University of California@Berkeley

July, 1998



                                Cybercultures

                                Jenny Sundén



Back in late 1993, when I interviewed Swedish MUD users for an essay in
sociology, nobody in my department had the slightest idea of what I was
doing. At that time, the population in MUDs and other text-based social on-
line spaces consisted largely of young, male college students in computer
science or related fields, who, more or less, identified themselves as
"hackers". The group of people I interviewed was no exception. They
constructed and wandered these subcultural spaces freely and imaginatively,
heavily inspired by role-playing, fantasy and science fiction. The world
around them did not seem to notice anything, but deep down in dark computer
labs these young men with red-rimmed eyes from lack of sleep were almost
inseparable from their machines.

If earlier, they had been captured by the internal logic of the computer,
by the way a sense of control could be generated through coding, they now
experienced something completely different. They were communicating. They
literally lived in the wires, temporarily disconnected from their physical
bodies, with the keyboard as an extension of their senses. During some
periods, they never saw the light of day, only the pale blue flicker from
the screen in front of them as they participated in discussions with people
from other continents. They were connected. Absorbed. Lost in the ambiguous
borderland between "real" and "virtual", "life" and "fiction". In their
negotiation with these contradictions they learned a new language, but this
time it had nothing to do with programming. They learned how to translate
themselves into pure text, how to move around in virtual locations and how
to deal with bodily absence and loss of non-verbal expressions. Some of
them made friends, others fell in love, and one of them even traveled
thousands of miles to encounter the object of his affection "in the flesh".
But almost nobody knew what they were doing, nobody really understood.

When William Gibson in his book Neuromancer (1984) coined the word
cyberspace[1], it was described in terms of a "consensual hallucination",
an electronic alternative to physical reality. It was constructed by means
of human brains directly connected to a global network, inhabited by
people's minds while their material bodies were left in physical space.
While reading it I realized that the young men I was in contact with had
already, in their own way, transferred this fiction into lived experience.
And so had a lot of other people without realizing it. As far as the
cyberspatial metaphor incorporates late-twentieth-century communication
technologies, such as financial systems, data banks and computer networks,
this fiction was becoming reality. After this, everything happened very
quickly. Almost over night, cyberspace as a virtual scene for science
fiction and the inner circles of an underground computer culture was turned
into an integral part of many peoples every day lives, transformed "from an
interesting fantasy to a hotly contested financial, cultural, and ethical
frontier."[2]. Even though the World Wide Web at first was merely a cool
application, it did not take long before it became a widespread medium for
communication, a space in which people projected their hopes, dreams and
desires. According to Jan Fernback:


       cyberspace is repository for collective cultural memory-it is popular
       culture, it is narratives created by its inhabitants that reminds us
       who we are, it is life as lived and reproduced in pixels and virtual
       texts. It is sacred and profane, it is workspace and leisure space,
       it is battleground and nirvana, it is real and virtual, it is
       ontological and phenomenological.[3]


After this description, the question remains; what incarnations of culture,
narratives and lives are experienced and created within the Net? What kind
of social space(s) do we find once connected? In what terms can the
symbolic exchange that takes place on-line be understood? Who are the
inhabitants; the constructors, the participants, the watchers? Along with
several others within the humanities and the social sciences, my own
interest in cyberspace is directed toward its cultural, symbolic and social
dimensions. My focus in this work is on the way human interaction is
transformed when mediated by machines, and in particular the kind of
identities, bodies and sexualities that emerge from these interactions.
Which images of the gendered/genderless body are salient in on-line texts?
What happens to desire in the interface of electronic textuality? What can
we learn from these texts about the virtual culture that is now being
formed? While, for example, looking at textual (re)presentations of bodies
and identities in MUDs, many are stereotypically gendered[4],
rearticulating traditional gender structures and identities. But there are
also others, innovative, strange, hard to grasp and interpret, perhaps
subversive in the way they disrupt familiar definitions and
categorizations.

This paper is an attempt to describe and analyze the landscape where these
bodily fusions and transformations take place. It is an endeavor to
understand the cultures that are now being created by those who enter and
participate in virtual communities, and how they in turn are influenced,
affected and limited by already existing structures and power relations in
the Net. During the last few years, a lot has been written on what might be
a useful concept for this purpose, namely "cyberculture". One problem with
this term is that it indicates that it might be possible to talk about a
single, homogenous on-line culture, possible to assign in a neat
definition. A related problem to this is that every attempt to clearly and
precisely define this culture is itself an exclusionary practice, which is
particularly problematic in a constantly moving, diverse area full of
contradictions. A more useful approach would instead be to account for the
"real life" practices in which cybercultures are grounded and always return
to, as well as careful examination of textual performances in the Net.

Furthermore, where cyberculture is defined and discussed, these discussions
tend to consist either of an exceptionally euphoric vocabulary of those
already hooked on the Net, or of voices of great suspicion from those
traditionally marginalized from mainstream technological development. There
is obviously a risk that these discourses mutually strengthen each other
and result in a perspective where the independent cybertraveler continues
to be blind to his (or her) own privileged position, while those already
excluded from this practice find themselves even more so, left behind with
a sense of not belonging. This is not to say that it is possible to capture
the world, or even a part of it in all its different facets and nuances,
without leaving out and ignoring a whole range of alternative ways of
seeing. Every attempt to say something about how people make sense of a
particular part of their lives and experiences, is in itself a specific,
partial and inevitable exclusionary move. The point is rather that the
cultural specific horizon from which the observer/researcher/theorist is
talking, and the often hidden assumptions and perspectives must be made
explicit. I agree with Donna Haraway that:


       no one exists in a culture of no culture, including the critics and
       prophets as well as the technicians. We might profitably learn to
       doubt our fears and certainties of disasters as much as our dreams of
       progress. We might learn to live without the bracing discourses of
       salvation history. We exist in a sea of powerful stories: They are
       the condition of finite rationality and personal and collective life
       histories. There is no way out of stories; but ... there are many
       possible structures, not to mention contents, of narration. Changing
       the stories, in both material and semiotic senses, is a modest
       intervention worth making.[5]


And even if women and other marginalized groups might go to great lengths
in their attempts to erase themselves, to temporarily be accepted as a part
of "the culture of no culture", this will only serve those whose power is
dependent on a maintenance of the illusion of transparency. By reflecting
stories of the "Scientific Revolution", Haraway wants to show how these
construct a notion of "objectivity" that remains to stand in the way of a
more self-critical position committed to partial and situated knowledges:


       The point is to make difference in the world, to cast our lot for
       some ways of life and not others. To do that, one must be in the
       action, be finite and dirty, not transcendent and clean. Knowledge-
       making technologies, including crafting subject positions and ways of
       inhabiting such positions, must be made relentlessly visible and open
       to critical intervention.[6]


My own witness of on-line cultures is far from being objective or neutral.
I am a regular participant in different activities and areas in the Net,
and am therefore very much a part of the cultures I am trying to capture
and understand. My work and my interest for how bodies and gender are
represented through technology are further grounded in and guided by
explicit feminist ambitions. This interest in feminist perspectives has led
to an increasing awareness of the way "off-line" gender inequalities to a
great extent are (re)constructed in on-line communities. On the other hand,
it also consists of a belief in the subversive potential of the very moment
within which new virtual bodies are constantly created. Where women write
themselves in the Net, this does not automatically copy their lives outside
the wires, but might also, through use of texts in new and unexpected
directions, gradually displace and expand the space where the creation of
female identities takes place. Along these lines of fascination for
gendered textual strategies on-line, a related interest for what one might
call electronic textuality has taken shape. This hybrid form of orality and
literacy used in on-line dialogues holds many familiar traits, but consists
also of  culturally specific, genre-related elements which deserve a
special alertness.

