Virtual Worlds

I just came across a Tom Boellstorff interview in Anthropology News which sent me off to re-read some of the blog posts that had previously popped up about his Coming of Age in Second Life book.  Boellstorff did a guest post at Savage Minds where he picks up the virtual world discussion where his book left off.  One of the issues he mentions revolves around virtual worlds not being mass media.  He writes,

Because virtual worlds are places, they are not mass media, though they may contain mass media within them (everything from magazines, books, and embedded websites to streaming audio and video media). Virtual worlds need not mediate two or more places, since they are places in their own right. If anything, it is more accurate to think of a virtual world as a “medium,” in the sense of a material in which one crafts things. This has consequences for the use of mass media theory for understanding virtual worlds: we cannot assume ahead of time how such theories will need to be reworked for virtual-world contexts.

His emphasis on virtual worlds as places in their own right resonates with me.  My focus is on the blogosphere as a virtual world, and specifically the corner of the blogosphere that focuses on issues of environmental sustainability.  I have been exploring the literature on virtual worlds and the literature on blogging, and I’m finding it difficult to bring the two together. I’m having a hard time using them as two pieces in the same puzzle.

Much of the writing on blogs categorises the blogosphere, not as a virtual world, but as a new form of mass media.  However, often the areas of the blogosphere that are referred to as forms of mass media rely heavily on partisan politics or focus on the arts/entertainment and popular culture. I think sustainability blogs take a very different approach to blogging.

In Coming of Age in Second Life, Boellstorff defines virtual worlds as consisting of three basic elements: they must be 1. places, 2. inhabited by people, and 3. enabled by online technologies.

I don’t have any trouble conceptualising the blogosphere as a virtual world, but what makes it more of a place than a form of mass media?  In the interview in Anthropology News, Boellstorff says that he “wanted to study [Second Life] without always having to rush to talk about how it is related to the physical world. Despite constant traffic between the two worlds, there are also boundaries.”

I might be erecting more boundaries between the virtual world and the actual world than bloggers may see themselves.  Part of the reason for this, as Boellstorff points out, is just a shorthand tool–to keep it clear which ‘place’ you are referring to.  Conceptualising ‘place’ in the blogosphere is still presenting me with some problems though.

One aspect of Second Life that definitely makes it more clearly a place and a virtual world than the blogosphere is the visual nature of it.  It resembles the actual world in many instances–it is populated with avatars, who are modeled on humans, people build houses, etc.  It is much easier to imagine SL as a place when it resembles the places around you in the actual world. The blogosphere, in spite of the recent additions of audio and video, is predominantly textual and lacks these representative visual cues.  What keeps bringing me back to framing the blogosphere as a virtual world, or as a place, is something that is embedded in Boellstorff describing a virtual world as a “medium, in the sense of a material in which one crafts things”.  The sustainability blogs that I am looking at are crafting a vision of the world that they want to live in.  But in doing this, they are also blurring the boundaries between the virtual world and the actual world.  What I want to figure out is where the lines exist for them.  What exactly are they crafting?  Is it a blog, or in the process of blogging and the actions that inspire it, are they crafting their environment?

Works referred to in post:

Boellstorff, Tom 2008 Coming of Age in Second Life: An anthropologist explores the virtually human. Princeton University Press

Winnick, Dinah 2008 On ‘Coming of Age in Second Life’: An interview with Tom Boellstorff.  In Anthropology News 49(7): 21.