Coming of Age in Second Life

Coming of Age in Second Life was not at all what I expected. I really thought I was going to read an ethnography about Facebook and relationships built on social media... or something. After reading the preface and first chapter, I was really excited to read more of the book. But as I got towards the end of chapter 1, I was a little less excited. The first pages reminded me of one of the questions we ask at the beginning of my social theory course: Who is the author arguing against? What is the author arguing for? It seemed the author was arguing against non-believers of his ethnographic experiment both scholars and non-scholars; plus trying to convince his reader that Virtual Worlds were/are very valuable places to study that tell us about the human condition and human kind.  I came to this conclusion partly because of the way that he positioned his work to famous but older anthropology scholars that have shaped the field: Boas, Malinowski, Evans Pritchard, Mead, etc. It felt like it was almost trying too hard to convince the reader that “Hey! This is really anthropology! See! Look at all the applicable theory and methods I'm using”. However, I’ve learned that you can relate a theory to anything. Anyways, I would like to discuss in class his use of classic anthropology theory and philosophers to frame his book (Chapter 2). The discussion in chapter two on the emergence and history of virtual words was valuable. I think he could have gotten into the gaming vs. online community discussion, as I still don’t know where to situate Second Life in that dichotomy. The methods chapter (Chapter 3) was fascinating on the ways in which he conducted his research in this virtual world. I do appreciate how he grounds his work in traditional anthropological methods but this again connects to my original point about proving his book as an anthropological venture rather than letting it be anthropology. 

The connection between last weeks discussion of science fiction and virtual humans may be an interesting connection between our last two classes. I read a few of the additional readings as well which I don't have the time to summarize here. I found the Nardi and Coleman articles most interesting and would like to compare them to Boellstorff's work and methods.