Notes on Boellstorff (2008), Chapter 7

Boellstorff, T. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Chapter 7. Community, pp. 179-201

180, again virtual worlds are places; ‘what makes them sites of culture… is that people interact in them’

180 virtual worlds “do become true communities after a time” (Curtis 1992 and others) [erm, but you're not telling us what you mean by 'communities', this most comforting of fictions].

181 community rhetoric of Linden Lab, e.g. when citing “community sentiment” to alter the platform but without explaining ‘who constituted or spoke for the community in question’ [EXACTLY, that's precisely why community is such as dodgy notion].

182 * social gravity: dots on screen beget dots on screen; what really mattered to residents were ’social places’ [cf. empty cyberjaya, no social places]

Concept work

Excerpt from a text by the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory, or ARC.

[...]

A third design principle for collaboration concerned concept work. Concept work consists in constructing, elaborating and testing a conceptual inventory as well as specifying and experimenting with multi-dimensional diagnostic and analytic frames. We hold that concepts are tools designed to be used on specified problems and calibrated to the production of pragmatic outcomes both analytic and ethical. As such, concepts must be adjusted to the changing topology of problem spaces. Concept work involves archaeological, genealogical, and diagnostic dimensions. Archaeologically, concept work involves investigating and characterizing concepts as part of a prior repertoire or structured conceptual ensemble. Genealogically, concept work frees concepts from their field of emergence by showing the contingent history of their selection, formation, as well as their potential contemporary significance. Diagnostically, concept work involves a critical function: testing the adequacy and appropriateness of a given concept or repertoire of concepts to new problems and purposes.

More…

Notes on Boellstorff (2008), Chapter 6

Boellstorff, T. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Chapter 6. Intimacy, pp. 151-178

151 emoticons not too important in SL

152 text as techne, separates actual from virtual; text ubiquitous, so SL ideal for deaf people but the opposite for visually impaired

153 historically unprecedented language exchanges, incl. ‘whispering’

154 author uses linguistic background effectively, e.g. code-switching could happen with different modalities of textual language, as in example of ethnographer’s interlocutor switching between chat (specific location) and IM (specific person) depending on degree of intimacy of topic (sex)

156 cybersociality and friendship, no techno-hermits; cybersociality research shows that ‘virtual worlds can not only transform actual-world intimacy but create new forms of online intimacy’

Notes on Boellstorff (2008), Chapter 5

Boellstorff, T. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Chapter 5. Personhood, pp. 118-150

119 Aim not to come up with SL typology of residents but ‘to investigate everyday senses of virtual personhood’. What does it mean when residents say they can be themselves, or find it easy to be several selves, or can ‘wear our souls in here’?

120 key issue since early studies cybersociality is techne gaps and how allow various identities in virtual worlds

120 celebs in SL

120 opposite of double life, no conflict perceived

122 the life course [see Amit] is one way in which cultures make selves; 122 Giddens, personalised life course presumed in modern society; so what is a SL course?

Notes on Boellstorff (2008), Chapter 4

Boellstorff, T. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Chapter 4. Place and Time, pp. 89-117

91 place-making is crucial to virtual worlds; whatever people do in them, virtual worlds are “just a set of locations. Places” (Bartle 2004). Yet long history in mass media studies of seeing place-making as ‘antithetical to the virtual’. What’s truly revolutionary about virtual worlds is that ‘they are new kinds of places’ [my emphasis]

92 3D visuality is key feature of virtual world, unlike websites or blogs

93 landscape and residence: conflict over store not because encroached on a building but because ‘it damaged a landscape’. If loses control over landscape this can impinge on viewer’s sense of own efficacy.

96 aesthetic of community and openness embodied in sky builds; resident who created in her SL home a ‘virtual virtual landscape’ although for the creator the images stood for a real SL landscape: “The scenery on the walls…is actual scenery here in sl”.

