Chapter 10: Identity Crisis

Virtual spaces may provide the safety for us to expose what we are missing so that we can begin to accept ourselves as we are. Virtuality need not be a prison. It can be the raft, the ladder, the transitional space, the moratorium, that is discarded after reaching greater freedom. We don’t have to reject life on the screen, but we don’t have to treat it as an alternative life either. We can use it as a space for growth … Like the anthropologist returning home from a foreign culture, the voyager in virtuality can return to a real world better equipped to understand its artifices.

Chapter 9: Virtuality and its Discontents

What if my virtual apartment is destroyed…? What if you kidnap my virtual dog … what if you destroy him and leave his dismembered body in the MUD? In the physically embodied world, we have no choice but to assume responsibility for our body’s actions … The possibilities inherent in virtual reality, on the other hand, may provide some people with an excuse for irresponsibility, just as they may enable creative expressions that would otherwise have been repressed … The challenge is to integrate some meaningful personal responsibility in virtual environments. Virtual environments are valuable as places where we can acknowledge our inner diversity.

Chapter 10: Identity Crisis

The many manifestations of multiplicity in our culture, including the adoption of online personae, are contributing to a general reconsideration of traditional, unitary notions of identity.

Naisbitt: Growing Influence of Asia

There could be one billion individual users by the year 2000 on the network. Twenty years from now we’ll be saying how could we get excited about that?

Naisbitt: Growing Influence of Asia

Unless you know what you are really doing, the Internet is a great waste of time … The Internet is good for person-to-person communications but for those doing “commercial business” it [will] take off only very slowly.

The Global Economic Boom of the 1990s

Telecommunications – and computers – will continue to drive change … In telecommunications, we are moving to a single worldwide information network, just as economically we are becoming one global marketplace. We are moving toward the capability to communicate anything to anyone, anywhere, by any form – voice, data, text or image – at the speed of light.

Chapter 9: Virtuality and its Discontents

In the 19th century, utopians built communities in which political thought could be lived out as practice. On the cusp of the 21st century, we are building MUDs, possible worlds that can provoke a new critical discourse about the real.

Chapter 9: Virtuality and its Discontents

What are the social implications of spinning off virtual personae that can run around with names and genders of our choosing, unhindered by the weight and physicality of embodiment? From their earliest days, MUDs have been evocative objects for thinking about virtuality and accountability.

Chapter 9: Virtuality and its Discontents

Do MUDs oblige us to find a new language that does not judge virtual experiences purely in terms of how far they facilitate or encumber “real” ones? Perhaps the virtual experiences are “real enough.”