#1 You said:
“What worries me are studies which buy into the ‘world is flat’ ideology of neoliberal globalization by denying the importance of the nation-state. I’m afraid that your book on Second Life does just that.”

My reply:
Well that’s a pretty nasty (and incorrect) claim, and pretty odd given not just my work on virtual worlds but on sexuality and globalization! First of all, like Rex there seems to be an issue with getting people to comment on *this piece* and not Coming of Age in Second Life. Not that I mind that – I enjoy the continued engagement with the book – but it just makes it a bit awkward for me to figure out how to reply. In any case, short answer is: you’re wrong – in my book I do talk a lot not just about the nation-state but the “California ideology,” etc. What your perspective leaves you unable to answer is: how do you ethnographically analyze social formations where the participants do not even know the nation-states in which they are all residing in the actual world? Where the social formation takes place entirely in a virtual world? Will anyone who tries to study such formations be tarred as buying into the ideology of neoliberal globalization? Trying to study such social formations is something that interests me (obviously), and while it doesn’t mean we deny the importance of the nation-state, it also means we can’t ontologize it with reference to the virtual world context, a priori. There can of course be virtual worlds (or parts of virtual worlds) where the nation-state plays a bigger role, because of state sponsorship, language, explicit interest in a particular nation-state, making the virtual geography or design somehow invoke or reference a national topography, etc. There are examples of this kind of thing in Second Life (more and more actually, as it gets larger). But that’s not all of Second Life and not true for all virtual worlds.

#2 You said:
“I have another problem with the unit of analysis, which is that I don’t see virtual worlds as a ‘place’ but as a ‘platform’. I know that SL uses a place-based metaphor…”

My reply:
Why should we care what you think, right? As anthropologists, we are interested in the emic social formation (not just that as you note, but that’s an important thing to most anthropologists). When you say “I know that SL uses a place-based metaphor…,” your phrasing hides if you are referring to Linden Lab or to all people who participate in Second Life (???). I think you might mean the former; if so then you’re missing how there is a broad-based understanding of Second Life as a place by its participants (not everyone, nothing is ever unanimous, but it’s very broad). Are you going to say these people are wrong? That’s not an effective approach in my view. That is not fetishizing the technology, that’s listening to people. To map the corporate entity as “etic” and the social formations as “emic” further confuses the issue, since both can be examined in emic and etic ways. It’s not a matter of privileging one over the other, but of using a multifaced approach – which I find useful. I actually look at Second Life in both emic and etic ways in Coming of Age in Second Life, but really enjoyed exploring the emic side in detail since the vast majority of the writing out there on Second Life is resolutely etic and often concerned with questions of design and proscription. Some of that work is amazing and I use it all the time, but it’s not the only approach. Once again I’m confused because this comment of yours is also not really about the posting but about my book, but it’s still helpful to me.

#3 You said:
“Regarding dislike of virtual worlds, I think you are too dismissive of the many good reasons for not liking virtual worlds. For those of us who value the free and open internet, virtual worlds seem like a pretty version of AOL. To treat these criticisms as little more than worries of Matrix style robot enslavement is to ignore some of the key issues about how virtual worlds interface with the rest of the internet.”

My reply:
This also has nothing to do with my posting, sigh. So quickly: in your earlier comments on my book, your dislike of virtual worlds was about much, much more than this question of “siloing” you bring up here. That’s a rhetorical slight-of-hand on your part, belied even by your “speaking to an empty room” aside (which recalls your earlier complaints about Second Life seeming empty, and is not about the “free and open” issue: there are plenty of “free and open” websites that get no hits!). It really has nothing to do with “ignoring some of the key issues about how virtual worlds interface with the rest of the internet”—since I don’t do that. I talk about movement between virtual worlds and the rest of the internet (blogs, websites, email, etc.) in the book, for instance. Siloing is a legitimate concern (there are some interesting experiments under way with teleporting avies between virtual worlds, by the way, and the Open Sim project, etc.), but it’s misrepresenting what I’ve said to assume that I don’t care about it too. When you talk about “those of us who value the free and open internet,” you don’t get to exclude me from that club! I don’t see what all this has to do with anthropology or my work in any case. There are people who like virtual worlds and spend time in them. We want to understand these cultures of virtual worlds better. It doesn’t mean that as researchers we necessarily like them or not.

#4 You say:
“I also worry about saying that everything is a virtual world, as you seem to do at several points in your book and in this essay.”

My reply:
I think this is one of those cases where the author throws up their hands and says “you can’t force people to actually read the words you write.” I have no idea where your worry comes from (and it’s indicative you don’t actually cite anything I say), since I specifically talk about how everything is not a virtual world in the book and my methods essay! And to claim that “communities of practice” is more rigorously defined (without providing this mysterious rigorous definition): I don’t even know what to say. The definitions of virtual worlds that are out there – mine and those of others – are actually quite consistent: “virtual world” is as well-defined as “website” or “nation-state,” for instance. So I just don’t even know how to respond.

So as you can see I find your comments rather confusing and disappointing, but they are still valuable to me, and I do thank you for them.

