture of belief that upholds for everybody in the MUD the illusion of
being a wizard in a castle or a navigator aboard a starship: the roles give
people new stages on which to exercise new identities, and their new identities
affirm the reality of the scenario. (Rheingold)
In LambdaMOO it is required that one choose a gender; though two of the choices
are variations on the theme of "neuter," the choice cannot be deferred
because the programming code requires it. It is impossible to receive
authorization to create a character without making this choice. Race is not only
not a required choice, it is not even on the menu.1
Players are given as many lines of text as they like to write any sort of
textual description of themselves that they want. The "architecture of
belief" which underpins social interaction in the MOO, that is, the belief
that your interlocutors possess distinctive human identities which coalesce
through and vivify the glowing letters scrolling down the computer screen, is
itself built upon the this form of fantastic autobiographical writing called the
self description. The majority of players in LambdaMOO do not mention race at
all in their self description, though most do include eye and hair color, build,
age, and the pronouns which indicate a male or a female gender.2In
these cases when race is not mentioned as such, but hair and eye color is, race
is still being evoked‹a character with blue eyes and blond hair will be
assumed to be white. Yet while the textual conditions of self-definition and
self performance would seem to permit players total freedom, within the
boundaries of the written word, to describe themselves in any way they choose,
this choice is actually an illusion. This is because the choice not to mention
race does in fact constitute a choice‹in the absence of racial description,
all players are assumed to be white. This is partly due to the demographics of
Internet users‹most are white, male, highly educated, and middle class. It is
also due to the utopian belief-system prevalent in the MOO. This system, which
claims that the MOO should be a free space for play, strives towards policing
and regulating racial discourse in the interest of social harmony. This system
of regulation does permit racial role playing when it fits within familiar
discourses of racial stereotyping, and thus perpetuates these discourses. I am
going to focus on the deployment of Asian performance within the MOO because
Asian personae are by far the most common non-white ones chosen by players and
offer the most examples for study.
The vast majority of male Asian characters deployed in the MOO fit into familiar
stereotypes from popular electronic media such as video games, television, and
film, and popular literary genres such as science fiction and historical
romance. Characters named Mr. Sulu, Chun Li, Hua Ling, Anjin San, Musashi, Bruce
Lee, Little Dragon, Nunchaku, Hiroko, Miura Tetsuo, and Akira invoke their
counterparts in the world of popular media; Mr. Sulu is the token
"Oriental" in the television show "Star Trek," Hua Ling and
Hiroko are characters in the science fiction novels Eon and Red Mars,
Chun Li and Liu Kang are characters from the video games "Street Fighter"
and "Mortal Kombat," the movie star Bruce Lee was nicknamed "Little
Dragon," Miura Tetsuo and Anjin San are characters in James Clavell's
popular novel and miniseries "Shogun," Musashi is a medieval Japanese
folklore hero, and Akira is the title of a Japanese animated film of the genre
called "anime." The name Nunchaku refers to a weapon, as does, in a
more oblique way, all of the names listed above. These names all adapt the
samurai warrior fantasy to cyberdiscursive role playing, and permit their users
to perform a notion of the Oriental warrior adopted from popular media. This is
an example of the crossing over effect of popular media into cyberspace, which
is, as the latest comer to the array of electronic entertainment media, a
bricolage of figurations and simulations. The Orientalized male persona,
complete with sword, confirms the idea of the male oriental as potent, antique,
exotic, and anachronistic.
This type of Orientalized theatricality is a form of identity tourism; players
who choose to perform this type of racial play are almost always white, and
their appropriation of stereotyped male Asiatic samurai figures allows them to
indulge in a dream of crossing over racial boundaries temporarily and
recreationally. Choosing these stereotypes tips their interlocutors off to the
fact that they are not "really" Asian; they are instead "playing"
in an already familiar type of performance. Thus, the Orient is brought into the
discourse, but only as a token or "type." The idea of a non-stereotyped
Asian male identity is so seldom enacted in LambdaMOO that its absence can only
be read as a symptom of a suppression.
