A few days ago, the John Edwards Second Life HQ was allegedly vandalized by a number of Second Life members wearing “Bush ’08″ stickers. Click on the image above for more detail of what they did — making a picture of Edwards in blackface, placing a rainbow-colored penis on the HQ, and adding a sniper to the top of the HQ. It’s hard to argue that some of this discourse is normally anything but racist, homophobic, and just plain wrong. I’m not a fan of Edwards, but what was done to his HQ can’t be condoned by any means.

That said, I’d like to move beyond the outrage a little and think about what this event might represent. There was a lot of to-do recently over the griefing in Second Life of Anshe Chung (Ailin Graef in “first life”). During an interview with CNET (virtually orchestrated as if it was actually a TV interview), she was assailed by a number of floating, animatronic penises. Graef’s made a lot of press for herself and raised some in-world ire by being the first, very public “virtual millionaire” — her millions coming from other players, of course.

I see the reaction to Edwards’ HQ as potentially mirroring the Chung case, albeit with very different politics involved. Second Life has an increasing amount of real-world encroachment, most likely due to the heavy press it’s received lately and the sudden sexiness of 3D virtual spaces. Thus, it shouldn’t be too surprising that there will be a backlash against this and the rather naive assumptions about political activism in these spaces. I’m not quite as snotty as John Brownlee is about it, but, c’mon, what the hell did Edwards’ people expect?

This is actually a long-standing problem in how old media deal with virtual worlds. Julian Dibbell’s now-classic report of “a rape in cyberspace” on LambdaMOO fell prey to similar problems. The real-life analog of what was going on in the virtual world (in that case, rape) overshadowed a nuanced analysis of what the player’s actual intent was with the action. In this case, Edwards’ blog’s reaction is of horror, demanding an investigation, and (I’m going to expect) some kind of retribution for the offense. Which is, probably, exactly what was intended by the act because it makes the Edwards camp look like idiots who don’t “get” this new environment. I doubt that the point was to seriously condone racism and homophobia, but to use racism and homophobia as tools because they were the most ludicrously offensive things one plaster on the HQ. Note the Wesley Willis picture — if this was supposed to be some kind of pointed political comment, why would they put that on the Edwards HQ?

I can’t help but conclude that griefing is, for better or worse, more than just a cop-out to excuse terrible behavior that wouldn’t be acceptable in real life. It’s also a tool used to highlight disconnects between the real world and online interaction, as well as an indicator that these spaces are still considered secondary to real life by even its hardest-core inhabitants (and thus still have their own evolving rules and codes of conduct). When old media are shoehorned into virtual spaces — such as a forced, staged interview with Anshe Chung or Edwards’ tacky political HQ — it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that those with opposing political viewpoints are going to use the tools available to them to disrupt them, in the predominant modes of the space. Ergo, coding up some jiggling penises and pasting in some offensive Photoshopping.

So, let me be clear: I’m not excusing any of the racist and homophobic crap that the Edwards HQ vandals did, no more than I’d be excusing Mr_Bungle’s clear misogyny in LambdaMOO a decade ago. Rather, I’m simply saying that dismissing the ways that some active inhabitants of virtual worlds explain their transgressive behaviors as “it’s just Second Life” or “it’s just the Internet” is doing a disservice to them. Why transgressive acts like this are so appealing might just have to do with the ease of access to tools to make them happen, but can also be due to the relative youth of the spaces and the naive ways old media encroach upon them.