AOL has been under fire for sexual harrassment in chatrooms. They have recently implemented "Parental Controls" in which a customer may set restrictions on another family member's screen name, and therefore, control where she can or cannot go on the web, which chat rooms she may enter, and from whom she may accept Instant Messages.

MOOs and MUDs also emphasize the gender identity of a person by allowing visitors to present themselves as icons, which if gendered, are often "small, stereotyped images of glamour girls or beach boys" (Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999. p. 262.) MOOs and MUDs allow one to physically and mentally present themselves as, and therefore change themselves to (at least for the digital time), who they think would be desired, mainly in a sexual manner.

Porn sites, I feel, are the most recent evolution of chatboards, possibly able to be claimed as part of the Revenge of the Nerds phenomenon (an eighties movie in which the nerds never had sex, but it was all they thought about, so they were great in bed, much more attentive than the jocks). Some porn sites are very well designed, and huge money makers, a natural habitation for horny computer geeks. With porn sites, nothing is left to guess, and there is even a sense of something close to obligation. The sites that charge visitors to view images or chat with the "porn star", etc. are business ventures, remediating prostitution.

Kinetic / cyber poetry fits into this evolution somewhere closer to the MOOs and MUDs, in which the contents and characters are partially described and partially visible. This whole notion of what is seen against what is known against what is thought is very sensual. The secrecy idea in MOOs and MUDs that the presented, or seen, character is known to almost definitely not be the same as the person who made and powers the character is seen in kinetic new media poetry in the notion that the text is visible as a result of another language, the source code. This masking is similar to sexual role-playing in that something is hidden but powering what takes place. What is visible mediates what is not, what skin or depths come through the surface layer, and what is perceived is up to the viewer / reader. Eduardo Kac's "Secret" is an example of this type of poetry.