Dear Mr. Boellstorff,
In your third chapter: method, you discussed your
experiments you conducted involving Second Life and virtual worlds in their own
terms. With the recent development
and quick expansion of online worlds like these, it almost seems necessary to
do research to learn more about them.
I really enjoyed that you chose to do your entire research while within
the online world of Second Life.
How people are in the real world almost doesn’t relate to their avatars
in virtual worlds at all. People
create characters in virtual worlds because they obviously have the desire to
do or be something different than their normal life offers. As you talked about, whether a woman in
the online world is being controlled by a woman or by multiple users in real
life is irrelevant. The other
people in the game have no clue about other users’ actual identities so I
thought it was very smart that you started your work this way. Your ethnographic approach to this
experiment was necessary in this situation because of what you were hoping to
discover. Too many people before
you tried to relate what they found to be true in the virtual world to also be
true about the user in real life.
You said, “perspectives doubting the possibility of studying virtual
worlds in their own terms miss how as virtual worlds grow in size, ethnographic
research in them becomes more partial and situated, much like ethnographic
research in the actual world.” The
virtual worlds people participate in are much more than just meeting places and
extensions of their normal lives, but a completely different world with it’s
own culture.
Sincerely,
Chris Imperiale
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