These fields of interest are part of my starting point and serve as a way
of seeing theoretical and empirical material on cybercultures, and will be
apparent in the text that follows. This is not to say that I necessarily
have to end with the same perspectives and beliefs that I started with, but
rather a way to make visible the sources of my inspiration. Theories do not
have to be viewed as static yardsticks against which a well-defined part of
"reality" is compared and measured. Theoretical frameworks, perspectives
and concepts can instead be seen as preliminary, creative constructs to
think with, always fluid and open to critique and revision.

My attempt to understand and analyze on-line cultures will in this paper be
performed in three different parts. The first part stays on a metaphorical
level and is an effort to analyze two salient discourses that circulate in
the scholarly discussion of cyberspace. One of these approaches virtual
space in terms of colonizing, by the use of "new world" narratives.
Cyberspace is here viewed geographically, as a recently discovered
electronic territory that is now being conquered in various ways. The other
metaphor is related to the discourse of new world discovery, and
articulates cyberspace as an utopia of disembodiment. The ancient dream of
transcending the body is here being reformulated in relation to cyberspace.
The question is; where do these images take us? Which are their political
implications and consequences? What strategies might be useful while
approaching the cultures in the Net?

The second part leaves the level of metaphors for a discussion of
electronic textuality. Hypertext forms the point of departure, which is
probably the form of computer texts that has been theorized the most.
Hereafter, the argument is gradually transferred into a discussion of the
ways participants in textual on-line spaces, by mere typing, have managed
to introduce bodily presence and identities in their texts. In contrast to
the idea of cyberspace as a disembodied universe, a lot of people
participating in on-line discussions have shown the need for and the
importance of an on-line language that goes far beyond written thoughts and
opinions out of context. This need is expressed in a whole range of textual
strategies that have been developed to mediate a sense of physical presence
and identity in a medium of very narrow bandwith.

The last part remains on the textual level, and might be seen as a
continuation and a refining of the second part. MUDs and MUD cultures here
serve as an example of electronic textuality on different levels, and of
the way fully fleshed characters might be created and maintained in text-
based worlds.



METAPHORS


       The most interesting way to consider the Internet is to construct a
       metaphorical understanding of it. This brings the imagined into the
       realms of the experienced. However, the Internet is not something
       that we can imagine by thinking of villages, communities, nations or
       even geographical spaces, although all these familiar images may
       enable us to form some kind of cognitive understanding of it.[7]


How can we start thinking about and visualize something as abstract and
elusive as cyberspace? One way of turning the ephemeral architecture of the
Net into something more comprehensible, is the use of metaphors. The number
of references to physical systems of transportation and communication ("the
Information Superhighway", "database navigation" etc.), that have been
circulating in mass media and popular culture during the last years, are
innumerable. Among (cyber)feminists, countermetaphors have been created to
add the dimension of communication between people, that might be
overshadowed by allusions to immense quantities of information, speed and
accessibility. Instead, images of weaving[8] and networking have been
emphasized, as a way to make people, their relationships, and the
activities that build and structure the Net visible. In this section, two
other ways of viewing cyberspace will be examined, where one spins around
the imagery of colonizing, and the other verbalizes virtual space as a
promise of disembodiment.



Colonizing cyberspace


Several cultural theorists working on different aspects of cyberspace have
been analyzing this virtual landscape in terms of Columbian voyages of
discovery and "new world" narratives.[9] They have formulated a metaphor of
aerial "mapping" of a newly discovered electronic terrain that is currently
being "colonized". The difference this time is that the frontier before us
does not consist of unmapped physical space, but rather of unmappable,
endlessly expandable virtual space. One of the questions put forth in the
geographical thinking of cyberspace is if we at all would be able to see a
new world being discovered today; "would its contours conform to our
understanding of "world" and "discovery"? Would it take place as a taking
of place? Would it supervene as an uncovering and drawing into appearance
of that which had been covered, hidden, withdrawn?"[10] By applying the
name "new world" to cyberspace, an encounter with a recently discovered
environment with what seems to be infinite possibilities is brought into
view. It is a world where nothing is solid or determined, but open to
different interpretations, returning to an era when there were worlds
without boundaries and sources beyond imagination. At the same time, the
use of the new world narrative also clearly points out the element of
exploitation, the execution of power that is imbedded in every act of
discovery and colonization.

The question is if we can think of the exploration of virtual space in
other and different ways from those related to the discovery of physical
places. Is there a way out of a scheme of thought where the old world, with
a certain violence, forces the new world under its conceptual domination?
Following Michael Benedikt; "We are contemplating the arising shape of a
new world, a world that must, in multitude of ways, begin, at least, as
both an extension and a transcription of the world as we know it and have
built it thus far".[11] According to Benedikt, we are determined by the
culture we come from as we enter virtual spaces, predestined to almost
automatically reconstruct its structures of power in the Net. The value of
such analysis is that it addresses the question of how power works in a
capitalist society, and an on-line world with roots in this culture can
hardly exist unaffected by its powers. At the same time, every attempt to
somewhere in between these power relations form strategies of resistance is
excluded. Every creative initiative starting with the individual is made
impossible. Furthermore, in a fixation of cyberspace by extending and
transcribing principles derived from the old "real" world, naturalizes and
universalizes the cultural power in motion and the very foundation upon
which the Western world is created. If we, when entering virtual worlds,
must build on an extension of "the world as we know it", there is something
more  at work than a confinement to replicate our cultural backgrounds.
This replication is made completely natural. An alternative performance
does not exist.

In contrast to this deterministic worldview, Mary Fuller and Henry Jenkins
provide a more open way of looking upon exploration and colonization of
narratives. Inspired by De Certau, they illustrate the way narratives turn
"places" into "spaces", how places only exist as potential, not yet
colonized sites for narrative action:


       Places constitutes a "stability" which must be disrupted in order for
       stories to unfold. Places are there but they do not yet matter, much
       as the New World existed, was geographically present, and culturally
       functioning well before it became the center of European ambitions or
       the site of New World narratives. Places become meaningful only as
       they come into contact with narrative agents... Spaces, on the other
       hand, are places that have been acted upon, explored, colonized.
       Spaces become the location of narrative events.[12]


When physical space was navigated, mapped, and conquered by Europeans in
the 16th and 17th centuries, only Europeans were understood as narrative
agents. Who the narrative agents of cyberspace are and will be in the
future is more of an open question. If we can think of the underlying
computer technology of the Net as the constitution of "cyberplaces",
exceedingly existing in a nonmaterial sense, but not yet meaningful. Then
in the moment when the technology is put to use, cultural meanings can
evolve and stories can begin to be told. When narrative agents transform
bites and bytes into a foundation for human communication, "cyberplaces"
can be turned into "cyberspaces", into scenes for narrative action. Even
though the Net largely has been constructed and inhabited by white, college
educated, and highly compensated men, other people with access to new
communication technologies have told their stories in on-line networks and
communities, using the Web for their own purposes. When the relative
stability of computer code logic is disrupted by the more unpredictable
nature of storytelling, the Net can be seen as a site for political
struggle over cultural meanings. This view leaves room for individual
creativity and resistance at the point where on-line narratives are
created.

