My ultimate goal for my WoW (as World of Warcraft is known) research is a book — now in its third draft. Along the way, however, I am ‘mining’ my research by producing several other publications. The two I want to discuss here are Being in the World (of Warcraft): Raiding, Realism, and Knowledge Production in a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (full text is OA — the publisher forget to get me to sign a CTA so I can release the work as I like. They are OK with this). The second is a draft paper I recently gave at a theater studies conference entitled Feeling Powerful and Being Powerful: Virtuosity and Expressive Individualism in World of Warcraft.

If you read these papers, you can see that there are a lot of similarities between them. Both chronicle my work with my guild. Because WoW is way more exotic to Americans then Papua New Guinea (“Black people in a forest? Got it. People killing monsters online? What now?”) I spend a lot of time describing what goes on online. But there are important differences in them as well.

Each paper was written for a different occasion. “Being in WoW” was written for a special issue of Anthropological Quarterly dedicated to ‘knowledge production’. As a result, I felt like I had to shoehorn my piece into that category. “Feeling Powerful” was written for a panel on “Economies of Showing” and so it had to be fit into that category.  Ironically, the panel organizers just wanted to do something on ‘showing’ but the conference theme was ‘economics’ so they changed to title to make sure they’d be included.

I think this is a good example of a general phenomena in the life of the mind: you are always thinking, thinking thoughts that are very abstract and in flux. Then particular occasions arise and they act like molds that you pour your molten thoughts into.

The papers address their occasion, but they don’t pander to it. They both reach through their occasions to address wider points in the literature I’m addressing.

“Being in WoW” made two and half points: first, it argued against the idea that virtual worlds were compelling because they looked ‘real’. Rather, I argued that they were compelling because they were places where people could socialize. Second, I took issue with the idea that we ought study virtual worlds ‘on their own terms’ and do ‘the culture’ of ‘a world’. Rather, I argued that virtual ethnography should study communities of people and how those communities used multiple spaces, some real and some virtual, to create themselves. My half point was that Coming of Age in Second Life legitimated ‘the culture’ of ‘a world’ ethnography by comparing it to ethnography of the Pacific, and as a Pacifcist I pointed out that this was a lousy description of how Pacific Islanders and Pacificists actually thought of themselves and their cultures.

“Feeling Powerful” made a series of related, but different points: that success in WoW affirm’s player’s ego ideals, that a virtual space affects actual personalities, and that this is what we should expect given that American WoW players have a western culture of ‘expressive individualism’. One reason WoW is so popular is because it is a place where this dynamic is powerfully performed. Once we realize this, we can see it is more compelling a virtual world than Second Life: Second Life was built around Western presumptions that all human beings want to be creative artists, which I argue is not true — romantic creation is just one species of expressivity. For this reason we should expect to see SL fascinate Americans because it speaks to their culturally-laden perceptions about what people want out of life, but more Americans to actually play WoW, which actually gives it to them. And this is in fact exactly what we see.

Basically, both of these papers make the same broad claims, but they differ in the specific points they make, the audiences they address, and the concrete data they use. In the final book version a lot of this material will be incorporated. The ethnographic exposition will be all the better for having been written and revised mutliple times, and I’ll be better able to make my points better because I’ve already made them in ‘rough draft’ form in the published articles. Best of all, the length of the book will allow me to connect them together and to add a broader overview since details on these arguments can just be cited in the book, rather than made there.

There are some people who feel you should ‘never present the same paper twice’ and I think that this is true. There is also reason to be cynical of the culture of ‘minimally significant differences’ used by people who make minor tweaks to present the same basic paper at different conferences over and over again. However, taking the same project and turning it over and over again to fit the situation and as part of creating a larger and more integral work is good academic practice — as well as good for the CV — if you can take different bits of data from your fieldwork and slot it in to whatever intellectual preoccupation you have that fits the occasion.

(AF) What is New Edge and how did you conduct your fieldwork?

(DZ) The term New Edge fuses the notions ‘New Age’ and ‘edgy’, as in ‘edgy technologies’. In the late 1980s, founder of the ‘cyberpunk’ magazine Mondo 2000, Ken Goffman, used the term to refer both to the overlaps and the incompatibilities between the spiritual worldview of ‘New Agers’ and the ‘geeky’ worldview of the scientists and hackers of the San Francisco Bay Area. Such interactions were articulated in the overlapping scenes of Virtual Reality development, electronic dance, computer hacking and cyberpunk fiction. I borrowed the term New Edge to study the genealogy of cultural cross-overs between – simply put – the ‘hippies’ and the ‘hackers’ of the Bay Area, beginning with the 1960s and tracing it to the current (2008) moment.

The overlaps that I traced are related to one general idea popular within New Age as well as within hacker circles and relating to current transhumanist notions. This is the idea that humanity is involved in a process of ‘self-evolution’, leading to a future moment when all ‘intelligence’ in the world fuses into one holistic entity. Among others, this notion translates into practices whereby people seek to sensitize their bodies, making it ‘all-sensing’ and ‘all-knowing’ by means of high-tech and/or by practices such as meditation or ecstatic-dance. This idea is also married to a neoliberal image of the autonomous, individual self, who needs to ‘realize’ its true natural self by escaping social conditioning.

There are quite a few moments and places constituted both by hippies and hackers, where they celebrate a kind of common adherence to these ideas and practices. Examples are Virtual Worlds conferences, the Mondo 2000 magazine, the electronic dance scene of the late 1980s/early 1990s, psychedelic events such as the Mindstates conferences and the contemporary Burning Man festival. These ‘New Edge environments’ are perfect places where it can be studied how secular thinking is both a modern ideology as well as a social fact: here we can see how the secularist idea that technology and science are inherently incompatible with spirituality, mysticism or magic is contested. At the same time we can witness here how notions of secularization are still informing modes of distinction-making: the very ways in which hippies and hackers identify themselves to be different from each other, occurs in large part in reference to the alleged incompatibility between the spheres of ‘religion’ and ‘technoscience’. While enchanted by the open-ended ways of thinking of New Age, geeks here are just as much distancing themselves from the “wishy-washyness”, the alleged vagueness of New Age. Similarly, those identifying with the New Age discourse, distance themselves from the images of disembodiment, celebration of technological superiority and over-rationality attached to geek-hood.

In my dissertation, I explore such kinds of compatibilities and tensions at various levels. My research for this comprised a period of 12 months, spent in between 2005 and 2008, in the San Francisco Bay Area, while going from scene to scene, place to place and tracing overlaps in people, metaphors, ideas, practices, objects and styles in between the ‘hippie’ and the ‘hacker’ spheres that I here identified.

So, why is New Edge so prevalent in California?

This is a kind of question that has bugged me for a long time and I am open to all kinds of suggestions into the answer. What I am finding the most plausible answer at the moment – and this turns your question a bit on its head – is that New Edge may in fact be a celebration of California.

I can only say this granting that what makes New Edge unique is not necessarily the fact that it allies the ‘rational’ world of science and technology development with the mystical spheres of spirituality and religion. Such alliances can be found all over the globe. Instead, what is characteristic about New Edge, I believe, is the way that it manifests this alliance through its radical performative style and this may be what makes New Edge characteristically Californian. If you have been to Burning Man, and if we take Burning Man as one of the homelands of New Edge, you probably understand what I mean. The clothes, the art-cars, the music, the buildings, the rituals at Burning Man are all aspects of a performance of a way of being that is ‘authentic’, ‘flexible’, deliberately confusing and unconcerned with hegemonic cultural norms. In a larger sense, we can here see the performance of a radical notion of ‘open-endedness’ in terms of what we can do with our bodies, with our minds, with other people, with our material environment and with technology. In my dissertation there are some examples of this celebration of ‘multiplicit style’. Ironic language; the deliberate contrasting of colors, ideas and ways of being; and the celebration of confusion and chaos are all part of it.

In terms of ideas, this performance associates with neoliberalism, which is prevalent in many other places of the world. Yet, in terms of style, it self-consciously identifies, I believe, with (the image of) California. This observation is partially informed by the fact that my New Edge interviewees were manifesting a strong self-consciousness about being Californian, or being located in California, and particularly about knowing what this means in terms of lifestyle, aesthetics and ‘ways of being’ – cacophonous, optimistic, stylistically ‘loose’ – which was often juxtaposed against ways of being in other parts of the world and of the USA in particular. For instance, Jane Metcalfe, co-founder of Wired Magazine, when she arrived in California in the early 1990s, read the alleged open-mindedness of Californians into the colorful, bright, and crazy style of the buildings and the clothes of the people. And so did Mitch Kapor – developer of Lotus 1-2-3 and associated with many other organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation – explain to me the difference between the corporate worlds on the East and the West Coast by pointing to people in Californian offices wearing Hawaiian shirts. I believe that New Edge culture is firmly rooting itself in, and celebrating as such, California by exploiting this association between California and stylistic cacophony to its extremes. Just as the 1960s hippies of California used a particular style of being, of building, of dressing and talking to distinguish themselves from their notion of mainstream America, so are New Edge Californians embracing this style still to distinguish themselves from the ‘conditioned rest of the world’. Of course, this style is also strongly global in its aspirations and has gone global in many ways, which complicates your question yet again.

Your anthropological project is about the confluence of technological and spiritual imaginations. There is little discussion of political and economic power as part of the equation. Why is that and what would your theory look like if you had included power?

I see New Edge as a discourse that travels through and across different kinds of socio-economic and political niches. And being a discourse, New Edge is not something that defines, in any fixed sense, someone’s identity. Just bringing this back to Burning Man, for instance, people go there from different kinds of backgrounds. This is so in economic sense: some participants are millionaires and are funding for entire camps while others save up all year to be able to “come home”. For one camp leader that I met, going to Burning Man was a tremendous financial sacrifice – that she was more than happy to make – since she was in such debt that she had started living in a shed in her backyard while renting out her own house. Within the larger New Edge sphere, there is also relative diversity in terms of political philosophy. Some of my interviewees were quite outspokenly libertarians, others were very much opposed to libertarianism and celebrating social democratic values. The New Edge discourse has the capacity to unite such differences. It does so in its explicit rejection of political debate and its outward refusal to validate formal status roles and in its emphasis on the body, on style and on human consciousness. As such – just as the 1960s hippies did – New Edge quite deliberately manifests itself in non-political terms.

