Matt Waddell
STS 129: Paper 2
Word Count: 3600
11/13/01
“At the close of the mechanical age, our consciousness is deeply changed by the way we're immersed in communication technologies every waking, and perhaps sleeping, moment. We are already ‘transhuman’. The boundaries between ‘us’ and our prostheses… have become vague, and they shift continually” (Stone, 1995).
A who’s who of “virtual reality” hardware includes head-mounted displays, BOOMs (Binocular Omni Orientation Monitors), Data gloves, Wands, Trampolines, even aerobic stair steppers. VR goggles reflect oversized motorcycle helmets; a motion sensor crowns the aluminum headdress, translating the agent’s movement relative to a stationary tracking device. The BOOM resembles its goggle cousin, however, its viewing box dangles from a two-part, rotating arm; to change the perspective on an image, the user manipulates a pair of handles that dominates the object’s metal chassis. Data gloves boast a delicate lining of fiber optic cables that interpret finger movement. Wands offer six degrees of freedom – forward/backward, up/down, and left/right – and purport versatility and relative simplicity. Trampolines translate to pseudo surfboards. Stair steppers help simulate battlefield terrains. These reality-inducing technics represent the outgrowth of early efforts by Douglas Engelbart and Ivan Sutherland in the 1960s and 70s to link people and computers, allegedly augmenting the capacities of the mind’s intellectual faculties. Put another, better way, these goggles and data and gloves (oh my!) lay bare the “gadget fetish” of early virtual reality academics and enthusiasts.
In the late 1960s Engelbart led one of the most important projects funded by ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency): a networked environment designed to support collaborative interaction between people and computers. It was dubbed the NLS (oNLine System). This historic prototype, developed at the Stanford Research Institute, influenced the development of the first personal computer and the graphical user interface at Xerox PARC. In 1965, Engelbart’s incidental protégé Ivan Sutherland wrote The Ultimate Display; his book made the first advance toward marrying the computer to the design, construction, navigation and habitation of virtual worlds. In the spirit of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Sutherland believed in the potential of computers to transform the abstract nature of mathematical constructions into livable, expressive worlds. By 1970 Sutherland had produced Sketchpad – a light-pen-driven interface used to “sketch” images on a computer screen – and a primitive, head-mounted display designed to immerse viewers in simulated 3D environments.
Starting in the mid-1980s, the development of reduced instruction set computing (RISC) catapulted the technological prowess of computer graphics and VR devices. Thanks to RISC processors, the performance of graphics hardware grew about 55 percent per year – resulting in a doubling of performance every 18 months (National Research Council, 1995). By 1990, the “convergence of high-end computer architectures, graphics-rendering hardware, and software… expand[ed] the opportunities for the use of VR technologies in a variety of commercial applications”, evidenced by the rich selection of “VR products now available across the aerospace, military, industrial, medical, education, and entertainment sectors” (Lenoir, 1995). Not surprisingly, until the mid-1990s, “the most salient feature in recognizing a ‘VR system’ [was] the presence or absence” of requisite hardware (Steuer, 1993). Stuff substantiated virtual reality. Immersing oneself in an alternate, albeit graphically generated “space” necessitated burdensome, hard-to-acquire collections of thingamajigs and whatchamacallits. But in Defining Virtual Reality, Jonathan Steuer introduces the idea of telepresence in an attempt to challenge the gadget-ridden-ness of Engelbart-Sutherland-inspired VR models (hereafter referred to as “old” VR).
Telepresence is “the experience of presence in an environment by means of a communication medium”. Hence, reading a letter from a friend, listening to live recordings of music, viewing television, even long-distance telephone calls allow human agents to “feel present” in a surrogate reality. Steuer continues: virtual reality (hereafter referred to as “new” VR) is “a real or simulated environment in which a perceiver experiences telepresence” (Steuer, 1993). Immediately, VR becomes an experience and not a machine; new VR shifts its locus from a particular hardware package to the perceptions of the individual. This is not to say that telepresence (and so, virtual reality) only exists minus technology; rather, the primary focus is the vividness and interactivity of communication experienced by the user. Take email, electronic bulletin boards (BBSs), and online services such as America Online, Prodigy, and CompuServe as examples.
