The Dangers of Cyberspace
Ask a 7-year-old what is a video game and he will look at you like you are an alien. Yeah, exactly. Even 7-year-old kids know what a video game is and how to play it. They are already familiar with the terms such as virtual reality, online gaming and video consoles. Welcome to our Era - a Digital Era.
When I was young we had different entertainments. “My crew” and I used to meet at the playground and play all kinds of games till it got dark. Then the era of GameBoy came. We all got our consoles and started playing 24/7. We exchanged the games and shared our progress. GameBoy was just the beginning.
With the invention of a Play Station and Xbox the entire field changed dramatically. Negroponte predicted that everything that is made with atoms, such as physical copies of films, music and games, would be replaced with the digital versions of atoms made of bits. There is no need to see each other and lend the copy of your game to your friend anymore. Digital Era made it possible to communicate through the web and experience the most fascinating feelings by playing online.
Digital Era also opened so many doors for each of us. But it also took a lot of personal traits from us. Humanity. Dignity. Consciousness.
Cyberspace made it possible for others not only to enjoy their gaming experience, but also humiliating other people and forcing them to commit a suicide.
But what is a cyberspace? Okay, let’s look it up in the dictionary. According to Dictionary.com, “cyberspace is the realm of electronic communication and also a virtual reality”. This term was coined in the 90s when the computer technologies were growing drastically.
This term is nothing new for us nowadays. We all participate in a virtual reality on a daily basis and some people even live their lives online. In her article “Is This Man Cheating on His Wife?” Alexandra Alter explores the issues of engaging too much in a virtual reality and what impacts it has on a real life. According to her, “that’s always been a concern with videogames, but a field of study suggests that the boundary between virtual worlds and reality may be more porous than experts previously imagined.” There is a special term for this in Japan; those people are called “Hikikomori” which means that they are having a social withdrawal and are being extremely introverted (which is basically a NEET). These people tend to mess a virtual reality with their real lives and believe that their virtual lives are real and are exactly what they need.
Even though that happens pretty often in our society, a lot of people still think that virtual reality is safe and good. But is it so? Do we ever think what kinds of effects does it have on our behavior and actions?
It’s all fun untill you run into situations like bullying or even cyberspace raping. Yes, there is such thing as a cyberspace rape. And it definitely does not have a positive impact on those who ever experienced it. One of the most famous cases of cyber raping happened back in the 90s and was told by Julian Dibbell in his work “A Rape in Cyberspace”. He described an event that took place in one of the MOO’s called Lambada MOO. One of the users used a subprogram that could apply all kinds of sexual stuff to other users and make them perform sexual actions towards each other. That subprogram ran for a couple of hours and made the users feel terrified of what was going on. Some of the effects of that action moved into a real llife and made the users cry or feel depressed. But whenever it came to taking an action towards the hooligan in a real life, no one wanted to do anything about it.
That is when the question arises, where is the fringe between the virtual reality and our everyday reality? Is virtual reality a great thing? Is it just an entertainment or is it much more and does it have deeper effects on us?
The cyberspace provides us with all those chat rooms that look so cool and fun. Not when it comes to cyberbullying. Before the Internet, kids used to be abused at schools or playgrounds verbally or physically and you could always know who did it. But nowadays you can do the same things and stay anonymous. You can bully other people, make them feel miserable and pathetic, and most of the times you don’t have to pay for it. That gives a lot of opportunities to psychopaths and sick people who enjoy when other people suffer.
This issue became more and more growing nowadays with the development of the virtual reality and all the technologies that make it possible. So Hideo Nakata, the director of Ring and Dark Water, made a movie called Chatroom in 2010 to bring people attention to this problem. The movie is about teenagers, who meet in the chatroom and one of them tried to commit a suicide before, but now he figured out how much power he has with the help of virtual reality. So he started bullying other kids, trying to find the weak one and make him commit a suicide. The movie ends up (Spoiler Alert!) with the death of that bully.
This movie brought up important questions about cyberbullying, virtual realities and how to protect yourself from their impact. In his interview, Hideo Nakata admits that “it sounds just sick, but it is our reality and we cannot live without Internet technology at all. Film industry cannot produce films without advanced computer technology and Internet. Just imagine how many CGI artists are linked by Internet just to create a one second shot.”
Virtual reality and cyberspace are great places to hide away and entertain yourself. With the booming technologies and shifting from physical copies to digital ones, anything is possible. You can live a whole different life and pretend to be someone else, but you always have to be aware of the consequences of your actions and dangers that the Digital World brings to your life.