Perhaps because the core of my dissertation is concerned with a discussion of New Edge contested understandings of consciousness, nature, evolution, style, and the body, it may seem not to involve a discussion of politics and socio-economics. It would be good to make this more explicit in further work, but there is quite a lot of implicit attention in my work for the power-politics underneath this New Edge negation of politics. For instance, I give the a-historical self-imaginary of New Edge a history; I root the transcendental aspirations of New Edge in actual physical bodies; I show the material conditions that enable a place like Burning Man to be experienced in non-political, naturalistic ways and I am critical of self-narratives that are explicitly dismissing discussions of socio-economics. For instance, in a newspaper article published after Burning Man 2005, when Hurricane Katrina had hit and some burners had set off to the East Coast to help clear up the mess, the writer was arguing that burners were specifically predisposed to being able to do this work, where official government failed. This was so, he wrote, because burners had understood the “bedrock value of water, diesel, and serviceable tools.” He argued that Burning Man was all about learning such values and becoming self-reliant beings, making burners predisposed to “lead” when the larger socio-economic system collapses. Of course, “water, diesel and serviceable tools” are not values but material goods. Along with the free time that these burners had at their disposal to go to the disaster area, and with the technologies and kinds of jobs that allowed them to work from a distance, these material goods are quite characteristic of the privileged position that these burners are having within the socio-economic system they seek to replace. I have been similarly critical towards the New Edge ideology of radical open-endedness, its celebration of fluidity and of boundary-crossing, arguing how these notions of flexibility are quite gendered and exclusive of people who are socio-economically ‘stuck’ in the bodies and in their material circumstances.

So, in these ways I did bring in discussions of power into the equation, yet, I didn’t feel the need to extend this into a critique of New Edge. This is so in the first place because I have been mainly concerned with understanding New Edge living, and secondly because there is much of this type of self-criticism within New Edge circles as well. To draw a parallel, there is much critique, both from the political right and the left, regarding the alleged ‘hypocrisy’ of Occupy protesters since the system they are trying to transcend is simultaneously giving them the resources to protest. Occupiers are often aware of this paradox themselves, yet it is not stopping them to try and change the system. Similarly, there is a lot of such ‘double-consciousness’ going on within New Edge circles and rather than critique it, I see it as something that is so characteristic of reflexive societies today that it is extremely worth-while to study it ethnographically – in non-normative ways.

Some of your key interviewees are cultural writers just like you. Some anthropologists have discussed the lateral, horizontal, or interface ethnography when the anthropologist and informant share an equal power-field, discursive community, and skill set. What do your methods or research tell us about the ethnographic project not studying up or down but sideways?

Yes, all my interviewees were in fact habitually thinking with me, interested in meta-perspectives, in connections between different kinds of ideas, and some of them – Erik Davis and Ken Goffman most notably – are, indeed professional writers. Furthermore, most of my interviewees had also formally studied, read or been implicitly informed by anthropological literature and anthropological concepts. This was testified by the off-hand way in which the notion of ‘liminality’, or the concept of the ‘homo ludens’ was used to describe the nature of the Burning Man festival and of how people were here behaving. Also, documentaries and books were constantly produced within this cultural environment that dealt with the exact same convergences that I was seeking to study. At one point, I began to take photographs of the many impressively filled bookshelves of my interviewees as a way of visualizing this self-reflexivity.

One of the ways that I dealt with my ‘schizophrenic position’ being a researcher in a highly self-reflexive field, was by becoming alert to the differences in the ways that we handled theoretic, reflexive concepts. I saw it as one of my tasks to make these distinctions explicit. For instance, I noticed that when using the idea of liminality when talking about a place like Burning Man, my interviewees did not so much use it in the Turnerian sense of going through a period of chaos to become part of the structures of society afterwards. Instead, they were striving for a sense of permanent liminality, for a permanent detachment from structure. Anthropology, in this way, in fact became a kind of ‘New Age science’ (Hanegraaff 1996) – i.e. a scientific legitimation for quite mystical ideas.

In general, what my research tells me about the ethnographic project of ‘studying sideways’, first, is that the types of questions one asks as an ethnographer, as well as the types of relationships one builds and the type of insights one gains are quite different from what ‘classical anthropology’ is generally considered to be. Secondly, I believe that there is by far not enough attention to this in the larger academic anthropological sphere, nor for the ethnographic phenomenon of self-reflexivity in general. Most anthropological studies still take for granted that it is the anthropologist who is reflective and that the ‘respondents’ are not at all aware of what they do. This implicit notion, for instance, has led some ethnographers to conceptualize Burning Man as a religious space, where people experience true authenticity – through dance for instance – and where they are genuinely free from the consumer-oriented, artificial, rationalistic larger western society. Yet, what is not accounted for in such studies is not only that there is much consumption, artificiality and rationalistic ideology going on in and around Burning Man, but also that many burners are quite self-conscious about this. For instance, burners generally realize quite well that Burning Man is an artificial environment that may quite well enable the experience of extraordinary things that have a mystical, natural feel to it. This ‘double consciousness’, I believe, requires not so much a “willing suspense of disbelief”, but as Michael Saler (2004) recently wrote about the ironic imagination, a habit of mind that allows people to “willingly believe with the double-minded awareness that they are engaging in pretence.” When, as a researcher, you take into account also such kinds of reflexivity, and the ironic imagination in particular, you ask different – and in my opinion more interesting – questions about the cultural complexity of today’s post-industrial societies – about how people negotiate different kinds of frameworks and perspectives that are logically and knowingly incompatible.

A final comment I would like to make about ‘studying sideways’ is that this notion runs the risk of covering up the cultural complexity of today’s world. The notion suggests that there is some kind of plane that is shared by particular kinds of people, who can move ‘sideways’ to have a peek into each other’s affairs. Yet, much of my research in reflexive communities – both in California as well as in the hacker scenes of the Netherlands – still felt like treading on unfamiliar territory. At times it was clear that I shared much socio-economic and intellectual background with my interviewees. At other moments such similarities appeared only superficial and much interpretative and translative work needed to be done to bridge the many subtle ways in which we experienced and conceptualized the world differently.

A number of anthropologists studying digital culture, Biella Coleman and Chris Kelty among them, argue that many manifestations of computer culture can be traced back to classical liberal theory and an emphasis on individuality, freedom of expression, etc. Can you square your research with this ontogenesis?

Yes certainly. In fact, I believe it is this liberal aspect through which computer culture and New Age are related. The emphasis on ‘freedom’ and particularly on ‘liberation’, as well as on the expressive self and the self-evolving and self-realizing human individual, are themes that account in large part for the sympathies between the ‘hippies’ and ‘hackers’ of the Bay Area. These notions translate, for instance, into the celebration of technology as art, of technology creators as artists and into rituals that seek to ‘decondition’ human beings (as well as technology).

Yet, this understanding that New Edge has liberal grounding is only anthropologically meaningful if we understand liberalism here in a broad sense, as similarly understood also by Coleman (and no doubt also by Kelty). Whereas Steven Levy’s notion of the Hacker Ethic, as defined in his 1984 book Hackers, suggests for instance that hacker culture is liberal, this ethic rarely translates into one uniform mode of behavior or political attitude among hackers. As I learned from my research, and as Peter Samson, one of the hackers that Levy wrote about, told me, some hackers translate the notion of freedom into a radical libertarian ideology, whereas for others their engagement with computer technology ties in with their sense of social responsibility. This may be related to the experience of being the creator of a system that users don’t understand the technicalities of. Or it may come from having to agree, socially, on a set of ethics and rules of conduct within computer systems. I think ‘computer culture’, if there is such a thing, is characterized by an interesting tension between these two aspects – a sense of individual freedom and expression and of social responsibility. Such tensions most certainly characterize debates within this New Edge cultural sphere.

One of my observations, for instance, regarded the implementation of the ideal of Doing It Yourself at Burning Man. In self-reflective narratives, Burning Man seems to be all about Doing It Yourself, about creating your own reality ‘from scratch’, quite independent from the cultural notions and social constraints of the larger society. Yet, alongside this fantasy of individual autonomy, both in hacker culture and in New Age scenes, there is also a kind of opposite longing – a longing to fuse, to become one with some kind of larger environment. To put it bluntly, for hackers this is the intelligence of computer networks and for New Agers this is the wisdom of the universe. Yet, this longing for self-transcendence and fusion is often frustrated in the context of everyday life: the people I studied don’t generally find themselves living in systems that they trust. This may be due to the understanding that computer networks are controlled by (opaque) corporations and government agencies and that corporate and ideological hegemonic interests conspire with contemporary media technologies to ‘distort’ people’s ideas about reality and about who is to be trusted. This is why and how an environment such as Burning Man is important for my interviewees. It offers an environment of trust. Here one can give oneself over to a larger environment – to the hallucinogenic substances, the artworks, the food offered, the dances, the light-shows – that is created by people that are known or that can be known potentially. A sense of paranoia, experienced in the context of everyday life, is here transformed into a sense of ‘pronoia’. This term was first coined in the context of raves and refers to the notion that the universe conspires to give you exactly that what you need. Both paranoia and pronoia are rooted in the awareness of being part of and controlled by a larger system, yet, paranoia comes from having to depend on a system that cannot be trusted and pronoia comes from giving oneself over to a system that is trusted. This divide informs much of the social embeddedness of the liberal belief in individual autonomy. This is the case at least in the context of New Edge but I think also in the context of hacker culture more generally.

Your work is mainly about a period of time between 2005-2008. This culture moves fast. If you were to continue this specific project where would you go and what would you do?

While you are right in the sense that technocultural development moves fast, I am quite interested in studying certain continuities within the technocultural landscape of post-industrial societies since the 1960s. What I’d love to continue doing, for instance, is to focus on the historically developed cultural tensions that I observed in this New Edge environment, and to see how these tensions intersect with the kind of technocultural negotiations that are taking place in the Netherlands today – and probably in other places as well.

For instance, one tension that I find characteristic of the New Edge environment is what I just discussed: on the one hand, there is a lot of commentary and experiential testimony of the notion that people today are becoming more and more part of opaque, complex, incomprehensible corporate and technological networks. At the same time, what remains firmly standing in this environment is the ideal of the autonomous self-possessed human individual – expressed in the ideologies of Doing It Yourself, Creating Your Own Reality and the notion that it is possible to use these otherwise complex technologies to have some kind of transparent access to Reality. I think you could say that two different notions of what technology is, are here converging: on the one hand technology is conceived of as an enveloping system. On the other hand it is seen as a tool that one can use to realize one’s individual desires.

