1A Study Guide for “Love and War in Cyberspace” by Katy Vine 380

 

Part One. Lexicon.

 

1. savvy, the ability to navigate in social circles with poise, confidence, and tact; you have social awareness so that you know you have a pasta noodle dangling from your oily chin in a restaurant. 
2. socially inept, the opposite of savvy (see paragraph 1); see 383, bottom paragraph
3. promise of modernity, see paragraph 3: Technology will fulfill all your emotional and materialistic needs, yet it’s a lie: you’re bored, your life is in a vacuum and you seek even greater technology to quiet your restless soul.
4. Slippery slope: one misguided step towards happiness leads to several misguided steps until one descends into madness: this is the essay in a nutshell.
5. T-3 Pipe: fiber-optic data line that can handle the telecommunication needs of a small country. “Come for the bandwidth, Stay for the Community” 381 bottom
6. Monolithic group: 383, second to last paragraph and 386 bottom and 387 top
7. Four Basic emotional needs: sense of belonging, sense of personal distinction and identity, a job that interest you and utilizes your deepest talents, to love and to be loved; see page 383 top: Walden promises a sense of belonging and identity and even love and many people work in the computer industry so that Walden is everything to them. See bottom of 390 in which Bosch buys a house, but moves back to Walden; see how close-knit the group is on page 391, tackling burglars, for example.
8. Protocols; rules needed for social interaction to preserve respect and order. Without protocols there is chaos and disrespect. These adult children have no social etiquette, see page 385 and 386, the violent language.
9. Anomie; breakdown of social norms and values resulting in chaos; see 392-394; it becomes necessary for property owner Birney to issue new rules at bottom of 394.
10. Hedonism; the desperate attempt to overcome one’s sense of loneliness and emptiness through pleasure-seeking; it always results in an emotional hangover and a feeling of emptiness that’s greater than before.
11. Virtual World (from Wikipedia): A Virtual World is a computer-based simulated environment intended for its users to inhabit and interact via avatars. These avatars are usually depicted as textual, two-dimensional, or three-dimensional graphical representations, although other forms are possible[1] (auditory[2] and touch sensations for example). Some, but not all, virtual worlds allow for multiple users. 

 

 

Part Two. A Failed Experiment in Unlimited Freedom. We learn that real freedom requires conditions. Therefore unlimited freedom, the kind we see at Walden, is a false freedom.

 

 

Unlimited Freedom at Walden Is a False Freedom

 

1. E-mail communication is not free. There must be face-to-face accountability; if you can’t say what you have to say to another human’s face, you are a coward and a fraud. Too many people hiding behind their computers speaking reckless thoughts from their mind.
2. E-mail communication is dangerous because you’re hiding under the delusional safety of your computer. In fact, your raw unedited thoughts are dangerous and inappropriate. Your thoughts should be measured, contemplated, and edited. That’s what makes you a mature, thinking person. The stream of consciousness that spews forth in an e-mail is the rant and tantrum of a spoiled child.

 

3. Squandering all your free time on an addiction is not freedom; it’s enslavement and the Multi-User Dungeon gamers are slaves to their addiction. See 380
4. Technology without wisdom will kill you. These renters have the broadest band-width in the world, but they can’t handle it. The computer modem attaches to their brain and their minds become warped; they go insane. See page 383
5. Walden gives the loners and computer geeks a sense of belonging, which you need to be free, but this is false belonging. This is symbiosis; an unhealthy mutual dependence that results in retarding your emotional growth. See 381
6. A cohesive healthy community must have protocols of etiquette to create a sense of safety, respect, and dignity. But there are no boundaries at Walden. See the “bombastic” and violent language on page 386.
7. A healthy community has diversity of people with diversity of ideas to challenge one’s way of seeing the world. But the people at Walden are a monolithic tribe. They’re all the same and as a result they’re maladapted to the real world, which is diverse. The world isn’t a bunch of computer geeks and hiding in a cell with other computer geeks isn’t the answer. See page 383
8. See page 390 in which we learn that hedonism leads to despair. That kind of extreme behavior is always followed by a crash. Your whole life can’t be a party. You’ll burn-out. You’ll find yourself lost. People who party all the time age faster than the rest of us. They look old. Hedonism wears you out. It’s not freedom. It’s a desperate attempt to escape your sense of loneliness and isolation and it never works. Read Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving.
9. There are no moral absolutes and no sense that this is right and this is wrong; as a result, Walden is a place of chaos and confusion.
10. A Virtual World is a place where you don’t find freedom. You lose yourself to insanity. 