Here, users “talk” with others viz. a physical keyboard and a series of onscreen windows. But it is important to note that the aforementioned, unexpected consequences of ARPAnet do not achieve virtual reality thanks to users’ input devices, or graphical user interfaces (GUIs).[1] Instead, AOL members’ being there is defined by “chatting” in a space perceived to be real, the use of peripheral technologies being purely incidental. In other words, the ability to evoke telepresence, and so create VR does not depend upon computer type, screen resolution, or even modem speed. Assuming this to be true, computer-mediated communication (CMC) exemplifies Steuer’s VR. In particular, “cybersex” – to be defined shortly – demonstrates the awesome power of new VR: human participants simulate sexual intercourse in Internet-provided locales viz. keystrokes, often with real-world results.
For hundreds of years, some of the first to experiment with new communication breakthroughs were those with smut on their minds; says Walter Kendrick, author of The Secret Museum, “if you look at the history of pornography and new technologies, the track record has been pretty good” (Kendrick, 1996). When Gutenberg first printed Bibles in the mid-15th Century, rival printers soon issued illustrated guides to lovemaking. (Pope Clement VII tried, unsuccessfully, to suppress the latter.) After Frenchman Joseph Nicephore Niepce invented the camera in 1826, sizable portions of the first photographs depicted erotic scenes; merchants sold these “French postcards” under the table at traveling circuses. Even Thomas Edison dabbled in skin with his movie “The Kiss”, released in 1896. In short, “Somewhere out there, some kid who is hungry enough and clever enough teach[es] himself the basics of the technology and then ask[s] the eternal and essential question: I wonder what sex would look like on this thing”? (Maxwell, 1996) Accordingly, cybersex promptly followed computer-mediated communication.
Cybersex comes in various forms: software, (old) Virtual Reality, electric pornography, email, and Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) constitute a handful of examples. However, the Center for Online Addiction in Branford, Pennsylvania reports that 75 percent of its online-addiction cases stem from “chat room”, or Instant Messenger (IM) virtual sex. (Behr, 2001) Therefore, this document defines cybersex as (1) computer-mediated telling of interactive sexual stories with the intent of arousal; and to a lesser extent (2), computer-mediated interactive masturbation. (Hamman, 1996) Common dimensions of IM sex originating in online gossip lounges include the following: (a) online communities, or friendship networks (consisting of two or more people) that extend across geographic and political borders; (b) personality fragmentation, or “multiplicity” experienced by individual participants; and (c), anonymity further substantiated by highly specialized, narrow-bandwidth language.
Equipped with an in-depth look at the most frequently volunteered reasons for cybersex – extended community, self-exploration, and anonymity – this document will demonstrate that information systems like the Internet suck up “the very identity of the human personality, absorbing the opacity of the body, grinding the meat into information, and deriding erotic life by reducing it to a transparent play of puppets” (Heim, 1993). Computer-mediated sexual encounters cause human agents to undergo a “cyborging” process; insofar as users cannot express themselves minus mechanistic prostheses, human life becomes an unfortunate subset of artificial life. America Online, apart from being the world’s largest ISP,[2] convinces sexually active subscribers that “You’ve Got Life!”
“Telecommunication offers an unrestricted freedom of expression and personal contact, with far less hierarchy and formality than are found in the primary social world; the computer network appears as a godsend in providing forums for people to gather… without the physical limitations of geography, time zones, or conspicuous social status” (Margulis, 1997).
At first glance online communities seem exemplars of egalitarian social organization: they are, for the most part, equally available to the masses; someone is always “there” to listen, advise, or just talk; and, there exists no interpersonal discrimination. A human’s gender, race, or creed does not preclude their participating in public or private online discussions. However, these admirable qualities of electric space are, at best, misleading and ephemeral. Keep in mind that (1) the availability of electric communities is determined by a requisite set of communication technologies; (2) the omnipresence of virtual interaction is a function of network down time and fellow users’ flippancy; and (3), the lack of online bigotry results from users participating in the aphysical “consensual hallucination”, or “nonspace” that William Gibson calls cyberspace (Gibson, 1995). This document now addresses each stipulation, and its effect on cybersex in turn.