Tourism is a particularly apt metaphor to describe the activity of racial
identity appropriation, or "passing" in cyberspace. The activity of
"surfing," (an activity already associated with tourism in the mind of
most Americans) the Internet not only reinforces the idea that cyberspace is not
only a place where travel and mobility are featured attractions, but also
figures it as a form of travel which is inherently recreational, exotic, and
exciting, like surfing. The choice to enact oneself as a samurai warrior in
LambdaMOO constitutes a form of identity tourism which allows a player to
appropriate an Asian racial identity without any of the risks associated with
being a racial minority in real life. While this might seem to offer a promising
venue for non-Asian characters to see through the eyes of the Other by
performing themselves as Asian through on-line textual interaction, the fact
that the personae chosen are overwhelmingly Asian stereotypes blocks this
possibility by reinforcing these stereotypes.
This theatrical fantasy of passing as a form of identity tourism has deep roots
in colonial fiction, such as Kipling's Kim and T.E. Lawrence's Seven
Pillars of Wisdom, and Sir Richard Burton's writings. The Irish orphan and
spy Kim, who uses disguise to pass as Hindu, Muslim, and other varieties of
Indian natives, experiences the pleasures and dangers of cross cultural
performance. Said's insightful reading of the nature of Kim's adventures in
cross cultural passing contrasts the possibilities for play and pleasure for
white travelers in an imperialistic world controlled by the European empire with
the relatively constrained plot resolutions offered that same boy back home.
"For what one cannot do in one's own Western environment, where to try to
live out the grand dream of a successful quest is only to keep coming up against
one's own mediocrity and the world's corruption and degradation, one can do
abroad. Isn't it possible in India to do everything, be anything, go anywhere
with impunity?" (42). To practitioners of identity tourism as I have
described it above, LambdaMOO represents an phantasmatic imperial space, much
like Kipling's Anglo-India, which supplies a stage upon which the "grand
dream of a successful quest" can be enacted.
Since the incorporation of the computer into the white collar workplace the line
which divides work from play has become increasingly fluid. It is difficult for
employers and indeed, for employees, to always differentiate between doing
"research" on the Internet and "playing": exchanging email,
checking library catalogues, interacting with friends and colleagues through
synchronous media like "talk" sessions, and videoconferencing offer
enhanced opportunities for gossip, jokes, and other distractions under the guise
of work.3 Time spent on
the Internet is a hiatus from "rl" (or real life, as it is called by
most participants in virtual social spaces like LambdaMOO), and when that time
is spent in a role playing space such as Lambda, devoted only to social
interaction and the creation and maintenance of a convincingly "real"
milieu modeled after an "internation al community," that hiatus
becomes a full fledged vacation. The fact that Lambda offers players the ability
to write their own descriptions, as well as the fact that players often utilize
this programming feature to write stereotyped Asian personae for themselves,
reveal that attractions lie not only in being able to "go" to exotic
spaces,4 but to co-opt
the exotic and attach it to oneself. The appropriation of racial identity
becomes a form of recreation, a vacation from fixed identities and locales.
This vacation offers the satisfaction of a desire to fix the boundaries of
cultural identity and exploit them for recreational purposes. As Said puts it,
the tourist who passes as the marginalized Other during his travels partakes of
a fantasy of social control, one which depends upon and fixes the familiar
contours of racial power relations.
It is the wish-fantasy of someone who would like to think that everything is possible, that one can go anywhere and be anything. T.E. Lawrence in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom expresses this fantasy over and over, as he reminds us how he‹a blond and blue-eyed Englishman‹moved among the desert Arabs as if he were one of them. I call this a fantasy because, as both Kipling and Lawrence endless remind us, no one‹least of all actual whites and non-whites in the colonies‹ever forgets that "going native' or playing the Great Game are facts based on rock-like foundations, those of European power. Was there ever a native fooled by the blue or green-eyed Kims and Lawrences who passed among the inferior races as agent adventurers? I doubt it... (Said 44)
As Donna Haraway notes, high technologies "promise ultimate mobility and
perfect exchange‹and incidentally enable tourism, that perfect practice of
mobility and exchange, to emerge as one of the world's largest single
industries" (168). Identity tourism in cyberspaces like LambdaMOO functions
as a fascinating example of the promise of high technology to enhance travel
opportunities by redefining what constitutes travel‹logging on to a
phantasmatic space where one can appropriate exotic identities means that one
need never cross a physical border or even leave one's armchair to go on
vacation. This "promise" of "ultimate mobility and perfect
exchange" is not, however, fulfilled for everyone in LambdaMOO. The
suppression of racial discourse which does not conform to familiar stereotypes,
and the enactment of notions of the Oriental which do conform to them, extends
the promise of mobility and exchange only to those who wish to change their
identities to fit accepted norms.