David J. Gunkel and Ann Hetzel Gunkel in their article "Virtual
Geographies: The New Worlds of Cyberspace" take the argument of alternative
ways of thinking that derive from the Net much further. They express in the
following words a postmodern longing out of everything that is solid:


       "Cyberspace has the potential to interrupt the very structure,
       substance, and control of modern epistemology. ... To begin to
       determine cyberspace from the perspective of the real (which is
       already a particular interpretation of what is called reality) is to
       limit our understanding to old world preconceptions and
       (mis)perceptions. Cyberspace has the potential to dissolve the solid
       monuments of enlightenment science.".[13]


Then what else is there to build an approach on, if an understanding of
cyberspace grounded in our reality is a limited understanding? How would it
be possible to erase everything we think of as "real", to disconnect us
from our lives as we live them in the physical world, in order to enter
cyberspace beyond history and culture, beyond ourselves? This is not to say
that a Cartesian worldview is natural or necessary, or that there do not
exist ways of seeing and being which are not captured in the enlightenment
epistemology. What is suggested is rather that every new interpretation of
any kind of reality, not at least the reality created on-line, can not take
place independently of the realities of people that have existed and still
exist. "Reality", here, is not understood as a static concept limited to
the physical world, but looked upon from a constructionist view containing
an openness for re-interpretations and negotiations of what a person thinks
of as "real". An encounter in a virtual world is part of the specific
historical, cultural and social contexts where we always find ourselves,
and must therefore proceed and be shaped from a context-specific horizon.
To claim that it is possible to escape from this situatedness as we enter
and explore virtual destinations, is to believe in the illusion of "the
culture of no culture" where cultural differences of those who can afford
it are rendered transparent, invisible.

What is actualized in the quote above, is a conceptualization of "the real"
as something coherent and unambiguous, as if there was just one, homogenous
perspective of reality that is now at risk of being reconstructed on-line.
Even though some perspectives of the real are more powerful than others,
(and therefore try to claim a higher degree of "realness"!), they do not
eliminate the existence of other forms of realities; the realities of those
who do not completely live their lives within the dominating structures.
Some conceptions of reality are always more likely to take precedence over
others, but one perspective, no matter how influential, can never in a
ambiguous world full of competing meanings and contradictions stand
unchallenged.

A final valid question, in relation to the postmodern critique of modernism
expressed above, is how the technology in itself can be the solution, the
way out of old ways of thinking. If "Cyberspace has the potential to
interrupt the very structure, substance, and control of modern
epistemology", what exactly does this potential consist of? If "the real"
according to old world preconceptions is one, unified perspective, and
cyberspace the inversion and dissolution of everything that is stable and
solid, it is not very clear where this fluid on-line world comes from.
Neither is it clear how this fluidity could disrupt the very foundation,
the essence of the old world firmness, through its mere existence and
presence in virtual space.

Somewhere in between two extremes, where cyberspace is either viewed as a
copy of the "real" world, or as something completely separate and released
from material reality, an alternative perspective could be formed. From the
point of view of those who consume and produce cyberspaces on a daily
basis, they probably experience their on-line lives as something separable
from a material world of physical encounters, without being able to make a
clear distinction between these two realms. Instead of reducing cyberspace
to an exact replica of an outer culture, it might be viewed as something at
least partly new, in the way room for invention and creativity arises and
unique modes of communication develops. On the other hand, rather than
being completely unrelated to other forms of communication, the
communication hybrids that can be found on-line contain many familiar
traits. The questions remains; in what way is the well-known being
recreated in on-line cultures? How do unexpected and yet not familiar
cultural forms develop? And finally, what can this tell us about the
relationship between "real" and "virtual", "human" and "machine"?



Bodily transcendence


       Such ontological and epistemological issues as the nature of the
       human, the real, experience, sensation, cognition, identity and
       gender are all placed, if not under erasure, then certainly in
       question around the discursive object of virtual reality and the
       postulated existence of perfect, simulated environments. Virtual
       reality has become the very embodiment of postmodern
       disembodiment.[14]


Closely connected to a theoretical articulation of cyberspace through the
metaphor of new world discovery, is the thinking of virtual space as a
postmodern utopia of disembodiment. Along the lines of the cyberpunk genre,
this theoretical tendency is grounded in the assumption that the body in
encounters beyond its physical boundaries, has ceased to matter. It is a
perspective where new communication technologies have opened up for
disembodied subjectivities, where identities not necessarily have to be
derived from authentic, embodied experiences. The material body, with all
its limitations, is completely disconnected from its virtual
representations, something the cyberspace traveler can leave behind. In
cyberpunk literature, the body is often referred to as "the meat", as
something disturbingly inert that surrounds and limits the active and
spiritual mind. [15] The dream is to leave this passive piece of flesh
behind and rise to a higher and more pure level of consciousness, far
beyond distracting physical needs:


       the duality between mind and body is superseded in a new formation
       that presents the mind as itself embodied. ... Through the
       construction of the computer itself, there arises the possibility of
       a mind independent of the biology of bodies, a mind released from the
       mortal limitations of the flesh.[16]


A somewhat paradoxical view of postmodernity rises from this kind of
theoretical writing on cyberspace. If the postmodern project ultimately
consists of a dissolution of a Cartesian worldview toward a constantly
moving reality of floating distinctions, this is hardly realized in the
view of virtual space as a space for the mind. Where the body is left
behind, the Cartesian separation of mind from body is not at all a
contradiction under threat, but rather rearticulated and fortified. The old
understanding of masculinity as abstraction, of men as physically
disconnected, independent and solitary individuals, is therefore now being
reformulated in cyberspace discourses. But these discourses are, as always,
dependent on the maintenance and essentializing of embodied "others".

Furthermore, despite the denial of the bodily roots of human consciousness,
the physical body is still exceedingly present in cyberpunk narratives (and
its academic alterations), through the way cyberspace in these discourses
is sexualized. When Gibson's console cowboys "jack in" to cyberspace to
heighten their senses, this metaphorically arouse a heterosexual meeting
between a male operator and a female body. These tendencies of erotization
of computer technologies in popular culture become even more salient in the
context of computer games, where it is almost impossible to find a game
where the woman is the active player instead of merely a desirably, passive
object. The vision of cyberspace as a place where the physical body is
absent but which still can provide fulfillment of erotic desire, "represent
a future where human bodies are on the verge of becoming obsolete but
sexuality nevertheless prevails."[17]

In contrast to main stream science fiction and cyberpunk in particular,
feminist science fiction writers perform textual deconstructions of
fictional bodies in alternative ways. Donna Haraway calls them "theorists
for cyborgs", in the way they recognize the fusion of human with technology
as potentially liberating, but at the same time as creating a profound
dilemma. If cyberpunk is characterized by the illusory relation between the
disembodied freedoms of virtual space and the material limitations of the
flesh, feminist science fiction has been more competent in pointing out the
body as a site for ongoing struggle. In the same way, several feminist
theorists have explored and emphasized the way the body is represented in
and through the use of communication technologies, and that every virtual
journey takes off from, and must return to, the lives of material bodies.
Or as Sandy Stone puts it: "No refigured virtual body, no matter how
beautiful, will slow the death of cyberpunk with AIDS. Even in the age of
the technosocial subject, life is lived through bodies."[18]