This is one tension that I am now seeking to study in the context of technocultural negotiations in the Netherlands today: within New Edge, as well as in the larger context of technology innovation in the Netherlands, the artistic sphere has played a large role in fostering the notion of technology being inherently and ultimately flexible, complex and unexpected in its outcomes. Various tech-art institutions in the Netherlands have been wedded to this notion, and have co-operated with hackers and artists to study the flexibility of technology, to push it to its limits and to solicit unexpected results – the ideals of multiplicity, open-endedness and emergence, are quite important here, and wedded also to the idea that, ultimately, what it means to be human is open-ended. Some of these artistic institutions have received government subsidies for their explorations, sometimes in combination with corporate or private investment. Yet, recently in the Netherlands, a cultural atmosphere has emerged that is extremely hostile towards art, and towards any kind of practice that does not straightforwardly produce a tangible profit-making product. This negative atmosphere is intensified by parties now in parliament that have successfully pushed for extreme budget-cuts, targeting specifically art institutions. So, currently, only institutions that are capable of producing concrete, profit-making products as part of their technological explorations, paradoxically, remain eligible for subsidy.

In this context, the institutions that I am seeking to study are having to intensify their negotiation of two technological frameworks that are different and conflicting in the ontological sense: on the one hand, the notion that technology is open-ended, and on the other hand, the notion that technology is a tool, used to solve identifiable problems, catering to the demands of the markets and able, in this way, to generate profit and to justify its own existence. An overarching question that I have, while seeking to study these ontological and institutional negotiations between different understandings of technology, is regarding the political, material and socio-economic bases for the neoliberal ideal of the autonomous, DIY individual – since I believe it is this ideal that is present in both ontological frameworks and that may reveal their common basis – and that may reveal what both accounts leave out of the equation.

And yes, this research does not involve a study of Virtual Reality software but addresses any kind of technology that is now attracting the attention of artists, hackers and corporations – most significantly being new forms of energy-generation tools, new kinds of sensor-based mobile technologies, and bio-nanotechnologies.

In December 2010 Zandbergen finished her PhD dissertation, “New Edge: Technology and Spirituality in the San Francisco Bay Area,” on the dynamic relationship between new forms of spirituality and politics on the one hand, and digital technologies on the other, as shaped in the past 30 years in Silicon Valley, California. A book chapter was recently published, “Silicon Valley New Age: the co-constitution of the digital and the sacred” in Religions of Modernity: Relocating the Sacred to the Self and the Digital. She elaborated on her dissertation in a recent post, “Combining Extreme Distrust and Spastic Bursts of Blind Faith… What New Edge Culture has to say about Today’s Schizophrenic Information Society.” Previously she has taught the course “Anthropology of the Information Society” at the University of Leiden. She is presently a Postdoctoral scholar at the University of Leiden in “The Future is Elsewhere” program. 

About a week later, as the scale of suffering in Japan became clearer, I became less concerned with everybody else’s questionable investments in the pain of others and more suspicious of my own hesitancy to engage emotionally.

Although I frowned and cried as solicited upon seeing the unavoidable photos of people staggering through muddy ruins, I wasn’t sure how to feel the rest of the time.  Brian Massumi’s claim that

“power is no longer fundamentally normative, like it was in its disciplinary forms—it’s affective”

suggests that stories and images circulate and infiltrate strategically. Even though, as de Certeau reminds us, readers aren’t fools and we employ tactics with which to play and navigate the web of discourse, we’re still stuck inside of it—and it inside of us.  Our critique of media, savvy avoidance of manipulation, and resistance to being told how to feel are themselves already the threads of discourses that have been woven into us.

Part of me wants to believe that some basic feeling for the suffering of others arises before all of this, that there’s a relational web prior and in excess to the discursive one—and that it’s woven more tightly.

But if the mass mediated means through which we gain access to others is always already shaping how we feel for those others, how can we feel without capitulating to the powers that traffic in affect? In the case of catastrophes, which seem to (fairly regularly) punctuate the passage of ordinary life with significance, how do we resist the meaning-making machines while still engaging meaningfully?

I’ll explore these questions here and in a series of posts to follow by looking into the ways various media structure our experiences of disaster and construe “eventfulness.” Considering the political and social interests at stake in Japan and the US, I’m curious about how this particular disaster is being positioned in historical time, and what such placements obscure, or displace.  But mostly, as I meditate on my own relationship with Japan and reaction to the unfolding news, I wonder how to engage responsibly with media and the “real” event.   Helpful to this project is Diana Taylor’s model of the witness who, reflecting Louis Althusser’s model of dialectic spectatorship and Augusto Boal’s “spect-actor”, serves as a

“guarantor of the link between the I and the you, the inside and the outside”and “accepts the dangers and responsibilities of seeing and of acting on what one has seen.”

This task is not easy considering how often we are bombarded with images and news of disaster.  People tell me that they either feel distant and numb to the repeating images, or else they connect to the images through identification: imagining the people in the images are one’s own mother, brother, etc.  The problem with the latter approach is that it brings the other into one’s own ideological universe and blinds one to the political, cultural, and other factors that structure the experience of the event.

These modes of spectatorship are not unlike those of hegemony and identification criticized by Althusser in relationship to theater.  However, when we are dealing with the theater of the real, and its tendency towards catastrophe, the ideological agendas organizing devastation into spectacle elicit modes of relating, as well as detaching, that register in the body.

Quoting the work of Hal Foster regarding shock and subjectivity in America, anthropologist Allen Feldman points to the double nature of the subject’s pleasure:

“in its guise as witness the mass subject reveals its sadomasochistic aspect, for this subject is split in relation to a disaster; even as he or she may mourn the victims, even identify with them masochistically, he or she may also be thrilled sadistically by the victims of whom he or she is not one.”

Feldman raises the stakes when he explicitly links the creation of the “mass subject” in modernity to catastrophe and the visual technologies through which the catastrophic is ideologically produced and distributed.  Developing a theory of the “actuarial gaze,” which he describes as

“the visual organization and institutionalization of threat perception and prophylaxis,” Feldman asserts that “the visual culture of risk reportage circulates catastrophic images as a psychosocial and, ultimately, political desire and currency.”

The visceral intensities ignited and snuffed in these visual images constitute the subjectivity from which we establish ourselves as a public, and how we, as a public, are going to relate or not.

I’d like to say that my reluctance to participate in the disaster drama stemmed solely from a refusal to let this awful thing give me any sort pleasure, masochistic or otherwise.  Or that I harbored sophisticated political suspicions of risk reportage.

But I was primarily loathe to identify with the community of spectators I imagined excitedly rallying their concern on the receiving end of the mediated image.  It was the thrill of the social—the heightened sense of occasion—that I couldn’t stand.  Nothing, it seemed, would make me feel so far away, so alienated from the thing in itself than positioning myself from this A-frame cottage in Iowa somewhere inside the Big Deal Event.  As for approaching the thing in itself, I knew of no other means than those used by the community of spectators themselves: disaster footage.  But did I really want to go there?  As elaborated by Zizek, the “passion for penetrating the Real Thing” spirals into an increasingly violent pursuit of the Real within the images that structure our reality.  I did not want to experience the tsunami as the “thrill of the Real,” the ultimate special effect.

An internet search brought me to a video of the tsunami swallowing the coastal town of Kuji where I had stayed with a family nearly 10 years ago.   The dreadful thrill of the footage did indeed flood my body darkly, excessively, like the tsunami itself.  Feeling my own footing give way, despite sitting down, I braced myself.  Had someone been next to me, however, I would have reached out to them, without thinking, to steady myself.

I wonder now about that instinct.  Why, when something awful or awesome is about to happen, or has just happened, do we tend to grab on to the people next to us?  Surely, the support sought by such a gesture isn’t merely that of balance, but of affiliation.   I hadn’t wanted to get on the drama bandwagon, but here I was: wanting to connect.

The public I imagined gaping from a safe distance was probably not the public into which my friend had been calling me when she sent me that facebook message.   Rather than use the event to elevate the drama in our lives, she may have been reaching out to me in order to ground the drama in a shared reality. This is not to say she was trying to reduce the significance of the event; the ordinary world has its own sort of eventfulness.  As Kathleen Stewart describes it,

“modes of attending to scenes and events spawn socialities, identities, dream worlds, bodily states and public feelings of all kinds.”

The everyday eventfulness “resonating in bodies, scenes, and forms of sociality,” spreads in whispers and flourishes in indeterminacy.  Something is happening, is going to happen, to us.  The mode is one of suspension that fastens potential significance onto the tiniest of things.  The effect isn’t of elevating reality into ungraspable proportions, but of charging reality with limitless points of connection.

While the looming risk perception propagated in the “actuarial gaze” may make and mask the ways in which we always feel vulnerable to invisible, ever-present and threatening powers, maybe it fails to displace the ways we feel vulnerable to each other.   The witness, unlike the spectator, creates a zone of proximity in the “link between the I and the you”.   Amidst the spectacular scenes of ruin, my old friend took the risk of writing me after all this time, took the risk of hearing bad news and having to respond, and took the risk of being criticized or blogged about.  In doing so she offered me the first clue for thinking about mediated models for responsible action.

You crave a different meme, something old school, circa around 2009. You could go to the YouTube Classics app, but strangely your favorite video never made it to 100 million views and so wasn’t promoted to YouTube Classics. Your television system is connected to the internet but the public internet browser app is buried in the systems folder on your networked TV. Besides, if you could find the browser app you can’t find a keyboard to type out search terms. You drop the idea of following a personal impulse and go with what you can see through the window of the professionally curated suite of applications.

This description of a limited and safe television viewing experience of the future is meant to evoke a feeling that the limitless content and freedom that we associate with internet video is quickly being truncated by the hardware and software engineers in cahoots with the content app designers to make a much more safe, convenient, and professional internet. This is quite easy to see in the world of internet video—once the land of the most subversive, graphic, and comic content possible—is now being overhauled by professionals producing, curating, optimizing, and streaming ‘quality’ videos to homes on proprietary hardware. Many of us interested in the democratization of media, the absence of conglomerate consolidation, the presence of “generative” digital tools, video activism, and indigenous media should be concerned by these trends. This era will be seen as the historical pioneering era of internet video idealism (2005-2009).

