Belstroff
·
Idea of personhood
·
Embodiment online
o
Mind-body dualism – cognition is grounded in our
bodily experiences
§ Virtual
worlds challenge this idea
·
Political economy – money labour and property
and modes of government
o
Creationalist capitalism à goldfarming
Cybersociality when interacting on Second Life
·
Does this have to do with labour and ownership,
sense of self, or placemaking
Personhood (Chapter 5)
·
Avatars – people invest time, money, emotional
energy
o
Somewhat embodied physically
o
Visual and tactile stimulatory aspect allows
people to get emotionally involved in their avatars
·
“Griefing”
o
abuse another avatar or their home space
o
people respond intensely to this
o
shows how avatars are emotional embodiments of
people online
·
People with physical disabilities using avatars
to escape from their own bodies
o
Versus people who have minor physical
disabilities such as a broken arm that keeps them from moving their avatars
online
o
How virtual and physical world affect one
another
·
Have more than one avatar – different avatars
for different occasions
o
Emotional or utilitarian reasons
o
Can switch between personas online
·
Not what you say but how you look is what
represents you online
o
Gives people a more accurate view of themselves
and others because it is a more real view of their emotions, “what they are on
the inside”
o
Challenge notion of self – virtual body is what
really reflects who you are
·
To what degree is there a gap between virtual
and actual
o
People are making conscious choices about how
they want to represent themselves
§ Does
this mean people are being fake because it is not what they actually look like?
§ Or
is this the more “real” version of people because they can be what they want to
be
·
Discussion on why it is okay for avatars on
second life to be not who they truly are in real life, but it is not as okay
for people to misrepresent themselves online in other forums
o
Ie spinal cord patients
·
Ethnography – you live in the place that you
study
o
How does this work with virtual worlds? To what
degree do you have to be involved in the community?
·
Issue with avatar being your “true self”
o
Takes out the aspect that people have
imaginations – your imagination is not a representation of you.
·
What does it mean to have a community – does
this even makes sense in a virtual world when anyone can join? What is the mark
of a true member?
Place and time (Chapter 4)
·
Place, time, and presence à
best illustrated when broken
·
Sense of being in a place although it is virtual
·
Place is central to vision – landscape
o
The way in which people understand their
relationships to these places
o
Conflicts that arise that show this
§ Other
players get upset by some people building ugly buildings for example. They
don’t like the disrupt in the landscape
·
What is “mine”
·
Ownership as social standing
·
“lag”
o
dissonance between the way difference players
experience time
§ decreases
sense of immersion
o
differences in the amount of lag for each
individual
o
breaks sense of immersion into virtual world
o
also the idea that people in different time
zones will experience the interaction differently
·
“afk”
o
“away from keyboard”
o
online but not with online selves
o
avatar is still in space and “present” but the
person is not actually present
·
Immersion
o
Social vs sensory
o
Sensory is not so important in the virtual world
o
Actual world senses are muted and this completes
the virtual world sensation by comparison
§ Related
to controversy of adding Voicechat – this is so “read world” that people didn’t
like it
ú Dichotomy
between social and sensory interaction
ú Voice
adds real world sensory input that breaks this separation
Political economy (Chapter 8)
·
Creationist capitalism
o
New market for capitalism – people in community
can create own forms by opening up business etc
o
This is a very real thing within the community
and can translate into real money in real life
o
Economy built around making things**
·
Online market – Who makes things?
o
What property rights do people have over the
things that they make?
o
What is property in an online world?
·
Companies and selling isn’t as popular as owners
might like because the whole idea of Second Life is creating your own things
(avatars, clothing)
·
Rules/Social norms about what you cannot do
o
No real regulation system but Second Life as a
company can regulate it arbitrarily
o
Social control mechanism
·
How much control Linden labs has over game and
what happens in it
o
Quite difficult because it is so large
o
More self-regulated amongst members
o
No real way of penalizing people other than
social embarrassment
o
Ie: gambling is something that occurs because it
is so easy to create, but it is so hard to regulate because it is difficult to
track
·
How is this different from creativity or from
capitalism?
o
Ownership of what you make is more closely tied
in online community – in real life you have to go to distributers, buyers, etc
to reach wider audience, so your ownership is diminished. Second Life allows
you to be the creator and the distributor all at once
o
***Human desire and nature to remake themselves
and the world through craft
§ This
not a totally new idea!
What happens to the property and ownership if the site were to disappear?
·
If a site goes down, does everyone’s stuff just
get lost?
·
Is there an obligation for the company to
replace what is lost?
·
People who have sued Second Life because they
have been kicked out of the program and claimed that as members, they had
rights there.
Chinese Goldfarming
·
Video
·
From the Goldfarmer’s perspective it is not bad
·
It is unfair that people are angry at them
because it is just a job for them
·
They do not have much control over it – the
money they make is very minimal compared to the profit the company is turning
·
Is this exploitation of these workers?
o
They enjoy their work, but the condition (form
the film) seems to be worse. They work long days and do not look very healthy.
Companies manipulate these people who are not qualified enough for better jobs.
·
Description of themselves as “professional
gamers”
o
Not the same as what we may think of as people
who get sponsorships and make a lot of money and have celebrity status. This is
not same kind of “Professional gamer”
·
Method of making money in online games involves
collecting items. You have to get all the way to the highest level before you
can get things that are worth money.
·
Transnational dimensions of this?
o
Racialized dimensions? “gamers” are white men,
“goldfarmers” are Chinese
o
It is not an equal playing field
o
There are national stereotypes for gamers
§ Gamers
bring own cultural values and norms into the game but because they are not the
same as others, this causes stereotypes to arise
o
How does language and different readerships –
different groups with different norms – come together in this online space.
Ethnography
·
Quoting/citing – cite specific actual page if it
is archived and publically accessible
·
Screenshots
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