#4. I have no problem with the idea of a nation-state as a fieldsite, as you describe having done in your work in Indonesia. I haven’t read your book (its on my list!) but it sounds like something I would be comfortable with. Nor does it seem particularly radical to me. Many single-sited studies also take the nation-state as their implicit unit of analysis. What worries me are studies which buy into the “world is flat” ideology of neoliberal globalization by denying the importance of the nation-state. I’m afraid that your book on Second Life does just that.

But I have another problem with the unit of analysis, which is that I don’t see virtual worlds as a “place” but as a “platform.” I know that SL uses a place-based metaphor, but I don’t see any reason our analysis of SL must accept its own metaphors. Would we talk about HTML as a “place”? (In fact we often do talk about “cyberspace” but I don’t find that particularly useful.) I worry that this fetishizes the technology, when (I believe) we should be doing the opposite. Why must we study virtual worlds “in their own terms”? Emic and etic analysis are both necessary for anthropology and I worry about privileging one over the other – especially when one is a corporate entity.

6. Regarding dislike of virtual worlds, I think you are too dismissive of the many good reasons for not liking virtual worlds. For those of us who value the free and open internet, virtual worlds seem like a pretty version of AOL. To treat these criticisms as little more than worries of Matrix style robot enslavement is to ignore some of the key issues about how virtual worlds interface with the rest of the internet.

I also worry about saying that everything is a virtual world, as you seem to do at several points in your book and in this essay. If virtuality is important it must be because of certain features which can be meaningfully delineated. Otherwise I suggest we drop using the word altogether and stick to more rigorously defined methodological terms, such as “communities of practice.” While not without its problems, at least CofP allows us to talk about overlapping social networks which include the virtual and the non-virtual.

Thanks so much to Montgamery, MTBradley, and Rex for these comments! This is the whole reason I did this experiment: it’s always flatting to get responses to one’s work, but it’s a real treat when I can actually take the comments into consideration when revising. I’ll have to let these comments perk in the back of my brain for a while because I have other projects ahead in line before the published version of this piece, so I’ll just provide quick responses here to each comment for the time being. I’ll check back in a week or two and if there are any other comments or responses, I will respond to those as well.

Montgamery: You’re absolutely right that there is military interest in virtual worlds (and thus, social science research into virtual worlds, including anthropological research). I don’t think “about to be invaded” is the right phrase, since military involvement in these kinds of technologies goes way back. The Internet itself was developed with military interests in mind. Another example that I mention in my book is that of Battlezone, an Atari video game developed in 1980 that some historians of technology have identified as the first using first-person perspective. Soon after its released, the military worked with Atari to develop “Military Battlezone” (also known as “The Bradley Trainer”) for training soldiers.

You raise the important question regarding how one’s work is used after it’s been published. I (like most social scientists I know) try to write in a way that is difficult to co-opt, but one can’t entirely predict how one’s work will be used after it’s been published. Just last week I was interviewed in The Jakarta Post, the major English-language periodical in Indonesia, about some recent demonizations of gay men in the national press. So far my books on gay Indonesians have been used in ways that support the rights of GLBT Indonesians (to my knowledge), but there’s always the chance that some fundamentalist group will cite a passage out of context in some way to do the opposite. One can’t control such things: one can do the best one can to make that difficult to pull off, but it’s just not possible to have total control, and that’s true whether one is talking about an actual-world context like Indonesia or a virtual world.

MTBradley: Thanks for all those detailed comments: I’ll think through all of them. In terms of your general comment, I do think social organization is certainly an important and valid concept, and issues of spatial scale are just one point of entrée into questions of social organization (you could also talk about it in terms of class, gender, religion, on and on). By no means is social organization passé!

Rex: Thanks as well for a very stimulating set of comments (and for the opportunity to post these notes more generally). I am once again in your debt. Your comments aren’t really about the draft essay, but about my book Coming of Age in Second Life, but I do find them interesting. They are a bit hard to follow because you contradict yourself along the way and ascribe to me views I don’t hold, but I enjoyed reading along as you were thinking out loud. As far as I understand the comments, I do think you are the one agreeing with me! Or perhaps can we just say “we agree with each other”–perish the thought?

This goes back to my response to Montgamery: one can only do one’s best to foreclose misunderstandings and misappropriations (not to mention oversimplifications) ahead of time. I certainly wouldn’t accuse you of islandizing, re-villagizing, re-bounding, or other such juvenile intellectual sins when speaking of “WoW players,” “Pacific Islanders,” or “living in the Pacific.” What your comments really highlight for me is how a range of emerging technologies and technologically-mediated or enabled socialities, from virtual worlds and MMOGs to blogs, cellphones, websites, even email, will continue to pose productive challenges for ethnographic inquiry. I’m particularly interested in thinking about these ramifications for exploring how people understand themselves as belonging, in various ways, to specific place- and time- delimited communities and localities, and at the same time understand themselves as engaged in a range of translocal and historical relationships. That’s an age-old dynamic in one sense, but there are some truly new shifts underway. It’s a fascinating time to be involved in these conversations, isn’t it?

