Visit the Second Life site (http://secondlife.com/; note that you need not join) and answer the following questions after exploring the site and viewing the material at the link "What is Second Life."
- While virtual worlds have existed for at least 30 years in some form, they have only recently become the interest of a variety of scholars, who see them as a new frontier for the study of identity and culture, among other things. In the text, we read about the anthropologist Tom Boellstorff's fieldwork in the virtual reality program "Second Life." Imagine that you are going to do an ethnography of Second Life. How would this be similar to and different than an ethnography of the offline world? What challenges would you face? What opportunities would be present in an ethnography of the online world that are not present in the offline world?
- Given what you are able to learn from the website, what similarities and differences do there appear to be between physical-world and virtual-world social networks?
- When compared with the offline world, Second Life offers the advantage of a highly apparent social construction of reality. How might the structure and design of virtual worlds affect the behavior of actors who live within them?
- As noted in the text, anthropologists are interested in what might be called the performative nature of identity. How does Second Life help us to see and think about self, personality, and subjectivity?
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