The struggle over the definition of cyberspace has not yet reached any
clear consensus, and perhaps never will. No matter what metaphor is being
used in our thinking of virtual space, a whole range of experiences and
activities will probably be excluded. But if it is difficult to
theoretically articulate the word cyberspace, it is perhaps easier to go
the other way around and point out what kind of texts that constitute this
space and give it meaning. It may be that the predominating discussion of
"virtual culture" has focused not on the cultures of cyberspace as they
exist today, but on the utopian or dystopian visions for tomorrow. As the
network of activities covered by the term cyberspace expands, there is an
escalating need to specify the variety of spaces that exist in the Net. In
a striving to captivate the reality that is now being created in
cyberspace, Ann Balsamo suggests a perspective of how myths around bodies,
nature and identities are rearticulated in and through new technologies:

       

       In traveling through various virtual cyberworlds, it no longer make
       sense to ask whose reality or perspective is represented in
       cyberspace;  rather we should ask what reality is created therein,
       and how this reality articulates relationships among technologies,
       bodies and narratives.  The body may disappear representionally in
       virtual worlds - indeed, we may go to great length to repress and
       erase its referential traces - but it doesn't disappear materially,
       either in the interface with the VR apparatus or in system of
       technological production.[19]


A wish to capture the reality that is now being created in the wires, leads
from a relatively abstract perspective of metaphorical thinking, to a more
pragmatic level of actual, textual performances. To regard cyberspace as
"text" is not very far-fetched, since it literally is a textual
construction. It might even be very useful to put forth the textual
dimension of its constructedness and tentativeness. The rest of this paper
will therefore be concentrated to different textual practices in the Net,
how they are created, and how they can be understood.



NARRATIVES


       Narratives do not just occupy our time as we read, write and imagine
       them, they determine the passage of time... and let us know that in
       fact time was not empty, it was abundant with activities and
       experiences we assigned to it. Such assignation is a profoundly
       political act, for it not only establishes what happened (according
       to the writer/thinker) but fixes an identity in time for those who
       are part of the narrative.[20]


In his article "Making Sense of Software: Computer Games and Interactive
Textuality", Ted Friedman shows how "interactive software" (computer games,
hypertext etc.) disrupt the very categories of author, reader and text. The
question is, how can we conceptualize textual interactions where "every
response provokes instantaneous changes in the text itself, leading to a
new response and so on?"[21] Even though we can capture on-line discourses
by saving the texts of interest in neat text files for our analysis, "how
do we ascertain the interpretive moment in electronic discourse,
particularly as it engages both reading and writing?"[22] Textual analysis
of on-line dialogues[23] are confronted with a similar set of problems as
that of conversational analysis, when spoken words that are recorded and
transcribed into written text. Voices on a tape will never sound the same
as they did in the moment when they first were captured. When they further
are "translated" into text, their specific tone, nuances, dialects, and
rhythm are very difficult, if not impossible, to transform textually. On-
line dialogues, from a methodological point of view, are very different
from face-to-face encounters in the way that they are automatically
transcribed in the same moment as they are created. Even though this
process is technically very simple, where a written text that gradually
grows out of the ongoing interaction is "frozen" and saved for a
forthcoming analysis, the loss of dynamics, life and richness is
nevertheless significant. Elizabeth Reid in her work on MUDs puts it in the
following way:


       Although sessions may be recorded ... MUD interaction is not enacted
       to be read but to be experienced. As would spoken interaction,
       virtual interaction loses meaning when transposed to a computer file
       and reread. The pauses, breaks, disjunctions, speed and timing of
       virtual conversations are lost in such transposition, and such
       factors are a crucial signifier of meaning and context.[24]


The point that on-line interactions are there to be experienced, and not
read or reread, is important. As with spoken dialogues, on-line
conversations exist in the moment where they develops, and then they
dissolve. They do not take place with the primary purpose of being
recorded, but to be performed and interpreted in the here and now. This
might seem like a superfluous statement, but the fact that on-line
dialogues look exactly like texts, even in the very act of "speaking" can
lead to the conclusion that they are very similar to "traditional" texts
and therefore can be analyzed the same way. To believe this would be to
seriously disregard the unique dynamics that constitute dialogues on-line.

As a way to pay attention to this special dynamic, on-line texts are often
referred to as being created somewhere in the borderland between orality
and literacy. The problem with this definition is that it is far too
general, and therefor fail to specify the contrasts between different texts
in the Net. Nina Wakeford suggests a more nuanced way of categorizing on-
line textual activities, by using the "socio-technical spaces" they
inhabit. She differentiates between "information spaces" (World Wide Web,
Gopher), "communication spaces" (Usenet newsgroups, Listserv discussion
lists) and "interaction spaces" (MUD, Internet Relay Chat).[25] Even though
these terms in themselves might be confusing (what is meant, for example,
by the distinction between communication and interaction?), they clearly
show three central textual levels that operate on-line.



Hyperlinked


Texts in information spaces come closest to the traditional notion of what
a "text" is, due to their relative stability. The dominating textform in
these spaces is hypertext, which might be the group of computer text that
has been explored the most by cultural theorists.[26] Hypertext in these
writings is assumed to have the potential to construct non-linear textual
modes through "webs of footnotes without central points, organizing
principles, hierarchies."[27] Hypertext is a construction of a set of
different documents (text, images, video clips etc.) connected to each
other with hyperlinks. Stories written in hypertext appear on the Web as
scrolling pages, but are maybe best thought of in George Landows term
"lexias"[28] or reading units. Where pages of paper in a book are bound
together in a terminate sequence, pages on a screen become lexias by the
possibility to both connect them to each other and follow them in a myriad
of ways. Stories written in hypertext have often more than one point of
entry, a lot of internal connections, and no clear ending. These stories
further unfold in many different ways while the reader navigates between
lexias in a movement through the spaces these units inhabit.

Hypertextual structure, in contrast to more traditional text forms, is
according to several theorists, through its allusiveness and
indeterminableness thought of as more capable of liberating the reader's
interpretation from the original intentions of the author. The hypertext
fiction writer and theorist Stuart Moulthrop puts it this way:


       Seen from the viewpoint of textual theory, hypertext systems appear
       as the practical implementation of a conceptual movement that ...
       rejects authoritarian, "logocentric" (i.e., truth-affirming)
       hierarchies of language, whose modes of operation are linear and
       deductive, and seeks instead systems of discourse that admit
       plurality of meanings where the operative modes are hypothesis and
       interpretive play.[29]


There are several problems with this argument. First, it is very difficult
to imagine a hypertext as something else than linear. Even though the
reader decides which hyperlink to follow, how to navigate the system, s/he
is still limited by a finite number of links created by the hypertext
author. The fact that it is possible to jump back and forth between
different lexias in a hypertextual structure does not make the act of
reading less linear than reading the pages in a book in any order.