Earlier this month, in re-introducing Apple’s internet connected TV set top box, the iTV, Steve Jobs claimed that people want “Hollywood movies and TV shows…they don’t want amateur hour.” What Jobs is saying is that we are entering a new era of professionalism—gone is the wild Darwinian kingdom of video memes, the meritocracy of the rabble rousers, the open platforms equally prioritizing the talented poor as well as the rich. Jobs has never been one to parrot the ‘democratization of media’ ideal. Never one championing collective design or the wisdom of the crowd (if only to fanatically buy his hardware), Jobs firmly believes in the auteur, the singular virtuosity of the genius designer, engineer, and director to make a professionally superior object of art and function. The upcoming golden age of ‘quality’ professional content will be ruled by Jobs and his ilk at HBO, Pixar, Hulu, LG, and Vizio.

Jobs’ vision is but one example showing that the pioneer age of the free and open culture of internet video is ending. Current TV, from 2005-2008, aired 30% user-generated documentaries and produced a cable television network that modeled democracy. Today they are taking pitches only from top Hollywood TV producers. The YouTube Partner’s program, like the very talented Next New Networks—the talent agents for Obama Girl and Auto-Tune the News—culls the ripest and most viral video producers from YouTube and optimizes them for the attachment of profitable commercials. Once pruned and preened, these YouTube cybercelebrities are promoted on the hottest real estate on the internet, YouTube’s frontpage, making 6-figures for themselves while finally making YouTube profitable.

Subcultural activities going mainstream is nothing new, the radical 60s cable guerilla television crew, TVTV, went from making ironic investigations into the 1972 Republican and Democratic conventions to making regular puff pieces for broadcast. World of Wonder, the queerest television company in Hollywood, has been bringing the sexual and gender underground to mainstream cable television for decades. For examples, see my documentary on World of Wonder.

But it is the first example regarding IPTV—internet-based direct to consumer ‘television’ such as Apple’s iTV—that will bring only the best of internet video to the home that most concerns me. The professional domestication of internet video in the home, I fear, will forever wipe out the memory of the wicked and subversive video memes of the YouTube past. With it will go the very ethos of participatory video culture. My colleagues in the Open Video movement can collectively design the hell out of open video apps, editing systems, protocols, and videos standards but no one using these free and open source video systems will be seen if proprietary IPTV covers both software and hardware, internet and television, in both the home and the office.

The process I am describing can best be articulated as a historical process of professionalization. The wild world of amateur video—its production, promotion, and distribution procedures—is moving from the realm of prototyping, beta-testing, and experimentation to expert production, algorithmic optimization, and alpha release five years after its debut on YouTube and Current TV. This professionalization is a historical result of 5 years of industrial development, individual trial and error, and profit-focused talent agencies and creative thinktanks. It is also a product of the historical convergence of the internet and television hardware, as well as the corporate consolidation of content and software around the idea of the app—a professionally designed hardware/software/content peephole into a small fraction of the internet. More anthropological however is the historical transformation of the subculture into the culture. This has been happening forever and is the engine of popular culture and we shouldn’t be so hip and retro as to bemoan it. But we should be concerned with the loss of that realm of artistic and political potential encoded in the free and open internet. The “golden age” to follow this pioneering phase will be as innovative as the golden age of television as we welcome the equivalent of I Love Lucy, Friends, and Lost and along with it the return to spectatorism, canned laughter, and the proliferation of middle class values.

Here’s the deal. Digital media firms using experimental methods with emergent technologies in indeterminate market systems use words that can model the stuff anthropologists care about. I’ll compare terms platform to culture, application to subculture, beta to process, and privacy to power.

Is Platform to Culture as Application is to Subculture?

Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Apple’s iPhone are platforms on which whole networks or galaxies of different social and economic systems flourish. These companies’ platforms are becoming the broadest cultural ecosystems within which all other digital social activity exists.

Like culture there is constraint and agency on the platform. The constraint comes from the terms of service, the affordances of the online architecture, and the rights given by the platform holder. Platforms are almost universally proprietary—privately owned. The overall platform itself cannot be adjusted except by holy command from the CEO. Giving a cut to the CEO, developers can make applications on platforms. The ability to development on the platform is the agency, as is the ability to surf, scam, and surveil on the platform. Developers have the capacity to transform the mechanics of a proximal space of the platform via application programming interfaces (APIs). People come into contact with the app–be it a game, a badge of identity, or a little tool–and their digital social lives are slightly adjusted.

Humble scholars desiring to say something about the platform:culture should begin by studying the practices occurring on apps:subcultures. Zynga—the makers of apps:subcultures Farmville and Mafia Wars, two games on Facebook with millions of gamers, is a more manageable research project with discrete parameters, practices, and ideology, than studying the platform:culture of Facebook or Google head on, which like culture is always in flux.

Culture is Permanently Beta

It isn’t news that culture is not static. Sociologists Neff and Stark studied New York City digital media firms during the Web 1.0 bubble, claiming these companies were in a state of “permanent beta”—never finished and therefore responsive to the chaos of the market and the unforeseen on the technological horizon.

Gmail is an outrageously successful application designed by Google for the Google platform. It has been around for years and it is still in beta. In What Would Google Do? journalist Jeff Jarvis makes the point that Google takes the risk of releasing their products in beta and achieves corporate transparency and greater social activity by letting the user in on the preliminary R&D experience. Is Google a bellwether for larger cultural processes of which platforms and beta releases are quintessential qualities of this emergent cultural system?

“Permanent beta” is an apt anthropological description of historically situated cultural activity. I don’t need to remind anthropologists or SM readers that beta is a description of culture itself that is always in process, historically variable, emergent, etc.

Is Culture Open or Private?

Several overlapping ideologies from the historical development of the internet highlight the importance of collaboration, openness, and transparency as preemptive measures to check the centralization of information power. In all cultural formations, those good things must be vigilantly monitored and fought for. I’d argue that collaboration and openness as corporate principles is new and may suggest that the technological affordances of digital technologies make less openness in social technology less profitable. If richly communicative social practices require open systems, and these digital firms are in the business of digital sociality, it behooves these CEOs to create decentralized and open systems. We see some of this openness and collaborative spirit in Google and Facebook as platforms and beta systems—despite their indifference to corporate transparency and their antagonism against what they see as provincial notions of personal privacy.

So how do the trends towards more personal transparency and less privacy fit into this theory of culture as a digital system? Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg really thinks the world will be more communicative and therefore more peaceful and mutually forgiving if only more people were less secretive and more honest about who they are. Protecting and respecting individuals’ private rituals, sentiments, and remarks is a primary objective of anthropological methods. Much important cultural work is done opaquely through symbols, in the depths of kivas, and behind closed doors. Does this sense of culture as a beta platform that is historically agitating towards greater openness and individual transparency give credence to Zuck’s algocratic design for world peace?

One problem with the theory that culture is like a digital system is that this platform:culture is corporately designed. The API may provide developers agency akin to social contracts. The digital firm may be motivated less by profit making and more by mission motives. But doesn’t the fact that the entire ecosystem is proprietary trouble the notion of platform:culture? Nobody owns the protocols—the total realm of possibility within cultural systems—like Zuck does Facebook or Jobs does Apple. Platforms may be like culture but unlike culture you can pull the plug on the platform should it cease to be profitable or fun for the shareholders. And yet, aren’t firms, platforms, and applications populated by people constrained and enabled by the same processes that exist outside of their digital systems?

Blizzard is one of the largest gaming companies in the US (and perhaps globally), and it runs several different virtual worlds and online games — chief among them being World of Warcraft, a virtual world I’ve done over a year of fieldwork in. RealID is basically Blizz’s way of linking all these worlds together — if you friend someone’s RealID, you can chat and hang out with them no matter what game they are playing. RealId thus turns all of Blizz’s games, which sort of always acted as chat rooms for the people playing them, into one giant meta-chatroom. Now when my scarily erudite beloved is playing a Tauren druid on one realm while I’m playing a Dwarf hunter on another, we can still plan what to have for dinner over chat. People are pissed off, though, because RealID will also connect the web-based forums that Blizzard hosts. In-game RealID is optional — if you don’t want to friend anyone no one will know that your undead rogue ClownKillazzzz is actually you. But in the forums, you will have no choice but reveal your True Name.

There is a lot to say about these changes — about how Blizzard is, borg-like, trying to mimic and absorb popular social games like Mafia Wars; about how Blizzard might be willing to take the heat of universal disapproval if it means creating forums where people are more civil because their identities are known; about the way a small number of people running companies get to decide what counts and privacy and how much of it and what kind we want; and so forth.

The best commentary I’ve seen on these changes so far is Tim Burke’s commentary at Terra Nova:

Blizzard is increasingly looking like both like the dominant force in its field and like the last of its kind all at once, a huge success that did not inaugurate but instead capped a particular cultural form.

I think Tim is really right about this — five years ago people were predicting tons and tons of MMOGs would spring up and become new lotus worlds into which we would disappear. Since then we’ve seen tons of contenders to WoW rise up and, by and large, phail. In my opinion, Tim and others like him are right: virtual worlds are not the beginning of a trend of massive disembodiment and removal from our fleshy biographies, but just something cool that happened for fifteen years around the turn of the century.

I’ve argued in my recent article in Anthropological Quarterly that we cannot think of virtual worlds as islands of culture to be explored without reference to the real-world engagement of their denizens, and that researchers who study virtual worlds labor under culturally-induced conceptions of these worlds separateness from the ‘real world’ because of the intellectual baggage that comes from their expressivist cultural backgrounds (also, the visual nature of the worlds helps facilitate the illusion of separateness). That is why my study of WoW is a study of  American culture when it goes online.

Increasingly the goal is to understand the interaction of projects available in the game (cooperative farming in Farmville, raid progression in WoW) with projects derived from people’s meat-world biographies (feed the kids, graduate from college). In particular, the focus should be on ‘virtual world ideologies’: the explicit ideas that people have about the way that virtual worlds interact with actual ones. To a certain extent, my paper was a study of the virtual world ideology of previous researchers of virtual worlds. Tim points out that:

casual games… are something that many people don’t mind having associated with their public lives… because they’re seen as compatible with productive work and with mainstream sociality. World of Warcraft… is not and won’t ever be that kind of activity. Joining the office betting pool and going bowling for three hours are intrinsically different things in terms of time and process and compatibility with other activities.

I agree although with a caveat — it is the culturally mediated perception of the fit of these different projects that will effect how they are perceived. it is not too hard to imagine a world where Mafia Wars play is seen as a sign of moral depravity and obsession with violence, whereas raid attendance in WoW with your company-sponsored guild is mandatory as a way to build office unity and you’re not allowed to protest that it eats into your free time.