Performances of Asian female personae in LambdaMOO are doubly repressive because
they enact a variety of identity tourism which cuts across the axes of gender
and race, linking them in a powerful mix which brings together virtual sex,
Orientalist stereotyping, and performance. A listing of some of the names and
descriptions chosen by players who masquerade as "Asian"
"females" at LambdaMOO include: AsianDoll, Miss_Saigon,
Bisexual_Asian_Guest, Michelle_Chang, Geisha_Guest, and MaidenTaiwan. They
describe themselves as, for example, a "mystical Oriental beauty, drawn
from the pages of a Nagel calendar," or, in the case of the Geisha_Guest, a
character owned by a white American man living in Japan:
a petite Japanese girl in her twenties. She has devoted her entire life to the perfecting the tea ceremony and mastering the art of lovemaking. She is multi-orgasmic. She is wearing a pastel kimono, 3 under-kimonos in pink and white. She is not wearing panties, and that would not be appropriate for a geisha. She has spent her entire life in the pursuit of erotic experiences.
Now, it is commonly known that the relative dearth of women in cyberspace
results in a great deal of "computer cross dressing," or men
masquerading as women. Men who do this are generally seeking sexual interaction,
or "netsex" from other players of both genders. When the performance
is doubly layered, and a user extends his identity tourism across both race and
gender, it is possible to observe a double appropriation or objectification
which uses the "Oriental" as part of a sexual lure, thus exploiting
and reifying through performance notions of the Asian female as submissive,
docile, a sexual plaything.
The fetishization of the Asian female extends beyond LambdaMOO into other parts
of the Internet. There is a usenet newsgroup called
"alt.sex.fetish.orientals" which is extremely active‹it is also the
only one of the infamous "alt.sex" newsgroups which overtly focuses
upon race as an adjunct to sexuality.
Cyberspace is the newest incarnation of the idea of national boundaries. It is a
phenomenon more abstract yet at the same time more "real" than outer
space, since millions of particip ants deploy and immerse themselves within it
daily, while space travel has been experienced by only a few people. The term
"cyberspace" participates in a topographical trope which, as Stone
points out, defines the activity of on-line interaction as a taking place within
a locus, a space, a "world" unto itself. This second
"world," like carnival, possess constantly fluctuating boundaries,
frontiers, and dividing lines which separate it from both the realm of the
"real" (that which takes place off line) and its corollary, the world
of the physical body which gets projected, manipulated, and performed via
on-line interaction. The title of the Time magazine cover story for July
25, 1994, "The Strange New World of Internet: Battles on the Frontiers of
Cyberspace" is typical of the popular media's depictions of the Internet as
a world unto itself with shifting frontiers and borders which are contested in
the same way that national borders are. The "battle" over borders
takes place on several levels which have been well documented elsewhere, such as
the battle over encryption and the conflict between the rights of the private
individual to transmit and receive information freely and the rights of
government to monitor potentially dangerous, subversive, or obscene material
which crosses state lines over telephone wires. These contests concern the
distinction between public and private. It is, however, seldom acknowledged that
the trope of the battle on the cyber frontier also connotes a conflict on the
level of cultural self definition. If, as Chris Chesher notes, "the
frontier has been used since as a metaphor for freedom and progress, and...space
exploration, especially, in the 1950s and 1960s was often called the 'new
frontier,'" (18) the figuration of cyberspace as the most recent
representation of the frontier sets the stage for border skirmishes in the realm
of cultural representations of the Other. The discourse of space travel during
this period solidified the American identity by limning out the contours of an
cosmic, or "last" frontier.5
The "race for space," or the race to stake out a border to be defended
against both the non human (aliens) and the non American (the Soviets)
translates into an obsession with race and a fear of racial contamination,
always one of the distinctive features of the imperialist project. In films such
as Alien, the integrity and solidarity of the American body is threatened
on two fronts‹both the anti-human (the alien) and the passing-as-human (the
cyborg) seek to gain entry and colonize Ripley's human body. Narratives which
locate the source of contaminating elements within a deceitful and uncanny
technologically-enabled theatricality‹the ability to pass as human‹depict
performance as an occupational hazard of the colonization of any space. New and
futuristic technologies call into question the integrity of categories of the
human since they enable the non-human to assume a human face and identity.