Secondly, as Janet Murray points out in her Hamlet on the Holodeck,
hypertext is nothing new. Literary work are hypertextual in their
allusions, through their intertextual references to one another. Murray
exemplifies with a work like James Joyce's Ulysses, which is nearly
impossible to understand without directives to other works. She continues;
"although hypertext is not new as a way of thinking and organizing
experiences, it is only with the emergence of the computer that hypertext
writing has been attempted on a large scale"[30] This statement takes away
the originality attached to the reading and writing of hypertext by
theorists like Moulthrop, without underestimating the significance of the
computer for making this process widespread and easily accessible.

Thirdly, and maybe most importantly, it is far from clear how a structure
that consists of pre- marked keywords and routes in itself can liberate the
reader from its creator. A question about hypertext that according to Paul
Gilster people fail to ask is: "Who creates the hyperlinks?"[31] His point
is that since the links are already there, the hypertext is given a clear
politics and certain readings are determined. Rather than experience a
release from the author, the reader might instead feel a great boundedness
to perspectives put forth by the links, without the possibility of
exploring what is not hyperlinked. To state that more traditional forms of
text consist of 'authoritarian, "logocentric" ... hierarchies of language,
whose modes of operation are linear and deductive', and that hypertext in
itself disrupts this authority and liberates the reader, is further to
seriously undervalue the creativity of any reader. The liberating potential
hypertext theorists today ascribe to hypertext structures, can be seen as a
later version of what many theorists in literature already have been doing
for a couple of decades in relation to any text. When Roland Barthes 1977
in his "Image-Music-Text" proclaimed the death of the author, the reader
was empowered over the writer. Barthes showed how the act of writing is
itself an act of reading, how positions of creation and interpretation are
constantly shifting. He describes a text as:


       not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the
       message of the Author-god) but a multi-dimensional space in which a
       variety of writing, none of them original, blend and clash. The text
       is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centers of
       culture.[32]


From this point of view, there is no finished work, but rather parts that
might be explored without constituting a determined wholeness. This opens
up multiple readings and possibilities, for textual journeys in a landscape
which will never look the same twice. This perspective comes very close to
the recently formed rhetoric of hypertext, but with the significant
difference that hypertext theory sets traditional texts back in a position
where the author prevails while multilinearity and "interpretive play" is
reserved for hypertextual structures only.

An alternative way of laying out the guide-lines for a theory of texts,
hypertext included, is to emphasize how possibilities for multiple readings
and different interpretations are present in any text, no matter if it is
moving over a computer screen or frozen on pages of paper. The advantage of
studying hypertext might be that these possibilities, through the textual
structure of links and multiple entries, become particularly visible. The
way lexias are connected to one another, and the many journeys that might
be taken through or around them, might be seen as a manifestation on a very
concrete level of the potential for a never ending variety of readings.



Introducing the textual body


       although e-mail derives from both writing and speech, it does not
       homogenize traits from each into a synthetic mixture or blend.
       Rather, like a child, it has some traits from one parent and some
       from the other, and the combination has a life on its own.[33]


I would like to return to the above distinction between different textual
levels that exist on-line, to discuss what was called communication spaces
(Usenet newsgroups, Listserv discussion lists etc.). If text in information
spaces, through its relative stability, come closest to the traditional
notion of what a "text" is, texts in communication spaces contain more
clearly elements of spoken words. Even though discussions in newsgroups and
on discussion lists consist of asynchronous communication (i. e. there is a
delay between a posted message and its response), these texts leave behind
many of the conventions that previously constituted written text.

E-mail conversation is often thought of as more spontaneous and less formal
than, for example, a written letter, but contains, at the same time, more
space for reflection and correction than a spoken dialogue. But more than
being just a fusion of written and spoken words, e-mail exchanges have
created new and different textual expressions. Judith Yaross Lee argues
that; "rather than represent a middle ground moderating the characteristics
of oral and written language, e-mail constitutes a junction in which
orality and literacy, in their extreme or purest form, meet."[34] Even
though it is unclear exactly what the "extreme or purest form" of writing
and speech is, Yaross Lee shows how e-mail writers use the technology of
the keyboard, traditionally related to printing techniques, to create a
mode of "talk".

While borrowing conventions from preelectronic writing and printing, e-mail
diverges at the same time clearly from these forms by incorporating oral
elements from face-to-face interaction and telephone conversations. The
impact orality has on e-mail is visible in the immediate and informal use
of language, but also by the way letters and symbols are used in new and
creative ways to indicate rhythm, tone of voice, emotions and other
nonverbal expressions. For example, upper case letters are used to mark a
loud, screaming voice, and asterisks bracketing a single adjective or
adverb indicate a verbal accentuation of the word. Emoticons, such as the
smiley face :-), have been introduced in e-mail conversations as a way to
transform feelings and attitudes into text. These and other typographical
innovations together might be seen as forming a physical presence of the
writer in the text, a notion of an "embodied" self behind the text that
comes through.

As discussed earlier, cyberspace is often described in terms of
disembodiment. Even though our bodies are intimately related to who we are,
how we experience our identities, the dream of transcending this body and
achieve immortality persists and is now being remapped onto virtual worlds.
N. Katherine Hayles, in her article "Embodied Virtuality: Or How to Put
Bodies Back into the Picture", argues that the discourses of disembodiment
in virtual space overshadow the importance of the body in the very
construction of cyberspace:


       If it is obvious that we can see, hear, feel and interact with
       virtual worlds only because we are embodied, why is there so much
       noise about the perception of cyberspace as a disembodied medium? ...
       To create the illusion of disembodiment, it is necessary to draw a
       sharp boundary between the body and the image that appears on screen,
       ignoring the technical and sensory interfaces connecting one with
       another. Then the screen image ... is reified, treated as
       constituting a world opening up behind the screen, an alternative
       universe that our subjectivities can inhabit. The final step is to
       erase awareness of the very perceptual process that brought this
       "world" into being.[35]


The paradox that creates the illusion of inhabiting a world far beyond a
material body is evident. First when the body is completely separated from
its representation on the screen and seen as pure "information", its
physical erasure becomes possible. Hayles attempt to reintroduce the body
in this picture disrupts the simple dualisms (mind/body, computer/organism,
male/female) that allow its erasure, without underestimating the power of
these dualisms in the creation of cultural representations. This ambition
also reveal the implications that the fantasy of disembodiment has for
gender politics. Where cyberspace offers a possibility to reconstruct our
appearance, or leave our physical gendered and race-marked bodies behind
us, women are traditionally obliged to resort to their groundings in
personal physical experience. This in turns strengthens the notion of a
male subjectivity closely connected to the rational mind, freed from
desires and limitations.