All fieldsites change, and it is one of the jobs of the anthropologist to produce work to help commemorate the lives of the people we live with — particularly since most of the time they are too busy living to remember to take pictures of convenience store or save copies of the church bulletin. But it is something else again to think that your entire fieldsite might become technologically obsolete and someday disappear, living behind only a swirling mass of traces in archive.org.

People often ask me why I try to document Warcraft instead of ‘some remote tribe’ when the remote tribe’s culture is — so they presume — undocumented and in the process of disappearing while virtual worlds are populated by educated white people and thus will be — presumably — remembered forever.

But the truth is that not only is life ephemeral, but digital life doubly so. It is much easier to capture as data because it is always already made out of data: recording your screen is much easier than recording your visual field. But I think (and I could be wrong) that at some level it is a lot harder to demolish a cathedral or a firestation than it is to switch off the electricity to a colocation facility hosting whole worlds inside its racks of cooled, humming servers.

Many involved with World of Warcraft are already aware that Cataclysm, the new expansion to the game, will change the face of the in-game world forever in a way that will make The Old Days the stuff of memory. But it may be that the game itself needs to be documented, and the memories of it need to be ordered and spun out into a story now, while the game is here.

Of course all that is a long way away, but with every update of the game the world changes a little, and with the rollout of RealID it will change a lot. As a result, strangely, virtual worlds may have more to teach us about salvage ethnography than the indigenous peoples who have so stubbornly and successfully resisted predictions about the inevitability of their disappearance.

Malaby and Burke, in an extremely intelligent and thoughtful piece (which is available currently if you sign up for Sage’s free trial period) argue that there is an emergent ‘pragmatic’ trend in the studies of games, a trend exemplified in the articles that they include in their special issue. Beyond this main thrust, however, they also provide a wider historical reading of game studies. Specifically, they claim that the early game studies was highly interdisciplinary, that this interdisciplinarity was fruitful, and that over time there are reasons to believe it could go away A more disciplinary, less fruitful future, they argue, is the result of increasing forces of professionalization, competition for funding, and other factors. A field called ‘game studies’ did not emerge out of this moment, and is not likely to — rather, the work of understanding virtual worlds is being domesticated in different disciplines.

I agree with their argument, and I tend to think of it as the development of an ‘area studies’ approach to virtual worlds. Like Latin America or Southeast Asia (but without the icky cold war funding structures), it seems to me that virtuals worlds are now areas in which several disciplines work, each in their own way. Its a familiar structure that results in the standard ‘two conference’ professional structure many of us are part of: I go to the anthropology conference, and I go to the Pacific conference; or I go to the sociology meetings, and that Latin America meetings; or I go to American Studies and Political Science.

Coleman’s forthcoming article and Miller’s posting seem to demonstrate that Malaby and Burke are right: in both cases anthropologists are writing pieces which suggest a canonization of a study of digital anthropology (or virtual worlds) is under way — or ought to be. The difference is one of tone — Malaby and Burke seem to lament the wild frontier days of game studies while Miller seems to be glad that such studies are becoming Normal Science in anthropology.

I must admit that I am much more sympathetic to Malaby and Burke’s position than Miller’s. I am glad that there are more anthropologists working on virtual worlds now, because this means a larger community of people to talk to. But at the same time there is the danger of academic enclosure (in the ‘of the commons’ sense): an unwillingness to reach out to disciplines, and a chauvinistic sense that only anthropology’s way is the only appropriate way to study the digital.

Obviously, Miller’s brief piece is light years from this sort of exclusionism. But I do think its reading of the present moment is awfully presentist. Miller points to four books — Malaby’s Making Virtual Worlds, Dibbell’s Play Money, Boellstorff’s Coming of Age in Second Life, and Kelty’s Two Bits — as marking a particular year for digital anthropology. But Dibbell is not an anthropologist, and if you think his work demonstrates that ethnographic writing of virtual worlds is coming of age, then you must think that coming of age happened a decade ago, when his first (and more ethnographic) book My Tiny Life appeared. Kelty is something wonderful but not exactly what you would call Orthodox Anthropology — he doesn’t have a degree in Just Anthropology, and doesn’t currently teach in an anthropology department. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll claim him as one of my own any day of the week, but Chris’s career is an example of the power of interdisciplinarity in the hands of someone scarily smart, not the disciplinization of digital anthropology. I think what Miller’s post really indicates is that two scholars who were early adopters of virtual worlds caught the Second Life wave before it hit, and then the books appeared shortly after the bubble for enthusiasm for Second Life burst — because that is how long it takes to write books.

I’m worried about origin stories for an anthropology of the digital the searches for a founding moment since such a ‘disciplinary history’ serves to create a ‘workable past’ to allow work to occur in the present (I am trying to reference here the introduction to Don Levine’s Visions of the Sociological Tradition). I have no problem with this as long as we remember such disciplinary histories are presentist and partial, and foreclose alternate imaginings of the past. In a world with such a rich interdisciplinary body of study of digital worlds I’d hate for anthropologists to begin telling each other stories that made us forgetful of great early collections like Wired Women or books such as My Tiny Life, especially when the two Toms (Malaby and Boellstorff) spend so much time in their work reminding us of this earlier tradition.

Of course Miller is a thoughtful scholar and hardly interested in foreclosing possibilities for thinking the past of digital anthropology. But my personal preference would be to look for good work — no matter whether it comes from anthropologists, cultural studies types, or smart fanboys with blogs — as broadly as possible, and to try to imagine as long a history as possible for digital anthropology. My current reading list on virtual worlds includes Tuan Yifu’s Escapism (bizarre and yet compelling), Ritual and Its Consequences by Seligman et. al (which I really like), and I’m making the students in my virtual worlds class this semester read sermons like “Self Reliance” (Emerson), “Transformed Noncomformist” (MLK) and “A Discourse on the Present Vileness of the Body, And Its Future Glorious Change By Christ” (Mather Byles, 1732 — turns out that guy thinks his avatar is going to look more like him than his body does, too).

So in sum, I think the growth of anthropological interest in digital phenomenon is a good thing, but it does have its own potential pathologies, and I also think it has a long prehistory and many interdisciplinary connections which I think it should embrace. Its good to develop a sense of who we are and where we’re going but… let’s make sure we don’t forget who we might be, and where we might have gone.

Web 2.0 still had only one business model, advertising, and the Valley was refusing to admit that only one company (Google) with only one of its products (search advertising) had proved that the model really worked. The older internet firms, Yahoo! and AOL, were doing their best to grab a piece of the action. But the “next big things” were selling negligible advertising, often on one another’s sites. Not one of them has become an advertising success in its own right.

A suggested alternative is for them to make money through the interactions of their users (I don’t know why, but I find it a bit unsettling):

While today, these may not look like great businesses (which hasn’t stopped investors’ willingness to fund them), I’m convinced that the daily interactions of their vast memberships–and their users’ willingness to share their interests, tastes, relationships and intentions, and the massive amounts of data around users’ behavior–will eventually lead to substantial revenues and profits.

These discussions have got me wondering whether we might not be wrong in thinking of the sites in terms of how much money might be made from them. Don’t get me wrong, I use some of them, and I find them very useful, but I think that we should not throw away the idea that they might in fact not lend themselves to being turned into money-making tools.

UPDATE
I did not mean to imply that social networking sites should not be making money, and I did not wish to imply any distaste for money-making. As a person who uses them, and who would like to continue doing so, I would like them to make money so that they can continue operating. This post was meant to suggest that they probably would not make money because their model for generating revenue is largely based on advertising, which, as I noted, is currently not working. Another option would be to charge users for using the sites. I personally do not think this would work because people still view them as a sort of commons, therefore paying for their use might not exactly sit well with the users.

Also, as some of you may know, Polity Press has a series of small introductory readers on blogging, hacking etc. But there is more to it than just that — they have a “website”:http://www.polity.co.uk/digitalmediaandsociety/ that looks like a sort of mini-online community, complete with blog and, yes, “syllabi”:http://www.polity.co.uk/digitalmediaandsociety/syllabi.aspx and “reading resources”:http://www.polity.co.uk/digitalmediaandsociety/resources.aspx. I can’t tell if its a community designed to promote a book series of a book series to promote a community. Its an interesting hybrid of a bunch of different models: group blog, academic book series, “online supplements for your textbooks”, etc.

First off — this is the first time I’ve ever shown up in an RSS news feed that I subscribe to! But at a deeper level its interesting to see what people think about my research. The actual guild that I do research has been super supportive, with comments like “im not a big fan of reading things but that was very interesting. Great job!” and “That is a pretty awesome interview. It really does give a lot more insight into what aspects of wow you are focusing on.” One of the big differences between this project and my PNG work is that I am writing while ‘in’ the field, and my ‘informants’ read everything I write (if they can be bothered), and its really nice to know that they support the research — even when they read what you write about them!

As for the larger group of people who read the work, one typical response is that Warcraft is ‘just a game’ so therefore it is an inappropriate object of study. A lot of people who work on MMOGs get this all the time. In my case it drives me particularly nuts, since I am also often told that kinship in Papua New Guinea is also trivial, unimportant, or politically incorrect. So apparently neither ‘traditional’ or ‘cutting edge’ work is appropriate. Ah well, I’ve learned to live with these sorts of views.

More interesting has been the comments that I cannot be doing ‘real’ research because I am enjoying myself while I do it. There is a whiff of ‘its just a game’ in this criticism, but more interestingly there is also the sense that what I am doing can’t be ‘science’ because I am ‘enjoying myself’ while I do it. Is this a way of saying that you can’t be ‘objective’ if you enjoy doing your research? This is funny, since a lot of contemporary science writing (Richard Dawkins, e.g.) is about the joy of doing science and the way it allows you access to the sublime.

A lot of discussion in the comments following the interview focused on whether or not WoW players were a legitimate object of study because they did (or did not) constitute a culture or, in some cases, a ‘subculture’. It is interesting to see whether or not a coherent structure of meaning has sort of been woven around WoW (I think the answer is an obvious yes) but what is even more interesting to me is how quickly my claim to study Americans and American culture seemed to go right by most commentors. I don’t study “World of Warcraft” I study my guild — a group of Americans (and Canadians). I study people. I study what they do online. I do not see them face to face, very often — although I do have dreams of doing a grand tour and having a beer with them all all over the US. But just how much of a deal killer, epistemologically, is the fact that a researcher’s experience of their ‘research subjects’ is mediated? Because if you think all professors must _absolutely_ meet the people they study face to face, you must have a very poor opinion of your local history department.

