My Strange Online Community

In light of our current ethnographies researching virtual communities, I found a list on cracked.com compiled by Ross Wolinsky of the 8 strangest communities on the web. Disclaimer: this site contains language and content that some may find offensive.

Interestingly enough, the online community with which we have all become so acquainted through Boellstorff’s ethnography made the list. Cracked.com paints a slightly less romantic picture of Second Life than Boellstorff:

Linden Labs, the company that makes Second Life, likes to brag about its membership numbers. In reality, the actual number of active players is always much, much lower than the sum total of all registered users. That means that people create an account, build a house for their in-game avatar to masturbate in, and then they stop playing and never come back. What does that mean for you, the curious, newbie player? It means that walking around Second Life is like walking around in some weird, virtual post-apocalyptic zombie movie, only instead of encountering zombies, you occasionally stumble across some dude dressed up like a mechanical teddy bear having sex with a giant cat.

Between stumbling in on intimate encounters and being banned from houses to encountering almost no other players, I feel that many of us, as newbies, had experiences in Second Life that more closely mirrored Wolinsky’s than Boellstorff’s. I found Second Life to be a community that was particularly difficult to get acclimated to. Perhaps Second Life’s virtual frontier has become too large (in terms of virtual geographic land area) and players are not condensed enough for newbies to easily find many other players who are actually willing to converse with them. Nevertheless, Second Life remains appealing for some and maybe it is related to the concepts of embodiment and identity that we discussed in class. After all, Second Life can allow any given user to be whatever they like, even if they means they are cat by day and vampire by night.