Only already privileged and powerful bodies, under the disguise of
invisibility, seem to be able to move around in cyberspace freely and
unchallenged. Several studies on computer-mediated communication indicate
that the female body in on-line cultures is far more problematic than its
male counterpart. Amy Bruckman, for example, shows in her work on MUDs that
it is much more complicated to create and perform a female character in
these spaces than a male character, since female characters constantly are
asked to prove that they are "real" women. On the other hand, it is
important to keep in mind that not all women share this experience of
exposedness connected to their virtual female bodies. As Nina Wakeford put
forth in her analysis of web pages created of and for women, "(they)
actively confront the "harassed female" stereotype by creating networks of
explicitly women-centered or feminist projects as alternative spaces in
computing culture."[36]

Furthermore, Wakeford shows in her investigation of bodies in cyberspace
how "textual bodywork" is performed on "Sappho", a discussion list with a
majority of lesbian-identified subscribers. In contrast to a view of
cyberspace as disembodied, the participants on Sappho inscribe their
physical bodies and cultural identities in several ways in their postings.
One way to perform a lesbian body on the list is through the use of
feminist and/or lesbian signatures in the end of the message. The signature
might include personal information, such as name, address, and a quotation
of a central character in lesbian culture. Another way of coding the
lesbian body is through the Muff Diva Index (MDI), which often is included
in the signature. The MDI is constituted by a number of letters and symbols
indicating everything from position along the dimension of Femme-Butch,
hair length and muscle tone, to trendieness and taste for clothing and
music. Through the coding, decoding and interpretation of the MDI, "bodies
on Sappho actively subvert the norm of dominant heterosexuality in computer-
mediated communication by the use of references to lesbian cultural
practices, while retaining an aura of exclusion by encrypting these
practices."[37]  Textual activities on Sappho thus not only introduce the
physical bodies of its female users, but also create a space of resistance
at the margins of cyberspace.

According to Kira Hall, the creation of women-only spaces on-line is a
response to an evolving "cybermasculinity".[38] Several linguistic studies
of computer-mediated communication have showed that women and men have
different strategies in their on-line communication, and that this
communication is both male-dominated and male-oriented. [39] Male
participants, even in cyberspaces especially created for discussions of
feminism and women's issues, have a tendency to dominate the discussion in
various ways. As in many "off-line" conversations, this is accomplished by
"ignoring the topics which women introduce, producing conversational floors
based on hierarchy instead of collaboration, dismissing women's responses
as irrelevant, and contributing a much higher percentage of the total
number of postings and text produced."[40]

Add to this an increasing amount of aggressive sexual harassment reported
from private e-mail, discussion lists and MUDs.[41] Even though physical
danger is removed from encounters on-line, insults and harassment are here
translated into purely textual actions. "For a woman, it's like walking
down a city street in a short skirt."[42] This does not mean that it is
impossible to find cyberspaces where women can find each other and set the
limits for the discussion, as here exemplified by Sappho, or that all women
experience their on-line sessions like this. What it does suggest though is
that the Net is a space profoundly branded by gender. The construction of
women-only spaces can therefore be a way for female participants to
collaboratively construct an oppositional gender somewhere in the wires.

Spaces in the Net where people in one way or another are (re)presenting
themselves, are strategic areas for investigations of how bodies and
identities are transformed into "texts" while mediated by computers. A
mailinglist like Sappho can be such a space, but more complex textual
environments like MUDs are probably even more so because of the nuanced
ways "characters" can be put together and performed. The final section of
this paper will be devoted to an examination of this specific corner of
cyberculture, of MUD environments and the textual practices that create and
recreate MUD cultures.



VIRTUAL WORLDS


       It is when the motivating expectation of sociability in cyberspace
       confronts the essential ambiguity and facelessness of the Internet
       medium that the resulting interactions begin to take on a distinctive
       shape, bringing the cultural contours of this space into view. As
       participants adjust to the prevailing conditions of anonymity and to
       the potentially disconcerting experience of being reduced to a
       detached voice floating in an amorphous electronic void, they become
       adept as well at reconstituting the faceless words around them into
       bodies, histories, lives: an imaginative engagement by which they
       become fully vested co-producers of the virtual worlds they inhabit,
       and the boundaries distinguishing "real" from "virtual" experience
       begin to fade.[43]


Multi User Dungeon, or MUD, are sometimes defined as text-based virtual
reality.[44] The term "virtual reality" is often thought of as representing
a highly complex computerized environment that users, dressed in body
suits, helmets and gloves, can explore and interact. MUDs are something
completely different. Instead of providing a sensory experience in
solitude, they offer social experiences based on shared, imagined worlds in
text. Virtual reality in these terms is not so much a technological
construction, (since the technology involved is very simple), as it is a
cultural construction that takes shape among those who inhabit these
worlds.

At first, MUD was a fusion of traditional role-playing and text-adventure
computer games, where a single player by typing short commands could move a
character through various settings and solve puzzles. This blend produced a
global form of interactive, computer based role-playing games, in which
Internet users could create characters, get together and play. Some MUDs
use graphics to envisualize places, characters and movements, but most of
them are constructed entirely by plain (written) text. MUDs originally
stood for Multi User Dungeons, where the term "dungeon" was directly
transferred from the genre of face-to-face role-playing games known as
Dungeons & Dragons to its high-tech version on-line. As the MUD culture
spread, and more and more people without previous experience of role-
playing began to participate, the terms Multi User Domain or Multi User
Dimension were put to use. This attempt to change the name might well have
been an effort to gain respectability and to take away some of the gamelike
and purely playful qualities.

Today, many MUDs are still closely related to the original system, and
people can log on to the computer on which the MUD program is running to
kill monsters, solve puzzles, find treasures, interact with each other and
with objects created within the program. The purpose is to gain as many
experience points as possible, which are transformed into power. When a
player has obtained a certain amount of experience points, s/he can leave
the level of the mortals, and instead join an exclusive, immortal crowd
with almost unlimited power over the virtual world. Other MUDs, sometimes
called social MUDs, provide spaces for a kind of role-playing more related
to improvisational theater than to a game with well defined rules and
hierarchies. These MUDs are in some cases inspired by fantasy and science
fiction works such as Star Trek, Tolkien's The Lord of the Ring-trilogy,
and the work of Terry Pratchett, to mention a few. They can also be more
loosely structured around different imaginary themes, which in contrast to
organized game settings give a feeling of relatively open social space.
These spaces constitute virtual meeting places without any other purpose
than hanging out and socializing.



Architecture


       Programming, rather than being part of the flow of what is being
       communicated, allows players to alter the environment in which the
       communication is taking place. As much as it may blend into the
       linguistic terrain, programming must always be recognized as the
       privileged language game of cyberspace. As such, it is capable of
       purely constructing reality rather than in any sense reflecting it.
       It is the difference between creation and utilization.[45]


Building in MUDs, as Sherry Turkle puts it, is "something of a hybrid
between computer programming and writing fiction."[46] A MUD is constructed
by hundreds of rooms connected to each other, each carrying its own
description. These texts can always be subjects to change, but often
persist the way they originally were written over long periods of time.
Compared to other texts in a MUD, they are relatively stable. This is what
appears on the screen if someone connects to ForestMOO:


       Lodge

       The big lodge sits in the middle of a forest clearing. Well worn
       paths leading in all directions suggest that it is the social hub of
       the area. Large over-stuffed couches rest on the green carpet that
       covers the floor. The great pine paneled walls smell wonderful
       combined with the wood-smoke escaping from the fireplace, which is
       always kept burning. The atmosphere is relaxed and lazy. You see two
       old men contemplating a scrabble board in the next room. There is a
       circle here, engraved in the floor. A huge Red-Gold Dragon is sitting
       here in the middle of the lodge, letting smoke escape it's nose.
       Squirrel sits on the ground observing all that happens in the Lodge.

       You see a sign [look at sign], a rock, Encryption Enabled PC for
       terminally paranoid players with something to hide, and Scott here.
       You may go: north to Dirt Road, museum to Museum, up to Game Room,
       south to The Beaten Path.