Overall, however, I’m very grateful and encouraged that the vast majority of the comments have been positive. The overall feeling I get is that there are tons of people in the world playing WoW who understand the tremendous, even life-altering stakes that get read into the game by people who care about it deeply, and it is nice to know that I am not the only person who thinks this about the game.

The Setup
1. I have been thinking about writing this essay for some time (in connection with an edited book project in its early planning stages), but was inspired to write it in this form in response to the interesting conversations that have appeared on this blog and elsewhere in regard to my book Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. This essay is an experiment in two ways. First, in it I discuss emerging genres of ethnographic research with regard to virtual worlds. Second, I use the blog format to post a draft, in the hope that the feedback I receive will help me in writing the final version of this essay. There have been several recent experiments using blog-based peer review to complement more traditional forms of peer review. The best example of this to my knowledge is the case of Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s forthcoming book Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies. Part of the “experiment,” then, is to see how the comments I receive with regard to this essay help me revise it.

2. Here is how I have set things up with these goals in mind. I have numbered the twenty paragraphs of this essay to facilitate commenting upon specific passages, and have kept the essay as succinct as possible. I see this essay as sharing genre features with the “conference talk,” a time-tested way to present work in progress. I have thus omitted endnotes, a bibliography, and most references to Coming of Age in Second Life, despite the fact that this essay extends arguments already present in that book. I encourage any and all comments on the essay, and would appreciate it if you could provide your name with your comment. If your comment inspires me in any way during the revision process, I will thank you in the acknowledgments section that will appear in the final version of the essay. I envision that final version being about twice the length of this draft, and of course as including endnotes and a bibliography.

The Background
3. Coming of Age in Second Life is an ethnographic study of the virtual world Second Life, as well as an analysis of the place of virtual worlds in human sociality more broadly. Since its unofficial release on April 21, 2008 and particularly since its official release on June 18, 2008, I have spoken in graduate seminars, been interviewed on radio stations, and appeared at a number of meet-the-author events (many of them taking place within Second Life itself). It is hardly a coincidence that in the same month as the official release of my book, the inaugural issue of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research was released. All this indicates that we are at a moment in which a new research community is coming into being, a community whose growth will only be stimulated by the continuing emergence of new virtual worlds, from Age of Conan to Google’s Lively. This research community includes a wide range of persons, from those who have researched virtual worlds for decades to students just beginning to think about new projects. It is an interdisciplinary research community, including persons from many academic disciplines, persons working in nonprofit and industry contexts, independent scholars, designers, journalists, and residents (these are, of course, not exclusive categories). Two key questions that emerge around this new research community (and in all likelihood, all new research communities) are: (1) what is the object of our study?, and (2) what do various methodologies bring to the table in researching this object of study?

4. As with the case of my previous publications on Indonesia, it has been interesting to see what aspects of my analysis attract attention from different readerships. In both my Indonesia work and my Second Life work, discussions have emerged around questions of methodology and particularly the constitution of “the fieldsite.” I find this gratifying, because I have intentionally designed all my research projects to push on the boundaries of what we mean by “the fieldsite.” In Indonesia I have conducted research on gay Indonesians on three islands (Java, Bali, and Sulawesi), but in my books The Gay Archipelago and A Coincidence of Desires I discuss how, in a powerful sense, this research is not “multi-sited”: the fieldsite is “Indonesia” itself. This is because gay Indonesians have historically seen themselves as gay “Indonesians,” not gay Javanese, Balinese, and so on. There are many different kinds of spatial scales operative in human life, including local, national, regional, and global, and it is crucial not to equate culture with locality. Sometimes that equation is valid, sometimes not: it depends. Translocal cultural logics exist with regard to everything from religion to gender. In the case of gay Indonesians, while they may think of themselves in local terms with regard to some aspects of their lives, with regard to homosexuality they typically think of themselves as Indonesians. This makes sense given that the concept of gay subjectivity is associated with modernity, not learned from one’s parents or tradition, but the linkages to the nation turn out to be much more complex. I have suggested that one reason so little has been written on gay Indonesians is that these persons fall outside one’s analytical horizon if that horizon is founded in the spatial scale of locality. Researchers who equate culture with locality in Indonesia can miss the forest for the trees, so to speak: they will see all kinds of cultural logics that are local, but those that are translocal in some fashion will appear to be inauthentic impositions.

5. My interest in challenging meanings of “the fieldsite” was strongly supported by my dissertation advisors at Stanford. One of these advisors, Akhil Gupta (now at UCLA) has co-written some key works about notions of the fieldsite with James Ferguson. James Ferguson was my colleague at Irvine for several years before moving to Stanford. I still have many colleagues at Irvine who support my interest in rethinking “the fieldsite,” including George Marcus, whose work on multi-sited ethnography is well known. When I began conducting research on virtual worlds, I thus came to the project with a prior interest in problematizing conceptions of the fieldsite. I soon realized that the conceptual tendencies with regard to virtual worlds were strikingly opposed to those I had encountered in Indonesia studies. Whereas in Indonesia studies, the presumption was in the direction of locality, in the study of virtual worlds the presumption has been in the direction of translocality. For instance, there were (and still are) persons claiming that all virtual-world research projects must include meeting persons in the actual world to be valid, or at least that such projects must always privilege the actual-world lives of virtual world residents.

The “Four Confusions”
6. As I discuss in Coming of Age in Second Life, both virtual worlds and the study of virtual worlds have histories to them. However, as noted above, the study of virtual worlds as a research community is in a formative stage, paralleling the recent growth in virtual worlds themselves. In such contexts of emergent inquiry, debates over definitions and terminologies are common, as a glance at the Table of Contents for the first issue of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research indicates. A difficulty in moving these debates forward is the remarkably negative attitude toward virtual worlds found not just in some quarters of anthropology, but even in science and technology studies. In part this may be due to the simultaneously utopian and dystopian narratives that often co-occur with new technologies. It may also be relevant that to date, the most prevalent popular-culture reference to virtual worlds is The Matrix movies, in which a virtual world is used to enslave humanity.

7. I define virtual worlds as places of human culture realized by computer programs through the Internet. Before turning to my typology of ethnographic methods with regard for virtual worlds, it will prove helpful to set out what I term the “four confusions” regarding contemporary discussions of virtual worlds. Most of these confusions originate in mistaking something that frequently co-occurs with virtual worlds for a necessary condition of their existence.

8. Games. Virtual worlds are not games. Historically they have been and continue to be shaped by video games; they may contain games within them; they may even be largely structured in a game-like manner; but there is no way to equate virtual worlds with games without defining “game” so vaguely as to include all social life under its purview. The confusion originates to some extent in the English-language distinction between “game” and “play,” a distinction not found in all languages and cultures. Because it is incorrect to assume, by fiat, that all virtual worlds are games, it follows that the use of theories from game studies to virtual worlds must be contextual: in some cases such theories will be highly effective, in other cases less so.

9. Visuality. Despite the fact that at present, phrases like “3D web” are frequently used as synonyms for “virtual world,” virtual worlds need not be graphical or even visual. This is seen most clearly in the fact that historically, virtual worlds were exclusively text-based (as in the case of “MUDs”). The fact that nearly all contemporary virtual worlds are built around three-dimensional graphics is fascinating and important to study, but this does not mean that such graphics are a definitional precondition for deeming something a virtual world. For instance, one could in theory have a virtual world composed entirely of soundscapes, in which persons who are blind in the actual world would be on equal footing with the seeing. One could imagine a purely haptic virtual world, in which an interface technology like a glove allowed participants to navigate and interact solely through touch. There is no indication such virtual worlds would involve more than comparatively small communities were they to come into existence. If anything, the trend toward visuality seems to be accelerating. However, it remains crucial that we avoid conflating virtual worlds and visuality. Since most contemporary virtual worlds are structured around visuality, theories from visual studies will be crucial to understanding them, but it would prove less effective to use such theories to make categorical claims about virtual worlds.

10. Mass Media. Because virtual worlds are places, they are not mass media, though they may contain mass media within them (everything from magazines, books, and embedded websites to streaming audio and video media). Virtual worlds need not mediate two or more places, since they are places in their own right. If anything, it is more accurate to think of a virtual world as a “medium,” in the sense of a material in which one crafts things. This has consequences for the use of mass media theory for understanding virtual worlds: we cannot assume ahead of time how such theories will need to be reworked for virtual-world contexts.

11. Anonymity and roleplaying. The vast majority of existing virtual worlds require that participants have accounts in which their identity differs from their actual-world identity. For instance, in Second Life I am known as “Tom Bukowski,” because while one is allowed to choose any first name one wishes, last names must be selected from a pre-defined list. However, it is not a definitional precondition of virtual worlds that they be built around anonymity. One could imagine a virtual world that encouraged or required participants to use their actual-world names inworld, along the lines of social networking websites like Facebook. As virtual worlds are used increasingly in contexts like education, nonprofit work, and the corporate sphere, virtual worlds disallowing anonymity, or at least not mandating anonymity, may become more common. Linked to this question of anonymity is that of roleplaying. Since many virtual worlds are structured partially or overwhelmingly as games, and given the historical linkages between virtual worlds and fantasy fiction like J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, it is unsurprising that forms of role play are crucial to many virtual worlds. Roleplay, however, is not a necessity for defining something as a virtual world.

12. There are, of course, other possible confusions: this is to be expected given the degree to which the study of virtual worlds is an emerging field of inquiry. For instance, it is still unclear if virtual worlds must employ avatars. Text-based virtual worlds, for example, did not use avatars as typically understood: one could define the description of a resident as a textual avatar, but such descriptions seem more like a “profile” than an avatar. However, the four confusions described above seem to be the ones that most often sidetrack contemporary research agendas and discussions with regard to virtual worlds.

Research Questions and Ethnographic Design
13. With the preceding discussion in mind, I now turn to the issue of research design, setting out a three-part typology of methods for ethnographic research with regard to virtual worlds. I intend “typology” to be taken in a heuristic sense, not an exhaustive one. My undergraduate mentor in linguistics, the late Joseph Greenberg, talked about “splitters” and “clumpers” in linguistic typology: researchers who sought fine-grained categorizations versus those who worked to gather the world’s languages into the fewest possible groups. For the purposes of this essay I will be a clumper: I will heuristically group all ethnographic methods with regard to virtual worlds into only three categories. I could easily have set forth a typology with five or ten categories, but this more parsimonious typology has the benefit of brevity, and well as highlighting some key distinctions.