For your comments and for posting my “notes toward a typology” in the first place, I hereby declare myself to owe you a beer at the American Anthropological Association meetings this November in San Francisco (assuming you will be there), and we can discuss all this in any terms you choose!

I appreciate that different research interests will lead to different methods, and I agree that the ‘in its own terms’ method you use in CASL is a legitimate choice. But is it the best one? I think maybe you are more interested in the multimodality of VR experiences than you might think…

1. I think CASL underestimates how central virtual/actual and virtual/virtual interfaces are for SLers. Indeed, although you claim to be studying SL in its own terms, your own ethnography is constantly slipping into actual and non-SL virtual spaces (websites, letters to spouses, etc.). So I really do think there is an element of bad conscience in the book — it is constantly implicitly struggling to exceed the horizons you set for it.

2. You might reply that the ‘its own terms’ method does not ignore translocal connections. This is fair, and I admit my point is a hard one to press home. But I really do think that CASL relies on things outsides of SL more deeply and seriously than can be accommodated by the ‘its own terms’ method, even when it is balanced by an awareness of translocal connections.

3. Many people have rethought scale, the fieldsite, etc. in order to undo assumptions of locality that spring from doing fieldwork in one place (‘the village’). It seems to me that you are using that literature in order to _redo_ locality. That is, we have spent all of this time proving that islands are not isolates, but connected in complex ways, and are now attempting to take this literature and use it to turn SL back into an island.

6. I think you would argue that islandizing SL bucks established trends because anthros don’t give respect to virtual worlds, and because we now have the freedom to imagine lots of different scales for our research. I admit we have freedom to rethink scale but… why does that freedom somehow make re-villagizing a fieldsite the best choice among other choices? It ends up eclipsing the multimodality of virtual world interactions is eclipsed. I would think someone who took the problematization of locality seriously would want to emphasize multimodality, not turn SL back into an island.

7. Legitimizing SL as a space of research by islandizing it is, in some sense, using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house: you are legitimizing SL ‘in its own terms’ only by buying into assumptions drawn explicitly from stereotypes of ‘isolated’ Pacific islands. Is this such a good idea? As someone who lives in the Pacific, works with, and studies Pacific Islanders I think these notions of boundedness are so compromised that I wouldn’t want to rely on them for anything, even legitimizing the study of virtual worlds in themselves.

8. I think your islandizing of SL is in line with current trends, rather than bucking them. Many SL residents are ‘immersionists’ who hold SL to be a distinct ‘place’. Similarly, popular press and much academic writing sees virtual worlds as ‘worlds’, an ‘electronic frontier’ as a place that people ‘migrate’ to in an ‘exodus’. Realistic 3d worlds have only exacerbated this tendency to understand virtual worlds as locales or ‘places’. Even those disgusted by SL are disgusted with it _because they understand it is a place_, and in particular one which is not an adequate replacement for the actual world.

8. As I’ve said, I don’t think these understandings do justice to the complex phenomena of virtual worlds, which I increasingly see as a whole network of sites in which people engage each other in a variety of different modalities. I think we need to understand how people make their lives meaningful inside that network if we want to do justice to the phenomenon. This means problematizing virtual worlds as places in the exact same way that previous scholars problematized ‘the village’ as a place, not reinscribing in virtual space the same errors earlier ethnographers made in their r/l fieldsites.

Furthermore… I think there is enough material in your own ethnography to demonstrate that deep down inside you agree with me on this one (!!!)

At any rate thanks for the essay — it got me articulating stuff that has been in my mind for some time..

Comments on particular paragraphs:
6. Regarding films, I think you should not miss the opportunity to reference David Cronenberg’s “eXistenZ” at some point, perhaps in 9. when you discuss the possibility of a virtual world invoking touch.

13. I have always heard and read the dichotomy as “lumper” vs. splitter, a distinction that goes beyond the discipline of linguistics if I am not mistaken. Perhaps Greenberg’s phrasing was distinct.

18. I am not sure that your reference to Boas’ “Comparative method” paper hits the mark. If read in conjunction with his “Occurrence of similar inventions” I think it is clear that what he is attacking is a program of research that presumes a correlation between features of social organization and material culture at the expense of investigation of local history. There are multiple “Comparative Methods,” as in for example historical linguistics. Perhaps the Comparative Method of Radcliffe-Brown is a better fit here?

General comments:
I have the tendency to explicitly treat a great deal of phenomena as issues of social organization. I am never quite sure if other anthropologists are doing so implicitly or if the term is so old fashioned that a) they find the concept hackneyed or b) it never entered their vocabulary. I say this because I feel that the issues of scale you are bringing up are good entrees into a discussion of how not all social organization involves the face-to-face community or the local group.

Hope some of this helps! I know e-mail has expanded informal review of work by allowing us to pass our papers around to friends and area specialists. It will be interesting to see if blogs are the next step in this sort of informal review process.

—Matthew T. Bradley
Indiana University