SECOND LIFE


anthorpology of virtual world

ethnography:: open ended method :: participant observation :

avoiding eliciting responses: conditionated the sort of responses

go to the field with ideas, rather than questions

issue of a sample :: snowballing

not good for counting things

description of a define population, purpose of understanding a phenomenon 

taking notes as field method
looking for patterns after that

graphic evidence

"taking the virtual world in its own sense"



techne and the built environment : 


repeated snaps shots :: synchronic






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study of culture :: complex whole

ethnography ::: participant observation
ethnographic knowledge is situated and partial
interviews and focus groups


opnen-endedness of second life



avatar tom bukowski
build tools



 insider researcher

The chapters on methods 
are masterful and will help any classroom enter a meaningful discussion of what is virtual 
in all lives and how ethnography captures virtuosity.


All his interview subjects go through the steps of informed 
consent within Second Life, with no forced connection to any other reality. Boellstorff 
accepts the culture he learns and acknowledges that he changes it by learning and through 
his published description to us. His chapter headings: Place and Time, Personhood, 
Intimacy, Community, and Political Economy, could come from any ethnography.  



Boellstroff notes that exclusively 
text based communication was one novelty of Second Life.


isn’t having every conversation all typed out, 
including the eavesdropped ones, an ethnographers dream?  I can only imagine the task 
of analyzing the thousands of pages of real text that must have constituted this “virtual” 
world research.  



chapter on intimacy, will think about personhood, individuality, 
personality, and all of the possible permutations of “self” in new ways. Perhaps the most 
dramatic are people who choose avatars wildly different from their first life selves in 
gender, age, racial representations, disability/ability, possible human physiognomy, and 
even species.




Boellstorff draws upon an impressively 
wide array of cultural theory to elucidate the idea 
that virtual worlds enable new possibilities for 
what he calls “techne”: “the bootstrapping abil- 
ity of humans to craft themselves” (57). In such 
an analysis, Second Life participants’ adoption of 
avatars to engage in virtually staged social interac- 
tions of various types—which Boellstorff addresses 
in chapters focusing on things like “personhood,” 
“intimacy,” and “community”—becomes a crucial 
component of a wider “recursive” tendency to ex- 
plore performance in cyberculture for “radically 
new ways to understand [our] lives as beings of 
culture as well as physical embodiment” (58).