People can connect to the Internet (and AOL) anywhere there is a computer and telephone line. There exist myriad personal computing devices and telephone jacks across the globe – 500 million PCs were in use worldwide by December 2000 (IBM) – but it is important to recall that in their absence, people don’t, indeed they cannot logon. Thus, while a majority of the industrialized world can visit the nearest library or computer café, thereby founding “global villages” and international discussion groups, online communities (currently) do require that would-be members sit in front of a computer in order to participate. The advent of wireless LANs may broaden the computer’s achievable range, but the extent to which service subscribers can access online communities will forever depend upon the physicality, and portability of the present communication technology.[3]
People who engage in cybersex cannot escape this unfortunate “net effect”: they can proposition whomever they like, man or woman, black or white, but they must do so from a desk chair, not too far from a power outlet. Here the machine, and not the human, determines how and where sexual intercourse takes place.[4] Cyber subordinates sex to the computer’s needs, thus commencing the cyborging process. (In response, IM-addicts may champion the infinite persistence of online relationships, but the seeming omnipresence of electric space succumbs to a similar line of reasoning.)
When computers crash, so do online communities (and their participants). If and when a network hub goes down, human-computer constituents of the Internet freak out: they repeatedly hit “refresh” on their browser applications, frantically disconnecting and reconnecting in hopes that the problem fixes itself. Here, feeling connected to others is reduced to the “on” or “off-ness” of a central machine, and so the notion of “technical difficulties” is incredibly disheartening, even frightening. Equally capricious is the fluctuating composition of cyberspace. Consider Sue Barnes’s cyber culture-related observations:
“The
rooms where I meet people and conduct interviews disappear without notice and
new rooms are created… someone I meet one day may not come back for several
days. When they do come back, I may not be aware of it unless I am specifically
looking for that person or they go to the chat room that I am in” (Barnes,
2000).
Again, the continuity of online communities is, by definition, extremely punctuated. For cybersexers, this means a couple of things: (1) the fidelity of (for instance) AOL’s web server governs the frequency of their sexual encounters; and (2), insofar as America Online’s supercomputers in Washington DC are up and running, intimacy continues through time only in the sense that someone – as opposed to a particular person – is usually there. Compounded with the aphysical character of cyberspace, virtual sex cannot represent anything other than fleeting, contrived pseudo-sex inextricably tied to the electric needs and binary nature of a third party machine.
Perhaps the most obvious distinction between traditional and virtual communities is that the latter do not occupy physical space. Instead, “members [of online groups] construct an illusionary social reality through written exchanges”, and most importantly, “this socially produced space does not require physical attendance” (Barnes, 2000).[5] It follows then, that in the absence of physical contact, the computer acts as a replacement body for individuals. Some people prefer their disembodied selves: in virtual space they’re not overweight, and they don’t suffer from acne precisely because the substitute, mechanistic self does not experience ailments associated with the human form. However this begs, at the very least, a pair of questions: (1) how do digital personalities relate to a person’s physical presence? And (2), can we be fully present living through a stand-in surrogate body? Moreover, because traditional sexual intercourse entails the exchange of bodily fluids, virtual sexers run a special risk of mistaking their cyber bodies for themselves, the machine twisting their tangible persons into the prostheses they are wearing – namely, the personal computer. “[Their] hearts beat in the machines” (Margulis, 1997). The cyborging process marches on.
I am He is She is You
“In a virtual world, you can have
the body and the personality you want. You can have the gender you want. You
can act just about any way you want” (Behr, 2001).
Sherry Turkle explains that the attraction of virtual “sitting rooms” is partly a person’s “ability to assume a role as close to or as far from one’s ‘real self’ as [he] chooses” (Turkle, 1995). Insofar as this is true, we would expect that billions of variant selves frequent the millions of AOL chat rooms on a daily basis. (Indeed, people who eventually meet electric friends offline routinely identify a disconnect between online and real world personalities (Gibson, 2000).) Turkle also argues, “people are able to build a self by cycling through many selves” thanks to chat rooms and other electronic communication mediums (Turkle, 1995). And this may be true. But with regards to computer-mediated communication, and more specifically sexual relations, a person’s multiplicity of selves – aside from his or her real world self – do not exist outside of a virtual environment; therefore, minus the machine, it follows that he or she is only partly human. Consider Gary, admittedly a fictitious character, but more importantly a staunch supporter of online sexual relationships.[6]
Gary is a shoe salesman. Still a senior in high school, he lives with his parents just outside the city limits and rides the bus to school every morning for an early morning class. To his teachers and friends, Gary is highly intelligent but soft-spoken, extremely creative but shy. After school Gary stops by the local 7-11 for a cherry Coke, does his math homework at the library, and waits for his dad to pick him up at five o’clock. He usually eats dinner with his parents, but determinedly retires to his room soon thereafter. With the door closed Gary turns on the computer. “You’ve Got Mail!” He becomes TiesLaces9087. Now the only question is, “Who to be”? In other words, which Gary is he tonight?