14. It is crucial to foreground the relationship between “research question” and “method.” Any claim that a particular method is the best (or the only valid) method for researching virtual worlds misses how research always involves a coming-together of research question and methodology. How one conducts research is not determined by some essential property “out there;” it is shaped by the research questions one wishes to investigate. In my work as Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist, I find that one of the most common reasons I end up rejecting a manuscript is that the research questions (while fascinating) and methodology (while rigorous) do not match up: the methods are not working to answer the questions the researcher has ostensibly chosen to examine. If I wish to study patterns of HIV infection in a certain social group, quantitative methods will prove invaluable. If I wish to understand how a certain population comes to think of itself as a “social group,” qualitative methods will in all likelihood be a better fit. Methodological partisanship is not helpful in moving these kinds of conversations forward: what ideally emerges is a research community, with researchers using different methods to answer differing research questions with regard to a shared field of interest. With this in mind, here is my “clumping,” preliminary typology of ethnographic methods with regard to virtual worlds:

15. Virtual/Actual Interfaces. One class of ethnographic methods with regard to virtual worlds explores interfaces between virtual worlds and the actual world. An excellent example of this kind of research is T. L. Taylor’s Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture, which opens with the researcher attending a hotel convention for participants of Everquest. This class of methods builds off a history of examining such interfaces with regard to the Internet more generally. A well-known example of this is Daniel Miller and Don Slater’s The Internet: an Ethnographic Approach, which focuses upon how Trinidadians use the Internet to reconfigure Trinidadian identity and community. Since work in this genre tends to emphasize relationships between virtual-world and actual-world selfhood and sociality, a logical methodological outcome is that researchers strive to interview the same persons in the actual world as they encounter in a virtual world or worlds, and have as one research focus those instances where residents of a virtual world meet collectively in actual-world contexts.

16. Virtual/Virtual Interfaces. Another class of ethnographic methods with regard to virtual worlds examines interfaces between two or more virtual worlds. In some cases, this can be a comparative research design in which residents of the virtual worlds in question do not (or mostly do not) move between the virtual worlds being studied. This is analogous to, say, Clifford Geertz’s book Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia, in which the Moroccans and Indonesians studied do not travel between Morocco and Indonesia and are, indeed, largely unaware of each other’s existence. In other cases, this can be a research design that tracks a community or communities moving between virtual worlds. An excellent example of this is Celia Pearce’s forthcoming book Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Online Games and Virtual Worlds. In this work, Pearce examines the “Uru diaspora,” a community formed when the virtual world Uru shut down and residents worked to rebuild their lost virtual home in other virtual contexts like Second Life and There.com. One frequent topic addressed by research in this genre is how notions of selfhood and community are sustained and destabilized across differing virtual contexts.

17. Virtual Worlds In Their Own Terms. The third class of ethnographic methods making up my heuristic typology involves studying a single virtual world. This is the primary method I employ in my book Coming of Age in Second Life, where I refer to it as studying a virtual world “in its own terms.” If Geertz’s book Islam Observed can serve as an analogue for studying virtual/virtual interfaces, then several of his other books (for instance, his first ethnography, The Religion of Java), can serve a similar purpose in regard to studying a virtual world “in its own terms.” Geertz’s Religion of Java is primarily a study of Islam, and there are by how hundreds of insightful ethnographies of Islam, exploring Muslim life around the world. That such ethnographies usually focus on particular places and communities does not mean they ignore that Muslims are found worldwide, that many Muslims make the pilgrimage to Mecca, that persons migrate, and so on. Instead, it means that they examine how such translocal cultural logics and practices shape what is emicially understood to be a particular community or communities. It is absolutely crucial to recognize that an interest in intersectionality, translocality, and the co-constitution of cultural domains is typically common to all three classes of ethnographic methods I discuss in this essay. Some studies of virtual worlds “in their own terms” focus upon subcultures or specific topics (say, sexuality, or economics). Others strive for a more general portrait. In any case, researchers working in this genre are often interested in how shared practices and meanings emerge and are contested within a virtual world.

Concluding Thoughts
18. This rough typology of ethnographic methods with regard to studying virtual worlds is meant to underscore how different genres of research design allow for exploring varied sets of research questions. Most researchers end up working in all of these genres over time, but at any point in time the best research is based upon the difficult choice of focusing one’s methods in line with a particular avenue of investigation. Arriving at a workable and compelling design is perhaps the most challenging and important step in conducting research. It is not possible to do everything at once. In the emerging research community around virtual worlds, I have sometimes encountered a misreading of my colleague George Marcus’s work on multi-sited ethnography, wherein it seems to be assumed that the more “multi,” the better. In this misunderstanding, research on a single fieldsite is, a priori, suspect or outdated, while research on multiple fieldsites is, a priori, valorized as cutting-edge. In reality, both single-sited and multi-sited methods go back to the earliest decades of ethnographic research: indeed, nineteenth-century anthropology was dominated by evolutionary approaches that presumed multiple sites of research and comparison. This is why in 1896, Franz Boas, a founding figure in American anthropology, felt compelled to write his influential article “The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology.”

19. It should be clear that all three of the methodological approaches discussed above (or the many additional methods that I could have set forth with a more “splitter” typology) are valid approaches to researching virtual worlds. All have strengths, and all involve sacrifices in terms of honing a doable research plan. In what I find to be the best research in virtual worlds or the actual world, we are moving toward forms of what I have elsewhere termed “postreflexive” modes of ethnographic engagement, focusing upon how “the fieldsite” of any research project emerges through that ethnographic engagement, rather than being set in stone “out there.” It is by now well-acknowledged that the single fieldsite is, in this sense, an ethnographic fiction. The irony is that in virtual worlds research, what sometimes appears to be less well-acknowledged is that multiple fieldsites are also so constructed.

20. What does the future hold? It appears that research on virtual worlds will continue to increase and diversify. A subset of that research will continue to be ethnographic in some sense, and this work bears every indication of representing an innovative set of contributions. Obviously, there is no need to choose between the various methods for ethnographic research with regard to virtual worlds that I have discussed above. All can be done well or badly, but none of them are by definition invalid. When properly keyed to appropriate research questions, each has something to offer. Each can contribute to building a body of ethnographic work that will help illuminate what virtual worlds are, as well as their changing place in human life. In some ways this body of work will be specific to virtual worlds, but it will continue to draw from a range of other fields as well. For instance, while (as noted above) virtual worlds are not necessarily visual and are not necessarily games, they do tend to be highly visual and often are games or emphasize play. As a result, theoretical perspectives from game studies and visual studies, among other disciplines, will continue to be crucial for understanding most virtual worlds. In turn, the growing body of research on virtual worlds, informed in part by various modes of ethnography, will have much to offer many other fields of inquiry. The conjunction of ethnography and virtual worlds will continue to stand as a vibrant field of research, contributing to central debates about human selfhood and sociality into the future.

—Tom Boellstorff is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, and Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist.

I mention Sennett’s book not only to give it a well deserved plug, but to contrast it with _Coming of Age In Second Life_, which we still have not talked about enough on this blog. One of the things that is central to Second Life is content creation — building new objects. I would argue that there is a strong sense in Second Life (and particularly in the work of Cory Ondrejka) that ideas of creativity are paramount — the human condition is conflated with the situation of the romantic artist, driven to exteriorize his subjectivity in works of art.

I think there are several things wrong with this point of view — not least of which is the way that it treats the world as full of inert objects that are infinitely plastic and submit to human manipulation. I’ve argued (in an article submitted to a journal) this view of the world is similar to that sketched by T. Jackson Lears in his book _Fables of Abundance_ — that it relies on human experience of a highly commodified world in which people do not interact with a world that resists them (as farmers who keep animals or fight the weather might).

Sennett might add that it misses out on what most designers in Second Life probably realize implicitly: that we are fascinated by the resistances our materials present. It is working with the ‘living edge’ of a problem, with all of the difficulties it affords, which is such a satisfying way of making something. For Cory Ondrejka, creation in Second Life is unique and important because it is easy. For Sennett, doing a job well for its own sake is enabled by and connected to the fact that the job is difficult.

Moreover, Sennett emphasizes that the satisfaction of crafting comes from repetition, from the act of making similar objects over and over again and one explores and improves one’s technique. Making things, in other words, becomes a career with a trajectory which is a source of satisfaction for the craftsman in pursues it. This is markedly different than the idea of a single, inspired, original, artistic creation such as that accomplished by a painter…. or a Second Lifer who creates A Single Pair Of Cute Socks which can, grace of the game engine, be infinitely replicated.

I think a lot of the problems that we have understanding virtual worlds stem from the fact that the tools we use to analyze them are flawed, relying as they do on romantic notions of creation and conceptions of unfettered play which are ultimately not very helpful. I think if you were to analyze Second Life using Sennett’s lens it would be very easy to discover people doing craftsmanlike things, even if the people who created the platform and many of the residents themselves were working with a different ‘creation ideology’. But one place where I think Sennett’s notions are immediately and obviously applicable is World of Warcraft (WoW).

Some people involved in Second Life insist that it is a not a ‘game’ like WoW because it does not feature grinding XP to achieve fixed goals like levelling your character. Instead, it is a ‘world’ because people can engage in open-ended content creation. They are not alone — many people have criticized grinding for being repetitive, mindless, and addictive for the way it ensnared people in some trap carefully designed to release endorphins in their brains.

I think that Sennett’s book gives us a way to analyze the situation in a different way. As one WoW designed “points out”:http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=140861&page=3, when you are not having fun it is called grinding, when you are it is ‘progress’.

I would say that playing WoW, even the most repetitive grinding aspect of it, features a strong element of craft work in the sense that Sennett describes it — engaging in a routine practice while constantly fine-tuning it, aware of the way each monster is the same but also different, and of the way that chance events make every pull different. As you gain more experience and your character gains different abilities you continue to explore the different ways in which you can do your things. I admit that this revelation came to me shortly after finishing a chapter of Sennett’s book when my level 20 Paladin put his eleventh talent point in the ret tree to get Seal of Command and was experimenting with the best seal/judgment rotation.

Of course, grinding can be monotonous but WoW is meant to appeal to gamers of all ages and, as Sennett points out, the amount of variation of repetition you can handle is tied to how experienced you are — anyone who has played peekabo with a child will know how they thrive on a repetition that adults would find tedious if it wasn’t so gosh-darn adorable.

