Coming of Age in Second Life by Tom Boellstorff

This ethnography is the product of two years of ethnographic research in Second Life by Tom Boellstorff. I have been wanting to read this ethnography for a while now, particularly because in these online environments, one is forced give birth to oneself, so to speak. I connected this with Sartre's bon mots: "man is condemned to be free"--this is an environment where the existence of the character you make precedes its essence, and you choose how you are thrown into the world. (There are obvious limitations, it is the game developer who ultimately provides the meta-structure for these choices.)

The "virtual" is described by Boellstorff as a gap between the potential and actual, in Second Life this gap is most saliently manifested in the gap between "online" and "offline." (There seem to be many layers of virtuality, however, and one of Boellstorff's express goals is to show that humans have always been virtual through culture.) Boellstorff thinks through online spaces by reconceptualizing the human as homo faber, who constructs virtual worlds through techne (contra homo sapiens who makes known the world through episteme).

Through techne online residents of Second Life emplace themselves in their virtual environment, constructing social places; places in the virtual world are not inherently inferior to ones in the offline world. The spatial gap constitutes the divide between the actual and the virtual and residents of Second Life can navigate this gap with varying levels of immersion (one can be "afk" or away from keyboard, which is a way of being present but not immersed). However, the temporal gap between the actual and virtual cannot be navigated as time is thoroughly nested in the actual world; time in the virtual world can threaten time commitments in the actual world.

Boellstorff has an interesting comment on immersion that is relevant to immersive hardware technologies like VR. He recollects a debate in Second Life about the addition of voice capacities (communication was wholly in text in the time of his ethnography); many residents felt threatened because it would close the gap between the actual and the virtual and "destroy the fantasy" (p. 114) to quote one of his informants. In his opinion, technologies of greater sensory immersion are not as important as the techne of social immersion. Second Life is immersive for its residents because of virtual sociality, and the emphasis on sensory immersion through VR technologies may breach the generative actual-virtual gap.

Boellstorff also analyzes the political economy of Second Life. He identifies it to be fashioned in the "Californian Ideology" of its creators, and calls it "creationist capitalism" (p. 206). In this system, the consumer is simultaneously a producer, and self-fulfillment takes on the form of creative production. 

There is a whole chapter devoted to 'Personhood,' the chapter that I looked forward to the most (as mentioned above). There was a great deal of divergence in how Second Life residents expressed the gap between the actual self and the virtual self (the avatar): some thought that there was a great divergence, some noted an interpenetration (personality in Second Life influences the actual), and some believed that "I can truly be myself, my inner self" (p. 119). None of these I find mutually exclusive. In all these cases, the avatar is a construction of homo faber, of techne.

Second Life personhood becomes more interesting when one considers the possibility of one actual person to have two or more Second Life accounts ("alts") and the possibility of one avatar being shared by more than one actual people. In both these cases, the avatar was treated as a discrete and continuous self; people did not question or probe into the existence of friends' alts, even when they were in intimate relationships. Boellstorff ends the chapter on a provocative note: concluding that "avatars [are] not just placeholders for selfhood, but sites of self-making in their own right," he wonders if avatars as such have agency, or as he puts it "can the avatar speak?" (p. 149).

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