For two years Gary has frequented a variety of online chat rooms, casually talking to other users, occasionally making friends. He spent the summer pretending to be an accomplished point guard; Gary suffers from a severe type of asthma, and so cannot play for any sports teams. Last month he conversed with a panel of music professors from universities across the world; unfortunately, Gary’s high school had to cut its art program in order to make ends meet. Just last week, Gary had cybersex for the first time. A certain Cheerleader3482 sent him an instant message that read, “wanna cyber”?, Gary kindly sent her a virtual bouquet of flowers, and the rest is history.
Sherry
Turkle writes, “When people adopt an online persona
... some feel an uncomfortable sense of fragmentation, some a sense of relief.
Some sense the possibilities for self discovery, even self-transformation”
(Turkle, 1995). CMC allowed Gary to be a star athlete, discuss the beauties of
Bach’s unfinished symphony, and sexually experiment with another person in
real-time. These experiences are, to a certain extent, very positive ones. But
the truth is biting: on the bus, in the classroom, studying at the library,
eating dinner with his parents, Gary is not a sports hero or a celebrated Don
Juan. Thus, the enabling power of the computer is first paradoxical, then
crippling: with it a person can traverse the globe at speeds nearing 100 mb/s,
explore unmarked corners of his or her mind, and achieve otherwise impossible
acts of sexual fantasy; without it, you’re just plain old you. Insofar as
Gary’s other selves constitute bona fide components of his personality, the
majority of “him” resides online. In order to realize his potential as a human
being, Gary must yield to a set of mechanical prostheses. Particularly,
simulating sexual intercourse viz. a computer terminal subverts one’s material
selves to those brought to fruition through, and projected onto an 800x600
pixel screen. All told, Gary can play basketball, speak of music, and procreate
as a full-fledged cyborg, or remain a partial human. “RL [real life] is just
one more window… and it’s not [Gary’s] best one” (Turkle, 1995).
AOL users maintain anonymity thanks to screen names, personal profiles, and a special kind of language designed to speed up conversation and homogenize the expression of emotions. (Too, that chat participants cannot physically inhabit virtual worlds further underscores the “narrow-bandwidth” that plagues CMC.) But as a result, – and this is key – cyber chatters can only procure information about another person by way of the computer.
Potential subscribers to online services must first choose user IDs, or screen names that identify them to the remaining Internet populace: some screen names are mixtures of first, middle, and last names – e.g., MEWaddell – but most others are micro (mis)representations of the users themselves – a dancer may choose DancinFool, or TwoLeftFeet as his alias. Here, it is important to realize that until a user volunteers his or her real name, it is unknown to fellow chatters. After picking a screen name, the would-be user answers a series of questions that later constitutes a brief summary of who they are (or want to be). For the purposes of this document, it is sufficient to note that personal profiles, like user IDs, encase IMers in computer-mediated conceptions of themselves. Prior to any interpersonal communication, users permit the computer to reduce their personal character to catchy nicknames, text fields, and comment boxes. Compounded with a set of language rules geared towards throughput and not content – hereafter referred to as “cyberspeak” – the computer manipulates a person’s identity to suit its needs.
Speed
is of primary importance in online communications; therefore, community members
purposely shorten words and phrases. “For example, to ask another user the
questions ‘How old are you? Are you male or female’? most users simply type
‘age/sex’” (Hamman, 1996). IMers also create words to describe unique
cyberspace phenomena: the term “newbie” refers to someone new to the Internet
(or a specific chat room), and the phrase “net split” denotes getting kicked
off the central server. Too, there exist acronyms specific to the online
community: OMG, meaning “oh my God”, is one of many examples. A final dimension
of cyberspeak, and perhaps the most worrying, is the advent of emoticons – a new
way to communicate emotions in the absence of traditional sensory indicators.