Recently, a character on Lambda named "Tapu" proposed a piece of
legislation to the Lambda community in the form of petition. This petition,
entitled "Hate-Crime," was intended to impose penalties upon
characters who harassed other characters on the basis of race. The players'
publicly posted response to this petition, which failed by a narrow margin,
reveals a great deal about the particular variety of utopianism common to
real-time textual on-line social interaction. The petition's detractors argued
that legislation or discourse designed to prevent or penalize racist "hate
speech" were unnecessary since those offended in this way had the option to
"hide" their race by removing it from their descriptions. A character
named "Taffy" writes "Well, who knows my race unless I tell them?
If race isn't important than why mention it? If you want to get in somebody's
face with your race then perhaps you deserve a bit of flak. Either way I don't
see why we need extra rules to deal with this." "Taffy," who
signs himself "proud to be a sort of greyish pinky color with bloches"
[sic] recommends a strategy of both blaming the victim and suppressing race, an
issue which "isn't important" and shouldn't be mentioned because doing
so gets in "somebody's face." The fear of the "flak"
supposedly generated by player's decisions to include race in their descriptions
of self is echoed in another post to the same group by "Nougat," who
points out that "how is someone to know what race you are a part of? If
[sic] this bill is meant to combat comments by towards people of different
races, or just any comments whatsoever? Seems to me, if you include your race in
your description, you are making yourself the sacrificial lamb. I don't include
'caucasian' in my description, simply because I think it is unnecess ary. And
thusly, I don't think I've ever been called 'honkey.'" Both of these posts
emphasize that race is not, should not be, "necessary" to social
interaction on LambdaMOO. The punishment for introducing this extraneous and
divisive issue into the MOO, which represents a vacation space, a Fantasy Island
of sorts, for its users, is to become a "sacrificial lamb." The
attraction of Fantasy Island lay in its ability to provide scenarios for the
fantasies of privileged individuals. And the maintenance of this fantasy, that
of a race-free society, can only occur by suppressing forbidden identity
choices.
While many of the members of social on-line communities like LambdaMOO are
stubbornly utopian in their attitudes towards the power dynamics and flows of
information within the technologically mediated social spaces they inhabit, most
of the theorists are pessimistic. Andrew Ross and Constance Penley introduce the
essays in their collection Technoculture by asserting that "the odds
are firmly stacked against the efforts of those committed to creating
technological countercultures" (xiii). Chesher concedes that "In spite
of the claims that everyone is the same in virtual worlds, access to technology
and necessary skills will effectively replicate class divisions of the rest of
reality in the virtual spaces" (28) and "will tend to reinforce
existing inequalities, and propagate already dominant ideologies" (29).
Indeed, the cost of net access does contribute towards class divisions as well
as racial ones; the vast majority of the Internet's users are white and
middle-class. One of the dangers of identity tourism is that it takes this
restriction across the axes of race/class in the "real world" to an
even more subtle and complex degree by reducing non-white identity positions to
part of a costume or masquerade to be used by curious vacationers in cyberspace.
Asianness is co-opted as a "passing" fancy, an identity-prosthesis
which signifies sex, the exotic, passivity when female, and anachronistic dreams
of combat in its male manifestation. "Passing" as a samurai or geisha
is diverting, reversible, and a privilege mainly used by white men. The paradigm
of Asian passing masquerades on LambdaMOO itself works to suppress racial
difference by setting the tone of the discourse in racist contours, which
inevitably discourage "real life" Asian men and women from textual
performance in that space, effectively driving race underground . As a result, a
default "whiteness" covers the entire social space of LambdaMOO‹race
is "whited out" in the name of cybersocial hygiene.
The dream of a new technology has always contained within it the fear of total
control, and the accompanying loss of individual autonomy. Perhaps the best way
to subvert the hegemony of cybersocial hygiene is to use its own metaphors
against itself. Racial and racist discourse in the MOO is the unique product of
a machine and an ideology. Looking at discourse about race in cyberspace as a
computer bug or ghost in the machine permits insight into the ways that it
subverts that machine. A bug interrupts a program's regular commands and
routines, causing it to behave unpredictably. "Bugs are mistakes, or
unexpected occurrences, as opposed to things that are intentional" (Aker
12). Programmers routinely debug their work because they desire complete control
over the way their program functions, just as Taffy and Nougat would like to
debug LambdaMOO of its "sacrificial lambs," those who insist on
introducing new expressions of race into their world. Discourse about race in
cyberspace is conceptualized as a bug, something which an efficient computer
user would eradicate since it contaminates their work/play. The "unexpected
occurrence" of race has the potential, by its very unexpectedness, to
sabotage the ideology-machine's routines. Therefore, its articulation is
critical, as is the ongoing examination of the dynamics of this articulation. As
Judith Butler puts it:
Doubtlessly crucial is the ability to wield the signs of subordinated identity in a public domain that constitutes its own homophobic and racist hegemonies through the erasure or domestication of culturally and politically constituted identities. And insofar as it is imperative that we insist upon those specificities in order to expose the fictions of an imperialist humanism that works through unmarked privilege, there remains the risk that we will make the articulation of ever more specified identities into the aim of political activism. Thus every insistence on identity must at some point lead to a taking stock of the constitutive exclusions that reconsolidate hegemonic power differentials...(118)
The erasure and domestication of Asianness on LambdaMOO perpetuates an
Orientalist myth of social control and order. As Cornell West puts it, as Judith
Butler puts it, "race matters," and "bodie s matter."
