Second Life is guided by the "Second Life Community Standards", which are fairly obvious general behavioral standards. However, I suspect peer enforcement of these rules also depends on what piece of Second Life you are in. Kollock and Smith briefly brought up alt.flaming on Usenet: it had different standards than the rest of Usenet. I would guess there are places in Second Life where one can get away with insulting others as well - as long as it is part of that virtual area's culture. (For those of you who haven't ever been in Second Life, it's very big.)
These are abridged versions of the rules:
1. Intolerance - don't insult anyone's race, ethnicity, gender, religion, or sexual orientation.
2. Harassment - don't threaten people or ask them for sex in inappropriate places/when they've said no
3. Assault - don't shoot/push/shove people or create scripts (program code that when activated makes a person or a thing perform an action) that assault them
4. Disclosure - don't give personal information out about someone if it's not listed in their profile
5. Indecency - no sex or violence unless in a place that is rated Mature
6. Don't disturb others' scheduled events
Second Life also has a abuse report form to fill out when a user suspects another user is breaking the rules. Then someone from Linden Labs investigates the issue. This is incredibly different from many of the other online communities I deal with, where the community is often a bulletin board system and moderated by users, but Second Life is huge.
Since Second Life is in real-time video rather than 2D and archived, it is difficult to find examples of rule-breaking unless they are aimed at you. Despite that Gossip Girl is a show that has a great deal of drama, sex and general meanness, I've found the virtual area to be populated by friendly people with a little bit of drama, but no rule breaking. I haven't run into any rule-breaking in my librarian persona either - I suppose griefers just do not find Infotainment that fascinating. So here, I have to rely on videos and discussion. Apologies.
Given the power of video-capturing tools and YouTube, I can find several examples of griefing such as violence, harassment, and of course a video showing the exploits of the Patriotic Nigras (warning: occasionally inappropriate) mentioned in Dibbell's article. The Patriotic Nigras' John Edwards SL campaign vandalism was also briefly covered by The Daily Show.
The (warning: foul language) Patriotic Nigras site on the 4chan-related Encyclopedia Dramatica relates that the Tigras were IP-banned from Second Life, but eventually they found something to mask their IP addresses and were able to return.
All this talk of harassment brings up a very important question: Is the Internet serious business? In one of the early sessions' readings Dibbell explored whether a cyberspace rape was actually a rape. When you're in Second Life the issue becomes even more muddled. In the days of MOOs, your interaction was all through text. Now it is through 3D representation - will troublemakers still be throwing around "the Internet is serious business" when we have real augmented and virtual reality, or, when the Internet increasingly becomes integrated with real life?
Somewhat embarrassingly, I'm familiar with a lot of the more specific mentions of this session including "the Internet is serious business" and 4chan. (I didn't link to it because 4chan is...well, if you google it and click on any one of the boards, do not be surprised if you are offended by an image or text.) It's difficult for me because I find some of what these sorts of groups do funny - who doesn't like LOLcats, which came out of 4chan - but the group is persistently filled with angry young males who between posting pictures with funny captions spew out sexist, racist, and otherwise offensive behavior. Again, the standards of behavior on 4chan and related sites are much less stringent than other sites and probably similar to alt.flaming.
The Gazan chapter presented an interesting idea - that we could cater to the needs of griefers by interpreting their personalities, and that adding the Web 2.0 functionalities to Answerbag actually mainstayed some persistent narcissistic traits of heavy users. It is difficult for me to see how we could appease Patriotic Nigras-type griefers, but then again I am not a continual reader of the DSM. ould it benefit online community promoters (the ones with the big bucks) to pull in real
psychologists to deal with appeasing griefers in other forms so they don't terrorize the other participants? Reed correctly identifies so many of the online personalities people take: we could assign a psychological profile to each one, and figure out what sorts of social community aspects would benefit each type.
Cosley et al discussed how low-quality contributions to a community can drive away the few people who come to make lots of contributions. If such troublemakers bother an individual on Second Life, they may not wish to return due to the emotional trauma. That's the serious part that transfers off the Internet.
Finally, I have a correction:
In the Dibbell article, he mentions that 4chan is a spinoff of Something Awful. It's not. It was started by a guy from Something Awful but the format is based off of 2channel, a super-popular Japanese BBS that works more or less the same way.
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People get attached to MOOs and invest a lot of emotion into them. I believe that is another reason why people get offended easily when rogue users start harassing them on MOOs. But those people should ignore them like they would do offline, and their problems would more than likely go away.
ReplyDeleteI agree that finding a separate online community for people who like to cause trouble would be a good idea. Perhaps they do not like something about the community of which they and everyone else are a part, and they could be harassing other users just so that they can release their anger or stress. Also, those people may not necessarily be mentally ill or have malicious intentions but rather are just not using their heads the right way.
Finally, the rules you listed appear to be similar to the laws that are established in our real-world society. To me, therefore, it seems like there is no line dividing Second Life and My Life (I coined that term to mean our offline existence), and because there is no distinction between the two, most users on MOOs would follow the rules. However, if they were to break them, they would secretly find a way to do so (again, just like in My Life), which could explain why you hardly found any rule breakers on Second Life.
Whoa, so in Second Life, one can walk around naked and such if the community is rated mature? Interesting. That's just like certain places in Waikiki or like nudist colonies, huh?
ReplyDeleteBy the way, why would we want to appease griefers? Can't Second Life admin just punish them "publicly"? That sense of justice seems to work in real life, or in the case of OkCupid from Mike's study? Although, there's that balance isn't there? Are we going to have to go vigilante? Or, if we go that route, does that mean griefers have succeeded in pushing the community's buttons and "won"? I wouldn't want them to go ignored either. There must be a fine balance.
So is the internet serious business or not? I'm interested in what you have to say about that. I can think of reasons for both sides. We can say that since this article was written that we have experienced an even greater integration of technology into everyday life. So the argument could be made that times have changed and the internet has definitely become serious business, but I wonder if this is exactly what groups like Patriotic Nigras are fighting against. Do they have some kind of issue with making people less "personally connected" to their computers? If so, then it seems that these groups need a dose of their own medicine. Their identities are wrapped up in these personas. Should we use DSM-IV, diagnose them and give them a "safe" place to play? I personally think it's just a fact of life. There are people like this in every aspect of life. People throw their gum on the sidewalk on purpose to see you step on it and like to make a scene and disrupt life. It's now just transferred to the online world as well.
ReplyDeletej_mastin ---> I guess maybe "appeasing" is the wrong word; I'm thinking more finding ways for the griefers to channel their energy elsewhere. The Second Life admin did try to punish the Patriotic Nigras - they were IP banned - but then the Nigras found a way around it.
ReplyDeletelisjennifer --> I *just* had a fight with a friend who's a 4chan reader about this the other day.
I think the internet is serious business after we hit a specific point, and we've nearly hit that point. After Second Life I think things are going to become even more real-seeming; we're going to have mixed reality situations and (for Star Trek watchers) at the very end, holodeck type situations. When the Internet was simply text and pixellated graphics, you could distance yourself from it. When your senses are partially immersed in it..it's going to be a different story.
The first wave of creators on the internet were government and businesses, and we have laws to protect against fraud and hacking; now it's people in social computing, and we don't have laws defining appropriate *personal* behavior. And of course the Internet is international and that partially throws a loop in any legislation one would create.
Too bad it isn't as simple as saying if you just ignore them, they'll go away. Whatever you do, don't build an anti-griefing guild. I'd have to admit that I chuckled when I read through the posts on that page. It was a good effort on their part, though.
ReplyDelete