 

Part Three. The 8 Characteristics of Virtual World

 

1. The VW allows you to escape your daily frustrations.
2. The VW allows you to escape from the intense pain of having no intimacy in your life, both romantic and social.
3. The VW becomes a way of procrastinating your responsibilities.
4. The VW can incite chemical reactions in your brain that become addictive.
5. The VW presents you with manageable challenges, giving you a sense of control and achievement when you would otherwise feel overwhelmed by a lack of control and a sense of personal failure.
6. It’s easier to go back and delete your mistakes in a VW and star all over again than it is in real life.
7. The VW allows you to erase or hide your real self, the one you either despise or feel is inadequate or both, and it allows you to recreate yourself with bells and whistles so that you have more confidence.
8. The VW provides you with a sense of belonging in the “online community” when in the real world you’re overcome by a sense of constant loneliness and isolation. 

 

Part Four Defining the foundation of your essay—your thesis

 

1.  One sentence that declares or asserts a position that can be demonstrated with examples.

2.    The examples can be expressed in mapping statements or mapping components.

3.    Avoids being self-evident or obvious but creates new insights.

4.    A good thesis is visceral, from the gut, meaning you have an immediate emotional connection to it. The intellect comes later.

 

Examples:

 

Not a thesis, a fact:

During the final years of the Bush Administration, 80 % of Americans polled believe that America is on the “wrong track.”

 

Americans’ pessimistic attitude regarding the direction of our country can be attributed to _________________, _____________________, _____________________, and _________________________.

 

The cost of the war in Iraq in both blood and treasure.

The national debt.

Increased gas costs and price of crude oil.

Biggest jobless rate jump in month in 20 years. (5 to 5.5 %)

 

 

McMahon’s thesis for “Love and War in Cyberspace”

 

Cause and Effect Thesis Uses "can be attributed to" and "and results in"

Example:

The swine flu hysteria can be attributed to its unpredictable mutability, disproportionate coverage of a few deaths (far less than the common flu), the stigma of an animal-to-human contagion and this hysteria will result in wild rumors inflaming public anxiety, overreactions (canceled cruises, abstaining from pork, etc.) and hypochondria (people misinterpreting every sniffle or cough as a sign of "sure death").

The organic food movement, as chronicled in Michael Pollan's masterful essay, can be attributed to ___________________, ________________, ________________, and results in ___________________, __________________, and ____________________. 

The intoxicating, addictive nature of war, Hedges argues, can be attributed to ________________, _________________, and ___________________, and results in ______________________, ___________________, and _________________________.

Walden is a failed experiment in the promise of unlimited freedom through technology. This woeful failure can be attributed to ________________, ___________________, and ____________________, and results in ___________________, ___________________, and __________________________________.

 

Katy Vine’s essay shows us the dangers of living in a Virtual World, which include __________________, ___________________, _________________, and _________________________.

 

“Love and War in Cyberspace” 380. 5-page outline: In the first 2 pages, analyze the causes of social dysfunction described in the essay. Then in about 3 pages, use research to show how the apartment complex is a microcosm for an emerging social dysfunction in our Age of Information. As such the thesis would like this: The apartment complex is a microcosm for an emerging social dysfunction emerging in our Information Age, which consists of __________________, ___________________, ___________________, and _______________________. You would flesh out the mapping components for the essay's last 3 pages.

 

 

More Stylized Thesis with a More Distinct Writing Voice:

Take a bunch of socially dysfunctional computer nerds in desperate search of belonging, stick them in a yuppie techno-apartment flexing its steroidal broadband muscles and you’ve got Walden, a microcosm of the types of addictions Americans will face in the near future. These addictions will include a sick attachment to trumped-up, often noxious alter egos, the need to vent without boundaries, the preference of virtual worlds to the real world and all the chemicals the body requires to stay up in a ghoul-like existence where sleep is little more than an afterthought.

Research Links:

Virtual Reality: Danger Ahead

Real Hope in a Virtual World (unrealistic expectations)

Geeking Out (addiction)

Second Skin Documentary

CNN (addiction)