Programming language and Internet connectivity have made it possible for people
to interact without putting into play any bodies but the ones they write for
themselves . The temporary divorce which cyberdiscourse grants the mind from the
body and the text from the body also separates race and the body. Player scripts
which eschew repressive versions of the Oriental in favor of critical
rearticulations and recombinations of race, gender, and class, and which also
call the fixedness of these categories into question have the power to turn the
theatricality characteristic of MOOspace into a truly innovative form of play,
rather than a tired reiteration and reinstatement of old hierarchies. Role
playing is a feature of the MOO, not a bug, and it would be absurd to ask that
everyone who plays within it hew literally to the "rl" gender, race,
or condition of life. A diversification of the roles which get played, which are
permitted to be played, can enable a thought provoking detachment of race from
the body, and an accompanying questioning of the essentialness of race as a
category. Performing alternative versions of self and race jams the
ideology-machine, and facilitates a desirable opening up of what Judith Butler
calls "the difficult future terrain of community" (242) in cyberspace.
1Some MUDS such as Diku
and Phoenix require players to select races. These MUDs are patterned after the
role playing game Dungeons and Dragons and unlike Lambda, which exists to
provide a forum for social interaction and chatting, focus primarily on virtual
combat and the accumulation of game points. The races available to players (orc,
elf, dwarf, human, etc) are familiar to readers of the "sword and
sorcery" genre of science fiction, and determine what sort of combat
"attributes" a player can exploit. The combat metaphor which is a part
of this genre of role playing reinforces the notion of racial difference.
2Most players do not
choose either spivak or neuter as their gender; perhaps because this type of
choice is seen as a non choice. Spivaks and neuters are often asked to "set
gender" by other players; they are seen as having deferred a choice rather
than having made an unpopular one. Perhaps this is an example of the
"informatics of domination" which Haraway describes.
3Computer users who were
using their machines to play games at work realized that it was possible for
their employers and coworkers to spy on them while walking nearby and notice
that they were slacking‹hence, they developed screen savers which, at a
keystroke, can instantly cover their "play" with a convincingly
"work-like" image, such as a spreadsheet or business letter.
4Microsoft's recent
television and print media advertising campaign markets access to both personal
computing and networking by promoting these activities as a form of travel; the
ads ask the prospective consumer, "where do you want to go today?"
Microsoft's promise to transport the user to new spaces where desire can be
fulfilled is enticing in its very vagueness, offering an open ended invitation
for travel and novel experiences.
5 The political action
group devoted to defending the right to free speech in cyberspace against
governmental control calls itself "The Electronic Frontier"; this is
another example of the metaphorization of cyberspace as a colony to be defended
against hostile takeovers.
Aker, Sharon et al. Macintosh Bible 3rd edition, Berkeley: Goldstein and
Blair, 1987-91.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of
"Sex". New York: Routledge, 1993.
Chesher, Chris. "Colonizing Virtual Reality: Construction of the Discourse
of Virtual Reality, 1984-1992." Cultronix, vol. 1, issue 1, Summer
1994. The English Server. Online. 16 May 1995.
Elmer, Dewitt, Philip. "Battle for the Soul of the Internet." Time,
25 July 1994.
Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Penley, Constance and Andrew Ross. Technoculture. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1991.
Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community. New York: HarperPerennial,
1993. The Well. Online. 16 May 1995.
Stone, Allucquere Rosanne. "Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?: Boundary
Stories About Virtual Cultures." Cyberspace: First Steps. Ed.
Michael Benedikt. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994.
Said, Edward. Introduction. Kim. By Rudyard Kipling. New York: Penguin,
1987. 7-46.