Rhizome Experiment, Fall 2015

Boellstorff's Second Life Theory

Boellstorff documents social interaction in a for-profit game world built by Linden Lab called Second Life. The Second Life is driven by the social energy of its users. Boellstorff describes it as a place where, "tens of thousands of persons who might live on separate continents spent part of their lives online" (19). In mediums such as the Second Life, individuals socialize without preconceived notions of rules or objectives. Social divisions such as class, gender, and race appear to be temporarily suspended as users are anonymized behind the screens of their computers.

The Second Life exists in-between the real world and the virtual world, in a liminal region called a simulation space​. For a better understanding on simulation spaces, Bill offers a definition of in his page, simulation machine and Guattari also applies his theory to simulation spaces.

 Referring back to the image of a round-a-bout, a simulation space represents the exact point of convergence between the streets where the traffic flow comes together. In this case, the streets that lead to the intersection point can be seen as the real world and a virtual world. Boellstorff uses the words of a notable anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski, to define the real world as where, "one sees the customs, ceremonies and transactions over and over again, one has examples of [a community's] beliefs as they are actually lived through, and the full body and blood of actual native life fills out soon the skeleton of abstract constructions" (Quoted in Boellstorff 4). Malinowski emphasizes words like real and actual to drive home the point that this world is confined to things that occur in the physical space. When humans engage with the world and change it, conditions for new social meaning are produced in unprecedented and often unexpected ways. This world is vastly different than the virtual world. 

The virtual world is Boellstorff's primary fascination in Coming of Age in Second Life. In the virtual world, Boellstorff believes that, "the forms of social action and meaning-making that take place do so [entirely] within the virtual world, and there is a dire need for methods and theories to take this into account" (5). The implications of this world are wildly powerful; It is an abstract invisible medium that all kinds of energy (emotion, soul, electricity) can flow through. However, the hardware that facilitates these virtual worlds has finite limits. Individual bodies in isolation are put into the virtual world merely through a computer screen. There is no way for the physical body to immerse itself in the screen. This may seem like a dead end in our pursuit of uncovering a liminal zone between the real and the virtual. However, such a simplistic analysis neglects to take into account the social interactions at play, that serve as a sort of connective tissue between the two worlds. Isolated online conversations produce real life impacts or effects. In other words, the virtual world accompanies the real world through social interactions. Boellstorff articulates this by saying, "virtual worlds show us how, under our very noses, our 'real' lives have been 'virtual' all along" (5). This parallel movement of virtual and real worlds and the connective tissue between them that is social interaction is where we see the emergence of a liminal region called simulation space.

Things get messy in the notion that through computing technology, people are suddenly introduced to a grey area where physical space and time intersect with technology, breaking down barriers of individual worlds and forcing separate worlds to mesh into a new space called simulation space. Anna shows this in her page called Black Twitter's Power in Media. Her reference to the case of Michael Brown is a fitting example of how individuals are meshed together through the technology of Twitter and manifest into a protest and movement in the real world. Such a progression is the intersection of time and space in a new way made possible by technology. As in the Second Life, people become part of this invisible abstract collective and at the same time are alone in front of a computer screen portraying themselves through their avatar as any age, gender, race or even species (Boellstorff 130).

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