Dibbell’s “A Rape in Cyberspace,” despite being written over twenty years ago about one of the first virtual gaming websites, still manages to allude to several of the issues we are facing today in human relationships with computers. In LamdaMOO—the virtual community in which the players’ avatars interacted and lived—one of the players “raped” other players, masking his identity in such a way that his actions were thought to be those of other avatars in the community.  This virtual rape, which hugely impacted several people—both the virtual avatars and their subsequent real-life players—brings to light questions of anonymity on the internet as well as the limitations of cyberspace, and the point at which virtual reality becomes reality.

Perhaps more so than ever before, in our technologized era that is always growing, we are facing issues similar to these. In a world of social media and digitalized technology, in which we spend the majority of our days looking into screens of some sort, we are faced with the questions of what is real versus what is simply digital. At what point does human relationship and interaction with computers become too much, so to speak, to the point where we are living almost entirely through their means? At one time it may have seemed that the computer screen itself was this boundary; however, as more and more aspects of our lives become digitalized and online, the lines are becoming blurred between what is reality and what is virtual.

Furthermore, the article raises issues of anonymity in cyberspace. Digitalized technology allows people the means to say and do things that they never would in real life, a fact which many seem to take advantage of. Through the internet, we are able to be anyone we want it to be, whether that’s a 14 year old boy, an 84 year old woman, or simply ourselves. We have the ability to pass our actions off to those of our virtual identities, which do not necessarily have to correspond with our true identities, allowing us to do and say things that our real-life selves never would. Will Wheaton’s recent article “Anonymous Trolls are Destroying Online Games” emphasizes this fact, highlighting the same problems of facelessness that the LamdaMOO community faced, including the necessity of “casting off the cloak of anonymity.”

Unlike things written on paper, our digitalized words and virtualized selves have the potential to reach countless numbers of people. Computers, though they allow us a flexible and mobile way of interaction, restrict us in the sense that we must be conscious of what we say and how we act more so than we would otherwise. As readers and writers of the digital era, we are forced to keep these facts in mind as we continue with our technologized lives and realities.