The Problem of Language
As I suggest elsewhere in this webtext, to confront the problem of the mind-body split is also to confront the problem of language and its role in how we understand ourselves, an issue related to but beyond the scope of this webtext. But the case of Mr. Bungle and the cyber-rape in LambdaMOO raises the related problem of the relationship between actions and words. Dibbell argues that virtual worlds like LambdaMOO signal "a paradigm shift that the classic liberal firewall between word and deed [...] is not likely to survive intact" (Dibbell 462). And he compares online communication to the "pre-Enlightenment principle of the magic word: the commands you type into a computer are a kind of speech that doesn't so much communicate as make things happen, directly and ineluctably, the same way a trigger does" (462; emphasis in original). This "conflation of speech and act" is, for Dibbell, "inevitable in any computer-mediated world" (462). But such a conflation already exists in the Western legal tradition and predates computer-mediated communication. Think, for instance, of the classic example of unprotected speech: shouting "Fire!" in a crowded movie theater. In such a case, the speech constitutes an act. The difference, of course, is that in such an instance, people are physically present, whereas on a MOO the participants' bodies are "absent" and their "presence" is purely verbal and intellectual.
My point is that this complex relationship between speech and action is bound up with the broader question of the relationship between language and self, a problem further complicated by technology. If our sense of self is a function of language (as many philosophers maintain), then technologies for language – such as writing or computers – can influence that sense of self. My broader point here is that computer technologies as they are used for online communication both grow out of and reinforce the prevailing Western sense of self as a primarily intellectual (and verbal – or, as Derrida might say, textual) being that I have argued is central to our ways of being-in-the-world.