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 activitiesÑcommercial interaction, academic research,
netsurfing, real time interaction and chatting with interlocutors who are
similarly "connected"Ñbut 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 discourseÑplayers 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 playerÑthough
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 chosenÑthe 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 chosenÑthough 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
funnyÑdescriptions 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 descriptionÑit 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 identityÑwhat 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 evokedÑa 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 choiceÑin the absence of
racial description, all players are assumed to be white. This is partly
due to the demographics of Internet usersÑmost 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 heÑa blond and blue-eyed EnglishmanÑmoved 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 oneÑleast of all actual whites and non-whites in the coloniesÑever 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 exchangeÑand 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 travelÑlogging
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 activeÑit 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 frontsÑboth 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 theatricalityÑthe ability to pass as humanÑdepict
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 LambdaMOOÑrace 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 slackingÑhence, 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.