Reading Response for Feb 15th

Rape in Cyberspace response:

This article treads a fine line in the subject it deals with, because it barely seems to deal with it all and instead uses big words to impress the reader. I thought this was an interesting read though because it is an interesting idea. If you can dig through the dense language it uses you'll find an interesting story. The story tells of a person that was raping women with his words and not physically. The important part of the story is the intense emotional and actual physical pain that the women felt. They were angry and demanded what would be the real world equivelent of death for this man. The article deals with how some people blew this off since it technically didn't really happen since it was on a computer screen and not a street. Violence in words can be just as bad or worse then actual violence because sometimes the emotional scars last longer then physical scars. The thing with this article is that it is twelve years old and online communities have advanced well beyond words. Now players can create life-like recreations of themselves, and since there is now a graphical representation of the person, the connection to this player can be much more intense. Humans are unfortunetly creepy and when that annoying thing called reality is removed and creeps can hide behind a character that they can erase and start over with once too many people are creeped out by them, they are free to run amok and that is an unfortunate side-effect of our newly connected society.