But the description of a room is only one part of its creation. For the
room to be related to other rooms in the MUD (in this case to "Dirt Road",
"Museum", "Game Room" or "The Beaten Path"), and for objects in the room to
"perform" something when someone is "using" them, some formal coding is
required. Even though MUD spaces are collaborataly created and constantly
under construction, what remains for those who do not master the art of
coding is thus to utilize what others have already built. In other words,
even though the crowd who inhabit virtual worlds might be increasingly
diverse, the production of MUDs is still dominated by a technological
elite.

When it comes to the division of gender in MUDs, there are still far fever
women than men participating in these environments (even though the
population varies between MUDs). Lori Kendall in her work on MUDs states
that she would never have stayed on the MUD she is researching, or any
other MUD, if she had not had a research agenda that motivated her to find
out what was happening on-line. She describes the rudeness she has
experienced, the continual allusions to and jokes about penises and blow-
jobs, and continues; "Most women don't have my research agenda, and most
are unlikely to find much of interest to them on MUDs, unless they are
science fiction fans ... Even these women are likely to find most MUDs
unwelcoming."[47]

Women, as well as men, might nevertheless find the collaboratively created
and imagined spaces in MUDs, at the point where "fantasy" bleeds into "real
life", both inspiring and amusing. Mizuko Ito, influenced by Janice Radway
and her Reading the Romance[48], analyzes MUD practices precisely in the
tension between fantasy worlds of texts and "real" social situations and
contexts in which these texts are grounded and interpreted. In a reading
across the gap between the text and the social, she attempts to incorporate
both textual and material realities into her analysis. In contrast to
Radway, she also wants to show how the textual worlds in themselves can be
seen as constituting "real" social relations, and that involvement in
fantasy can be "a social event to be analyzed in terms not ultimately
reducible to a social reality outside the text."[49] As with reading of
novels, MUDs involve physically separated bodies that interact with
immersive worlds of texts, but:


       MUDs differ from novels in that they foreground interactivity and
       travel to alternative domains through an explicitly networked
       sociality. So instead of focusing on how textual artifacts
       constructed on the Net circulate through "real" social contexts at
       large, I would like to examine the inter- and intra-textuality of the
       Net as itself a social and political context where history, politics,
       and discourse are being constituted. By insisting on the reality of
       the virtual I do not intend to reduce social practice to language
       games, but rather to foreground the inseparability of semiotic and
       material technologies.[50]


Ito's starting point of analysis does not only put forward the way fantasy
blends into "real" life where a reader bring text and society together
through the act of reading, but that the distinction between "real" and
"virtual" has ceased to exist. Imagination is from her perspective a social
practice in itself, rather than "merely a commentary on, or a reflection
of, "real" social relations whose ultimate ground is a singular
subjectivity localized by the biological body."[51] Drawing from examples
of MUD marriage, romance and sex, as well as cases of violence in the MUD
and virtual death, she illustrates how virtual worlds can be realities that
matter.

Without neglecting the material technologies of computers and computer
networks, a similar analysis of the way bodies and identities are created
and rendered meaningful in MUDs would be very useful. These virtual bodies
arise exactly at the point where flesh, by the means of technology and
imagination, is transformed into text. They are neither disengaged from,
nor reducible to, an identity grounded in a concrete, locally situated,
material body, but rather (re)embodied through prosthetic computer
technologies. Their mere existence further shows the need for a
representation of physical presence in on-line encounters. The question
that remains to be asked is; what kind of self(re)presentations can be
found in the Net, and how can they be interpreted? The following discussion
will still be restricted to MUD cultures, which of course not is
representative for on-line selfpresentations in general. Nevertheless, they
might serve as an illustrative example of how these configurations of body
and self take shape in a limited corner of cyberspace.



Cyber identities


       The acts of interpretation that color and enliven the virtual
       universe are neither fortuitous nor random. If the allure of the
       Internet is the possibility of interaction with other people, this
       desire for human contact, in turn, insists on the appearance of
       humanity at the other end of the wire. ... The defining interaction
       of Internet culture lies not in the interface between user and the
       computer, but rather in that between the user and the collective
       imagination of the vast virtual audience to whom one submits an
       endless succession of enticing, exasperating, evocative figments of
       one's being.[52]


To become an inhabitant in a MUD, a "character" must be created. A
character consists of a name, a gender, and a textual description of any
length (available to other participants through the "look" command).
Elizabeth Reid put forth that the only identity trait that is always "hard
coded" into MUD programs, is gender. Some MUDs in adventure game style do
ask players to choose a racial belonging, "but the choices are more likely
to be between Elvish, Dwarvish, and Klingon than between Caucasian, Black
and Asian"[53]. Choosing a gender is more complicated than it first might
appear. In LambdaMOO, for example, the following choices are available:
male, female, neuter, either, Spivak, splat, plural, egotistical, royal and
2nd. The "gender flag" controls which pronouns will be used by the MUD
program in referring to the player. "Neuter" uses the pronoun it, "either"
uses the s/he and her/him practice, "Spivak" uses a set of gender neutral
pronouns such as e and em, "splat", in the same way, uses *e and h*,
"plural" uses they and them, "egotistical" uses I and me, "royal" uses we
and us, and "2nd" uses you.

Even though it is technically easy to create a character with a gender
different from one's own, Reid points out that the issue of cross-gendered
or genderless participation is very controversial. She holds that a
successful enactment of, for example, a female character by a male
participant seriously can stir people's emotions. This feeling of unease in
relation to the anonymity of the medium, together with the fact that MUDs
still are male dominated territories, partly explains why female characters
often are asked to prove that they are "real" women. Male characters, on
the other hand, are rarely questioned about the authenticity of their
maleness. Kendall adds that the question "are you male or female?" is
common enough to circulate as a joke among experienced MUD
participants.[54]

Whether this insecurity in the interaction with others, whose gender is
unclear, is true for MUD cultures of today is debatable. It might be that
these feelings rather belonged to an earlier on-line culture of
unfamiliarity with a mode of (sometimes very intimate) communication, where
you never can be sure of who you are meeting. According to Stone,
cyberspace has since then grown into a place where unexpected compositions
of the crossdressed or transgender body are the norm. She argues that: "The
nets are spaces of transformation, identity factories in which bodies are
meaning machines, and transgender-identity as performance, as play, as
wrench into the smooth gears of social apparatus of vision-is the ground
state".[55] The "unnatural", problematic position of the "real"
transgendered body is in Stone's view turned into a "natural" starting
point on-line through the ever present possibility of performance and play
with gender and identity.

Considering the many stereotypically gendered characters that at this
moment are wandering the worlds of MUDs, one might suspect that the
transgender body even on-line is far from representing the "ground state".
On the other hand, an increasing amount of odd beings are moving around in
the same spaces, disrupting the familiar and rendering every traditional
notion of gender unstable. Kendall believes that the specific atmosphere in
MUDs crucially (?) limits the type of identities that can be created in
these spaces. Where subcultural norms together with technical limitations
constitute the basic conditions, gender performances on MUDs are at risk of
being forced into stereotypical charicatures:


       Although individuals can choose their gender representation, that
       does not seem to be creating a context in which gender is more fluid.
       Rather, gender identities themselves become even more rigidly
       understood. The ability to change one's gender identity online does
       not necessarily result in an understanding that gender identity is
       always a mask, always something merely performed. ...Further, what
       I've found is that the standard expectations of masculinity and
       femininity are still being attached to these identities.[56]


Because we expect everyone to be either male or female in "real" life,
Kendall claims that choosing an unusual gender will not be effective. If
someone encounters a character who has set the gender to "Spivak" and uses
the pronouns e, em, eir, eirs, and eirself, this person is not likely to
believe that this represents the "true" gender, which turns the
presentation into an empty mask.