But raiding in WoW can also be seen as a form of elaborated craftsmanship. The experience of getting 25 people together in order to kill a difficult monster requires practice and repetition over and over again, and when people finally do learn how to kill a boss and have him or her on ‘farm status’ they take a pride in their ability which is very much that of the craftsman. Others have spoken of the ‘mythic structure’ of raiding — the attempt to recapitulate the same scenario over and over again (the one in which the boss drops). But this is not some sort of Levi-Straussian ‘cold’ culture of raiding, it is one which wants to do the work well… but will take the kill even if it is messy.

Thomas Malaby once wrote that WoW is compelling to people because it creates situations in which people work together to overcome risk and that this, obviously, is a great way of building esprit de corps. I think that Sennett would agree (although his discussion of the nature of guilds might also explain a lot of in-game drama). If this is the case, then it may be that WoW is _more_ like the actual world than SL, and that the hallmark of worldliness is not openendedness, but goal-directed craftsmanship undertaken with others.

Overall, _Coming of Age in Second Life_ (CASL) represents cutting edge anthropology at its best — hip, smart, theoretically sophisticated, and with its head screwed on straight. As far as I am concerned it establishes a new standard for students of virtual worlds in all disciplines, and clears a path for anyone wanting to understand how anthropologists can study virtual worlds. Of course, the book has its shortcomings — mostly, I feel, because cutting edge anthropology has its shortcomings — but there is no doubt that CASL (as I’ll call it) is a seminal work that deserves to be widely read.

Those of us working on virtual worlds have been anticipating Tom Boellstorff’s (TB) book for some time. Second Life (SL) has attracted tons of press in recent years as _the_ virtual world that challenges our notions of what virtual worlds are and how they operate and TB, a mid-career anthropologist with an established (and growing) track record, was exactly the person to study it. Additionally, TB did not publish a lot of his work on SL before the book came out, so I really did not have a sense of what it was like. All of this added up to a spectacular opportunity to fail, but TB rose to the challenge and wrote a book that is worthy of the conjuncture of events in which it was written.

One of the things that is so appealing about CASL is the way that it gets so many things right about virtual worlds. It insists, correctly, that human experience is always mediated by culture and therefore our experience is always ‘virtual’. It insists that interaction in virtual worlds _is_ interaction with other people, not life in some addictive solipsistic fantasy world as some would argue. And above all the book emphasizes the way that plain old participant observation can get us very far in terms of what happens in such a world.

The title of the book is, obviously, a renvoi to Mead’s classic work, and the very sexy dust jacket features an image which harkens back to the picture of the Samoan girl that graced the old AMNH edition of Mead’s book. All of this is more than a clever pun, however – the idea is to draw a parallel between early classics of Pacific ethnography and TB’s book. Just as Mead discovered Samoa for generations of Americans, so TB hopes to discover (and validate) SL, and just as Malinowksi demonstrated the importance of participant observation, so too does TB want to (re)validate its relevance in studying virtual worlds.

It’s smart, although as a Pacificist I have to nitpick a little. Although TB pays homage to this sort of work he doesn’t come across as someone who is super-knowledgeable about the Pacific as an area. He mistakenly claims the River Valley Dani live in Papua New Guinea when in fact they live in Indonesia (his own area of expertise) (p. 70), and I also feel he is too kind to Mead in his (brief) assessment of her work on page 61. I think most Pacific scholars would now argue that Mead was importantly wrong in her description of Samoa, although we would also hasten to add that she was not as wrong about Samoa as Freeman was wrong about her. It is possible to disagree with Mead’s findings without endorsing Freeman’s literal psychosis about her.

But these are quibbles which do not offset the value of the book. Of key interest to me was the second chapter, the ‘literature review’. This kind of thing is not popular with publishers, but I am glad that TB features the extensive and exhaustive literature review that he does. There has been so much written about virtual worlds, games, computer mediated interaction, that it is difficult to find one’s bearing. These problems are augmented by the fact that much of the work done on virtual worlds has been bad and/or based on assumptions very different from those made by anthropologists. For this reason TB’s thorough working through of the literature, often term by term, is absolutely fantastic. It lets him locate himself in scholarly space, it provides a genealogy of research for other scholars to build on, and it allows him to specify his terms of art and what they mean. This chapter alone is incredibly impressive and is almost worth the price of admission.

TB’s chapter on method is more problematic. TB’s research was conducted entirely in SL without tracking down anyone in real life. Personally, I have no problem with such an approach – in my experience people learning to trust self-accounts in virtual worlds is no more or less tricky than learning to trust them in rela life. However, his justification for staying strictly in-game strikes me as fishy. His attempt to demonstrate the validity of such an approach relies on the claim hat SL is a valid and unique world which is not derivative of or secondary to the real world. This seems wrong to me. First, I would argue that virtual worlds are both discrete realms of social action _and_ predicated on the real world (this is why we stop playing SL when we die, but not vice versa).

Secondly, anthropologists have always argued that cultures are not bounded objecs — they are not ‘billiard balls’ and do not have ‘skins’. Understanding ‘the village’ (even the virtual village) requires us understanding the broader context in which it is situated. TB seems to recognize this point implicitly since the real world seeps constantly into his description of SL. When people describe meeting SL friends in real life; when they describe leaving sealed envelopes for their real life spouse with instructions on what to tell their SL spouse is something happened to them; when they describe the way handicapped people can experience liberation in virtual spaces; when they talk about play SL drunk. when they talk about playing as a woman when they are a man in SL — when they do all of these things, they are talking about the membrane between SL and real life and the way they move across it. Understanding these things means understanding how SL is just one of the many, connected worlds in which people create meaning. All of which is not to say that you must track down people in real life to make sure the stories they tell you in SL are true (although it wouldn’t hurt), but merely to say that TB’s ethnographic practice gainsays the theoretical grounding of his method.

The research itself is great — it is readable, it is descriptive, it gives you a sense of what it is like to be in SL, and deals even handedly with exotic topics like SL’s widespread experience with eroticism (you can read chapter 6 for the juicy bits). The book really succeeds as ethnography in the classic sense — it gives you a sense of what people in SL are like, what they are doing there, and the mechanics of the world, including things like working with prims. This, I think, is really an achievement at a time when so many ethnographers float above the facts or somehow assume that the details of people’s lives are not worth reporting on. For anyone who wants to get a sense of what life in SL is like, the book will actually tell you. For people who have spent time in world, I think it will really ring true, which is a real sign of success — when the ‘natives’ find your work boring or your findings obvious, you know you’ve done a good job!

One thing that I appreciated about CASL is the way that it attempts to connect in-game concerns with individuality and creativity to wider cultural trends (although, apparently, it is not believe they are ‘derived’ from them). Pointing out the cultural background of these beliefs, rather than assuming that technology enables some biologically hard-wired drive for all human beings to be Romantic Artists is important. That said, I wished that TB had discussed this in more detail rather than simply referring to SL as an inheritor of ‘Western’ culture. Any approach which sees Torah, the Nichomachean Ethics, Descartes’s Discourse on Method, and the Whole Earth Catalog as all ‘Western’ simply is not nuanced for me. The notion of ‘the West’ here is better deconstructed than criticized (although I do appreciate TB’s criticisms of many ‘Western’ notions). I would have liked to have seen more of a focus on the cultural history of American responses to consumerism and notions of authenticity, since this would have given a more precise understanding of the _specific_ milieu TB is working on… if, that is, we knew for certain that his research subjects _were_ American.
Theoretically, TB develops a distinction between the ‘virtual’ and the ‘actual’ to describe the difference between virtual worlds and what I have been calling the ‘real world’ — its a distinction that works well because it allows one to understand how both the virtual and the actual are both ‘real’. He also develops the Aristotelian notion of ‘techne’ to describe the human capacity to build meaningful worlds. Again, its a serviceable idea, although his road to Aristotle appears to be through Foucault, which obviously is ok but strikes me as a bit eccentric given how many authors have taken up Aristotle in one way or another (Arendt, for instance, would be interesting here). And what of gnosis and phronesis? But at any rate the book is not about Aristotle it is about SL and the virtual/actual distinction and the notion of ‘techne’ are both useful and important contributions to our understanding of virtual worlds.

Throughout the book — particularly in discussion of the term ‘homo cyber’ and ‘virtually human’ — TB generalizes from his ethnography to make more general statements about the human condition and what SL can tell us about it. I can’t take issue with this strategy, since it is how anthropologists ‘do’ theory, but as someone who studies World of Warcraft, the virtual world that is the exact _opposite_ of SL, I felt that many of TB’s conclusions raised the cultural particularities of SL to the status of the general structure of _all_ human activity online. In fact I think that his focus on SL as a valid, self-enclosed world can also be traced back to the fact that the native point of view has seeped into his analysis. Since _my_ natives have a different point of view, I would take issue with this particular seepage (!) but ultimately I think that TB’s generalizations are productive. Present a positive model that can be revised as more data comes in, and frankly it is a sign of his success as a fieldworker that he has been changed by the field in this way.

I said earlier that TB’s book is cutting edge anthropology, and I think this is true. This also means, for me, that it shares the drawbacks of much cutting edge anthropology. It apologizes constantly for its ambition to know and describe the world. Every chapter begins ‘I could have written an entire book about (insert chapter topic), but am only writing a chapter here’. It constantly points out that it does not do enough to describe power and gender relations. One thing that I found particularly disturbing was TB’s inability to acknowledge the power of the book as genre. In his conclusion he writes that

Within the static pages of a book there is no way I can do justice to my adventures within Second Life, or the experiences of the residents who so generously shared their activities and thoughts with me. A book cannot capture the beauty and joy of a virtual world, nor its anger and heartbreak

What can I say, except that I pity TB that he has lived a life devoid of the pleasures that reading can bring? For not only can books capture the joy and heartbreak of virtual worlds (read My Tiny Life to discover this), they have even managed to capture the beauty and anger of the actual world. Ultimately, one of the great tragedies of CASL is that the book wants so hard to emphasize the human power to use technology to create worlds that mater, while simultaneously underestimating the power demonstrated again and again by one of the most tried and true narrative forms of all — the one the author himself uses.

The final section of CASL is entitled “Towards an Anthropology of Virtual Worlds” and that is exactly what this volume is — and important, confident, clear headed volume which may end up founding an entire sub-discipline. The work is not perfect, but even in its imperfections it will spark conversations that will prove fruitful. If you are interested in virtual worlds, the book is a must-have and (if you haven’t read _My Tiny Life_ yet) an immediate must-read. If you are an anthropologist who is interested in important recent work, or simply someone interested in keeping up with what anthropologists are thinking about lately, then I would strongly recommend the volume for summer reading. Tom Boellstorff has produced an important new book on an important new topic.