I’ve just finished reading My Tiny Life: A Rape in Cyberspace. It is long (it’s actually the first chapter of a print-book), well-written, and it is very interesting.
Julian recounts a case of “virtual rape” involving characters in an online community. It shows how much impact “online events” have on the real people behind the keyboards. It also shows an anarchic community struggling to get organized for dealing with the rapist.
In my online life, I have been faced by people who look upon online interaction as an “experiment” – who don’t care about their fellow chatters because they are “not real”. I think this text shows just how wrong these people are.
As an aside, I’m developing another pet peeve: haikus. Don’t get me wrong, I love japanese haikus. But this trend of sticking haikus everywhere on websites is so… “web”. I mean, short attention span and all that.
It’s a bit “easy”.