Dear Tom Boellstorff,
Your question, “What can
ethnography tell us about the virtual worlds?” automatically caught my
attention because it unveiled how virtual worlds can be seen as legitimate
sites of culture, and since virtual worlds are meaningful sites for social
action, cultures in the virtual worlds exist whether we like it or not. I thought your
research to this question was done very fairly because you were not concerned
to determine if the woman you were talking to was “really” a man in the actual
world or if two different people were controlling “her” because most SL
residents do not have these answers either. You truly took advantage of the
open-endedness of SL.
Daniel Miller and Don Slater’s notion of how Internet
technologies are being understood and assimilated somewhere in particular is so
relevant in terms of SL because “online cultures are ultimately predicated upon
actual-world cultures, an assumption sometimes methodologically operationalized
by efforts to meet residents of virtual worlds in the actual world, although
researchers have long noted the difficulty of ascertaining actual-world identities”
(Boellstorff 62). Even though people know that they cannot know who the people are
offline, people in the virtual worlds are still determined to address the
actual world- the actual world meaning the only “real” social world. Relating
to this topic, I can imagine that the way my cousins participate in SL would
differ from the way I differ from SL because events, identities, issues, and
ideas in virtual worlds derive and are referenced from the real world.
I
strongly agree with your statement, “participant observation is the central
methodology for ethnography because it does not require the aspects of culture
be available for conscious reflection,” because researchers can become involved
in crafting events as they occur, for participant observation is itself a form
of techne. Many aspects of culture are imperfectly available for conscious
reflection because they take the form of common sense. I also was in the same
position as you when you noticed that all of this experience did not give you a
totalizing understanding of SL because you realized ethnographic knowledge is
situated and partial because so many of the other residents have been immersed
in SL much longer than you and had much more knowledge of this virtual world
that something second nature to them might have seemed like a difficult task
for you and me. Very fascinating article and great insight about investigating the virtual human through the lens of an anthropologist.
Sincerely,
Clara
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