Open Anthropology Cooperative, Research Seminar Series

The Open Anthropology Cooperative, an online initiative launched by Keith Hart and colleagues a few weeks ago, is growing rapidly at nearly 2,500 members as I write these lines. As part of this initiative I am organising a research seminar series for this coming academic year (2009-2010) to be held on the site’s main Discussion Forum. The template for the series is taken from the EASA Media Anthropology Network’s e-seminar series. The programme is as follows (NB indicative themes only, actual paper titles to be announced):

8-22 Dec 2009, Vered Amit (Concordia) conceptualising sociality

16 Feb-2 March 2010, Jeff Juris (Northwestern) urban activism in Mexico

27 April- 11 May 2010, Olumide Abimbola (Max Planck)  international trade in used clothing

8-22 June 2010, Alberto Corsin Jimenez (EOI): theme TBA

Details of other future events can be found here

Notes on Boellstorff (2008), Chapter 3

Boellstorff, T. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Chapter 3 – Method, pp. 60-86

60-62 Interesting methods discussion

60 Mead-Freeman debate; author sides with Mead; makes glib point about SL vs. Samoa: ‘After all, Freeman’s accusation against Mead was that she made things up, and what are virtual worlds if not made up?’. Not quite the same thing, Tom. If you came back from your SL fieldwork and made up your findings that would be problematic…SL may be ‘made up’ but as your ethnography itself shows, it is no less real to its residents than the ‘actual world’.

61 Starting question was methodological: ‘What can ethnography tell us about virtual worlds?’. Whole project conducted inside SL, as avatar Tom Bukowski. Questions numerous studies of online culture for aiming at showing the continuities between online and offline, 62 e.g. Miller and Slater (2000) [as opposed to Hine 2000?].

Notes on Boellstorff (2008), Chapter 2

Boellstorff, T. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Chapter 2: History [of Virtual Worlds], pp. 32-59

36 print technologies shaped new socialities, e.g. postal system and rise of pen pals as primitive form of virtual worlds

37 Lord of the Rings as virtual world precedent coz it showed you could create a ‘fully realized, make-believe world’ (Bartle 2004)

45 making of a third place* demonstrated by Krueger, i.e. difference between virtual worlds and telecommunications or mass media generally; “two-way telecommunication between two places creates a third place consisting of the information that is available to both communicating parties simultaneously” (Krueger 1991)

47 Krueger’s Videoplace (first virtual world) differed from TV, telegraph, newspaper, film, etc, in that multiple people experienced a place simultaneously, a place that they experienced as not being the actual world. ‘People interacted within the virtual world and also with the virtual world itself’.

Cyberjaya: the Making of a Hi-Tech City

The Malaysian scholar Norhafezah Yusof is currently completing a book by this title based on her PhD thesis at Nottingham Trent University, UK.

This book will be an important contribution to our current knowledge of what it is like to work and live in a futurist ‘intelligent city’. Based on ethnographic research in Cyberjaya, located in the heart of Malaysia’s answer to Silicon Valley, the author demonstrates what happens when the centrality of sociality to the making of a lived-in world is overlooked. Searching in vain for sustainable forms of residential sociality, the author concludes that future intelligent cities should make sociality a top priority.

Notes on Boellstorff’s (2008) Coming of Age in Second Life

Boellstorff, T. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

PART I: SETTING THE VIRTUAL STAGE

Chapter 1: The Subject and Scope of this Inquiry, 3-31

1 Malinowskian tale of entry

7 book is ‘ethnographic portrait of the culture of Second Life’ from June 2004 to Jan 2007

8-16 everyday SL

16-24 terms of discussion: 17 book explores virtual worlds phenomenon

18 book aims at rehabilitating and refining keyword ‘virtual’; virtual worlds can be researched in own terms

21 gaming sociality

22 … vs residential sociality of SL: definitely not a game

23 we are overly interested in connections that cut across ‘real’ vs ‘virtual’ worlds

24 anthropology can help chart emergent forms of cybersociality

25 theoretical aim: what’s new and what isn’t about this virtual world? Thesis: virtual worldview as techne, with person that emerges not homo faber or homo ludens but rather homo cyber (55 techne = ’human action that engages with the world and thereby results in a different world…intentional action that constitutes a gap between the world as it was before the action, and the new world it calls into being’; techne extends natural processes, e.g. underwater breathing technology; it is about practice not knowledge (episteme)) .

28 posthuman is central to book, but a misleading term…

29 in fact, thesis: ‘it is in being virtual that we are human’

31 book’s obsolescence is fine, no worries; written in past tense

31 book outline

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