allowing streams to play in phoenix viewer second life

I have no problem with anthropologists assuming authority.

It is easy enough to see here how the real world pressures of academia require the book to be authored by Boellstorff and not Bukowski, but it also serves to strengthen the distance between the anthropologist and his subjects in a way that I find somewhat problematic. Boellstorff draws extensively on his fieldwork experience in Indonesia in discussing his work in Second Life. Boellstorff’s corporality is very much tied to his authority as an anthropologist. But the book isn’t written by Bukowski, its written by Boellstorff, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of California. In Second Life he is Tom Bukowski, born on Jwho has a home in Ethnographia, located in the Dowden region of Second Life. There is one exception to Boellstorff’s self-imposed limitation, and that is his own authorial voice. These slippages show how hard it is to maintain the boundary between virtual and real identities, but they also serve to cast doubt upon the book’s premise. Spouses take over their partner’s avatar for a day, confusing other residents. One person gets put to bed in Second Life before starting her day in real life, making her real life little more than her avatar’s dream world. Boellstorff tries to demonstrate Second Life to a group of people and finds it difficult to have his avatar speak for all of them. Avatars get frozen because people forget to log off. In fact, the most interesting parts of Coming of Age in Second Life are those where Boellstorff talks about ways in which the real world intrudes upon Second Life. It sounds convincing, but I’m still thinking about whether or not I buy it. Boellstroff tries to get out of this by arguing that to the extent large-scale processes are important to Second Life they will be reflected (in some way) within Second Life itself. Yet, this makes the book subject to the same criticisms which community of practice theory has been subject to namely, that one must make a special effort to link individual communities to large-scale practices (see Bergvall). In this sense it is no different from any other community of practice which might be studied by anthropologists. The book’s conceit works because, like soylent green, Second Life is made of people. The forms of social action and meaning-making that take place do so within the virtual world, and there is a dire need for methods and theories that take this into account. Most virtual worlds now have tens of thousands of participants, if not more, and the vast majority interact only in the virtual world. However, as I discuss in chapter 3, studying virtual worlds “in their own terms” is not only feasible but crucial to developing research methods that keep up with the realities of technological change. It might seem controversial to claim one can conduct research entirely inside a virtual world, since persons in them spend most of their time in the actual world and because virtual worlds reference and respond to the actual world in many ways.

Here’s Boellstoroff discussing his method: And this is perhaps the most interesting thing about the book – it is an ethnography of a virtual world. And, what better way than ethnography? Indeed, Boellstoroff has given us a very competent, thoughtful, and well written, ethnography of one such virtual world. His argument is that whether we care about virtual worlds or not, they are here to stay, so we’d better try our best to understand them. If Boellstoroff never really convinced me that I should care about Second Life, it is because he doesn’t even try. Indeed, Boellstoroff’s book confirms my conviction that Second Life is mostly about real estate, with a little relationship stuff thrown in for good measure. It always seemed to me that playing Second Life was much more cumbersome, time consuming, and less entertaining than reading the real estate or personals sections on Craig’s List. I have to admit coming to this book with a certain degree of antipathy towards its subject. I just finished reading Tom Boellstorff’s ethnography, Coming of Age in Second Life, which I first learned about on last year.

Allowing streams to play in phoenix viewer second life