Shannon McRae gives in her article "Coming apart at the Seams: Sex, Text
and the Virtual Body" a very different picture. She argues that a choice of
one of the alternative gender that some MUDs offer can be a way to avoid
traditional gender assumptions. In her investigation of virtual bodies and
netsex, she has found that, for instance, the spivak gender "has encouraged
 some people to invent entirely new bodies and eroticize them in ways that
render categories of female or male meaningless... a spivak can have any
morphological form and genital structure e devises for emself."[57] The
creation of alternative genders illustrates how netsex, rather than being
merely a sexual act, is to a great extent an act of creative reading and
writing. Rather than being a crucial part of human identity, gender is
altered into a mere abstraction, one of several features of the bodies that
are written. McRae also believes that pleasure can operate as a form of
resistance against technologies that would isolate us from each other, that
the use of machines has become a way to experience profound sensuality with
others: "Eroticizing our technology might not mean giving up the ghost, but
rather giving in to the pleasures of corporeality that render meaningless
the arbitrary divisions of animal, spirit and machine."[58]

The only way to get a deeper understanding of the way bodies and identities
are being created and given meaning on their way through the Net, is
continuous empirical investigations of different cyberspaces. When virtual
bodies and their participation in on-line worlds are in focus, the question
of the "real" and the "virtual" in computer technologies, is crucial. In
the discourse of virtual worlds as scenes for disembodied performances,
where the machine overshadows bodily processes toward a perfect fantasy of
abstractions, something very important is excluded. Left out are
heterogenities, variations, different and maybe marginalized versions. What
can never be included in the discourse of a global web of information,
where bodies are made both invisible and equal, is the particular, local
and concrete, what Mizuko Ito calls "the materiality of
information"[59].The problem is that this materiality is utterly absent in
the interface of on-line worlds, efficiently erased from its surface. But;
"beyond these absences lie the many agents and agencies implicated in the
production and maintenance of computers and computer networks-multinational
corporations, microelectronics factory workers, and military funding
agencies, to name a few."[60]

What enables us to create beings and lives on-line, with a feeling of a
prosthetic extension that dissolves the real/virtual distinction, is
probably exactly the erasure of these materialities. They nevertheless form
the political conditions for our on-line existence, and therefore must be
taken into account in cultural studies of technology. This is not an easy
mission, since the virtual ethnographer in on-line "field work" is part of
the same systems of erasure as the people s/he studies. This difficulty,
however, does not exclude an awareness of the existence of these agencies
and power relations that structures the Net.

Neither does this material invisibility withhold on-line participants from
constant efforts to reinscribe a sense of physicality in their
presentations. This process of bodily transformation into text on the
screen is even for the researcher the first, necessary move in a work on
MUD worlds. But in contrast to many other selfpresentations in these
spaces, this description can not, for ethical reasons, deviate too much
from the "truth". The final questions must be: How on earth can I even
start to write those strings of text that are supposed to mediate something
of what is "me", physically and mentally? Exactly what would be an
efficient textual strategy in encounters with forthcoming informants? Who
am I anyway?


       Name:   Jenny

       Gender: Female

       

       You see a rather Scandinavian looking young woman. She is wearing
       laced boots, a pair of black Levis and a dark blue turtle neck
       sweater. She has been cruising the Net for a while, and has over time
       developed a strong interest for virtual bodies, raising from the
       point where flesh meets text in an ongoing, electronic dance... While
       looking at her, she looks back at you, curiously, piercing, in a way
       that makes her look like a very sensitive but at the same time strong
       and intelligent human being.

       

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-----------------------
[1] For a discussion of the term, see Featherstone & Burrows (eds) 1995, or
Strate, Jacobson & Gibson(eds) 1996.

[2] Stone, 1995, p 34.

[3] Fernback, 1997, p 37.

[4] See Kendall, 1996.

[5] Haraway, 1997, p 23.

[6] Ibid. p 36.

[7] Arnold, 1996, http://www.swin.edu.au/ssb/media/staff/ja/cyberfem.htm.
Under "*Cybercolonialisn and marginalisation: Envisualising cyberspace".

[8]See Plant, 1997.

[9] See Fuller & Jenkins, 1995, Arnold, 1996, and Gunkel & Gunkel, 1997.

[10] Gunkel & Gunkel, 1997, p 123.

[11] Benedikt, 1993, p 23.

[12] Fuller & Jenkins, 1995, p 66.

[13] Gunkel & Gunkel, 1997, p 126.

[14] Bukatman, 1993, p 188.

[15]  See, for example, Lupton, 1995, Land, 1995 and Sobchack, 1995.

[16] Bukatman, 1993, p 208.

[17] Springer, 1996, p50.

[18] Stone, 1992, p 113.

[19]Balsamo, 1996, s 14-15.

[20] Jones, 1997, p 15.

[21] Friedman, 1995, p 73.

[22] Jones, 1995, p 11.

[23]"On-line dialogues" here refer to synchronous conversations with
immediate responses and other qualities similar to face-to-face
interaction. These dialogues can, among several places, be found in chat
rooms and in MUDs.

[24]Reid, 199X, p 171.

[25] Wakeford, 1996, p 95.

[26]See for example Landow & Delany, 1993, and Landow, 1997.

[27] Plant, 1997, p 10.

[28]See Landow, 1997. The term lexias is here borrowed from Roland Barthes,
who as a part of his theory of texts invented it as a concept for "reading
unit".

[29]Moulthrop, 1988, p 1.

[30]Murray, 1997, p 56.

[31]Gilster, 1997, p 130.

[32]Barthes, 1977, p 142-143.

[33]Yaross Lee, 1996, p 294.

[34]Ibid. p 291.

[35]Hayles, 1996, p 1-2. ("Immersed in technology"...)

[36]Wakeford, 1997, p 53.

[37] Wakeford, 1996, p 102

[38]Hall, 1996, 147-170.

[39]See, for example, Herring, 1993, and Sutton, 1994.

[40]Hall, 1996, p 154.

[41]See Brail, 1996,  Kendall, 1996, Sutton, 1996.

[42]Sutton, 1996, p 171.

[43]Porter, 1997, p XII.

[44]See, for example, Turkle, 1995.

[45]Beaubien, 1996, p 186-187.

[46]Turkle, 1995, p 181.

[47]Kendall, 1996, p 208.

[48]See Radway, 1984.

[49]Ito, 1997, p 92.

[50]Ibid. p 93.

[51]Ibid.

[52]Porter, 1997, p XII-XIII.

[53]Reid, 199X, p 179.

[54]Kendall, 1996.

[55]Stone, 1995, p 180-181.

[56]Kendall, 1996, p 221-222.

[57]McRae, 1996, p 257.

[58]Ibid. p 262.

[59]Ito, 1997, p 101.

[60]Ibid.