The Virtual and the Physical
Of course, online characters or identities like MOO participants are also physical beings whose bodies cannot, in the end, be irrelevant. Our sense of self may be intellectual, but as Julian Dibbell reveals in describing the effects of the "rape" on the participants in LambdaMOO, the physical – the body – can never be entirely erased. Dibbell tells us that some time after the "rape" on LambdaMOO, he spoke to the woman who created and controlled the character of legba and was struck by her intense reaction to the event and to her own subsequent angry demand for Mr. Bungle's "virtual castration":
Months later, the woman in Seattle would confide to me that as she wrote those words [i.e. an argument for removing Mr. Bungle from the MOO] posttraumatic tears were streaming down her face – a real-life fact that should suffice to prove that the words' emotional content was no mere playacting. (Dibbell 452)Dibbell attributes this physical effect on legba to the "emotional content" of the words, and he is intrigued by what this whole event might suggest about the "dissonant gap" between virtual reality and real life (452). But I'm suggesting that the matter is more complicated than that: that "legba's" physical response to Mr. Bungle's "attack" is a reflection of her sense of self as a fundamentally intellectual, textual being. What Dibbell construes as a "gap" between "the virtual" and "the real," I am suggesting is a contemporary version of the mind-body split.
The irony here is that the Bungle case illustrates the important role of the physical in our ways of being even as it highlights our disconnection from the physical. It begins to illustrate, too, the important role technologies can play in our sense of self and our ways of being-in-the-world.