An
emoticon is “an emotional icon, or a pictorial expression of the emotions of
the moment. These are most commonly created on one line using the symbols on
the keyboard” (Argyll, 1996). Try and spot the emoticons below:
CareBear1704: hey elpadrote, age/sex?
ElPadrote: 26/m, u?
CareBear1704: 24/f. wanna cyber?
ElPadrote: J
[Minutes later…]
CareBear1704: OMG! that was amazing!
ElPadrote: J
CareBear1704: ***elpadrote***
ElPadrote: L
CareBear1704: no kisses?
ElPadrote: j/k LOL! J
Emoticons are cute, fuzzy,
unreliable mouthpieces for expressing feelings; they facilitate quick
demonstrations of traditionally complex ideas, and in so doing mechanize one’s
gamut of emotions. Accompanied by screen names, personal profiles, and the
agrammatical void that is cyberspeak, emoticons de-emphasize articulacy such
that human agents cannot express themselves minus mechanical appendages. And
what of cybersex? Foreplay translates to the exchange of codified affection
units, the superficial getting together of flirting man-machines. In short,
cybersexers are emotionally impotent human-computer hybrids.
Donna Haraway, in Cyborgs and Symbiots states, “A cyborg exists when two kinds of boundaries are simultaneously problematic: (1) that between animals (or other organisms) and humans, and (2) between self-controlled, self governing machines (automatons) and organisms, especially humans (models of autonomy). The cyborg is the figure born of interface of automaton and autonomy” (Haraway, 1995). For the purposes of this document, it presumed that humans’ ability to engineer and manufacture problematizes Haraway’s first boundary. By examining the symbiotic, almost parasitic man-machine relationship that sustains computer-mediated sexual encounters, we see that cybersexers use technology to supplement their own humanity, thereby satisfying Haraway’s second cyborg criterion.
AOL users that engage in virtual sex cannot do so without computers: their PCs inevitably determine the space, time, velocity, direction, and mode of sexual intercourse. Electromechanical devices dominate these human beings in whole or in part, and “rapidly, [they] approach the… technological simulation of consciousness” (McLuhan, 1964). Haraway’s two boundaries converge in AOL chat rooms, the latter becoming genuine cyborg factories. What’s more disturbing, though, is the striking productivity of these factories in recent years.[8]
On a personal note, I like to think it’s possible that physical sex will become cool again. Maybe it still is. As Miles Monroe says in Woody Allen’s Sleeper about the Orgasmatron: “Two minutes in bed with me and you’ll sell that thing for scrap metal” (Behr, 2001). Then again, who is to say that cybersex won’t “supercede [the] messy ancient imperative for an increasing number of individuals”? Certainly not I. In the end though, there’s no avoiding the fact that “for the human species to continue, so must the wet ancient cycle persist in at least some” (Margulis, 1997).
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[1] Email, electronic bulletin boards (BBSs), and online services were unanticipated extensions of ARPAnet, the first computer network. Established in 1969, it “initially linked researchers with remote computers centers, allowing them to share hardware and software resources such as disk space, databases, and computers” (Barnes, 2000).
[2] AOL’s worldwide membership surpassed 30 million in June 2001. (AOL Time Warner)
[3] Insofar as the human body is a communication technology, one can argue that, like any machine our form limits the range of social activity. However, because the human body is a priori human, no cyborging takes place.
[4] Imagine your parents commanding that you make love to your significant other in their presence, with the lights turned on, reserving the right to whisper sweet nothings into your lover’s ears. Now replace your parents with a computer. “Hey baby, wanna gyrate to the hum of my CD-ROM drive”?
[5] Rosanne Stone rightly attributes the creation of cyber “non-space” to the “narrow-bandwidth-ness” of computer-mediated communication; compared with reality’s capacity for speech, gestures, facial expression, and dress, “computer conferencing is narrow-bandwidth, because communication is restricted to lines of text on a screen” (Stone, 1995).
[6] Gary, though not a living human being, is based on a collection of folks that the document’s author grew up with; incidentally, this same group of people was absurdly fascinated by the idea of virtual sex.
[7] BRB stands for “be right back”, and K is an abbreviation for “OK”.
[8] In 1998 Americans spent $8 billion on computer-related pornography, and visited Playboy’s free website 5 million times a day. (Peterson, 1999)