FINAL DOCUMENT PROPOSAL

Working Title: Settlements in Second Life: Transplanting real world cultures into virtual worlds.


I. Descriptive Summary

· The question or issue your final document will address
During the last five years, people have begun to settle virtual worlds such as Second Life. Previous works, based on few academic studies, presented this settlement in a uniform way. Everyone seemed to come to Second Life (SL), for the same reason, and behaved in the same way, no matter where they were in the virtual world. These studies reached the conclusion that the new world was as the Greeks would say -- techne which is creative in nature and man made, this is the opposite of episteme, which is pure information or knowledge. To examine this hypothesis we must find examples of techne and episteme cultures in Second Life.
While we can see examples of techne in periods like, the Age of Invention of the late 19th century, or episteme in Age of Enlightenment or the Postmodernism of the late 20th century, very few societies readily use this nomenclature, therefore analogies need to be discovered. In the day to day world, a good example of techne is the subculture of Steampunk. While Steampunk is a small subculture, the academic world, including libraries is an example of episteme cultures, which we all interact with. In Second Life, I will examine the regions of Caledon, a large area settled by Steampunk mined people, and Information Archipelago, settled by academics and librarians.
This work will look at these two questions: is there just one culture in Second Life and if so is it creative, by examining the regions mentioned above. These regions are made up of several simulations or sims, populated by hundreds of people, all of whom have agreed to several central ideas. They are often called theme lands, but they could easily be defined as colonies or communities.
If there is a uniform nature to Second Life, then these areas should be uniform in nature. If Second Life is symbolic of a techne meta-culture, the areas should all be highly creative in nature. If these areas are not uniform in nature then where did this diversity come from? Was it imported or is it native to Second Life?
To seek out the answers one needs to step away from expressions of self such as: race, sexual habits, politics, power, and economics addressed in other studies. The new study needs to address the aggregate expression of culture by communities. One tool for this is landscape studies: a geographic approach, which studies the built environment. Landscape studies allows the communities to be compared and contrasted as qualified concrete expressions of a culture.

Contrary to what Dr. Boellstorff, Au or Matthew state, Second Life is far from universal. It is diverse with many communities each importing its own ideas from the actual world cultures. However, the most successful colonies are the most expressive or techne in nature. This is true because of the nature of Second Life. It seems people are more attracted to active creative communities. This question of Second Life's multiculturalism leads one to ask several other questions. How and where did these cultures develop? Who are the leaders that build these areas? How do the real world landscapes influence Second Life landscapes? Do these landscapes play a significant role in their culture? Are there archetypical buildings or places for the regions? Finally what do the landscapes say about the viability of these cultures?
Four steps need to be taken to examine this hypothesis. First, I will explain Second Life and describe the regions to be studied. Second, an ethnographic study will be done in the three regions. Third, this data will be used to do a comparison of the landscapes of the regions. Fourth, in the conclusion, the study will try and answer the culture questions of the hypothesis.

A review of the key works reveals three problematic issues in virtual-world studies: the travel-story approach as opposed to an academic approach, a lack of ethnographic materials, and the reliance on a monocultural perspective.
Cultural study of virtual worlds is sparse, with just a few gems appearing over the last twenty years such as Communities in Cyberspace and I, Avatar Three-dimensional virtual worlds like Second Life have a complex history, which is best traced through the late 1980s and 1990s text-based, multi-user domains (MUDs). While there were attempts to create graphical worlds as far back as the 1980, it was not until the start of the new millennium that computer graphics and broadband Internet connections allowed for the creation of complex virtual worlds.
The first attempts to study the culture and life in MUDs started in the mid-1990s with two bestsellers. Howard Rheingold’s The Virtual Community, published in 1994, was followed in 1995 by Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital. While both of these works looked at MUDs and the communities within them, Negroponte was more concerned with the effects of technology than with the communities. Rheingold focused more on the communities, but his book lacked the intellectual rigor accepted in most academic settings. It reads more like a modern-day travel story and booster book than a cultural study or history.
It would be almost five years before the next serious cultural studies of the Internet, and specifically MUDs, would appear. In 1999, Communities in Cyberspace, edited by Marc A. Smith and Peter Kollock, was published by Routledge. An anthology of articles, this work covered many problematic aspects of modern culture within the Internet such as: race, gender, politics, economics and power. However, “Virtual communities as communities: net surfers don’t ride alone” an article in the anthology, by Barry Wellman and Milena Guila, is the best attempt to look at the actual cultures within MUDs.
Wellman, a professor of sociology, and Guila, a doctoral student at the University of Toronto at the time of the article, looked at two questions: Can people find community online in the Internet? Can relationships between people who never see, smell, touch or hear each other be supportive and intimate?
The authors admit to a lack of creditble ethnographic work to answer these questions, which led them to use a study of “computer-supported cooperative work” that was used throughout the 1990s. In addition they used anecdotes, traveler stories and their own experiences to fill in the gaps. The two concluded that communities do exist and resemble the flexibility of modern communities. These communities were also strongly supportive and intimate. Despite their efforts, the article’s lack of reliable background research and the study of text worlds instead of the graphic virtual worlds render much of it dated.
The next important work, published in 2008, is Tom Boellstorff’s Coming of Age in Second Life. The book cites Wellman and Milena Guila’s work. Boellstorff, an anthropologist at the University of California-Irving and editor in chief of American Anthropology, is considered the foremost anthropologist studying virtual worlds, SL in particular.
The book goes a step farther than Wellman and Guila when describing the community or culture of SL. Boellstroff argues culture has entered an age of techne, meaning applying of science and arts for creating, not an information age were information is just, studied, stored, and transferred. SL is a prime example of this new age because it is a creation of not just a new world but of new identities.
This new paradigm hides a flaw in Boellstorff’s reasoning. He assumes SL, and by extension all virtual worlds, share the same culture. His monocultural approach fails to address the differences between virtual worlds like Second Life and World Of Warcraft. More importantly he fails to detail the cultural differences one can find within SL’s different areas. This could be explained by the small number of virtual worlds that existed as well as the small size of SL itself at the time of the book’s publication.
Many researchers have since followed Boellstorff’s monocultural approach. Other books, however, such as I, Avatar, by Mark Stephen Meadows and The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World by Wagner James Au take the travel story approach to Second Life.

My study will be based on a combination of landscape studies and ethnography to understand three communities in Second Life. The two will work together to develop a deep view of the three communities and use that understanding to see how their built environment expresses their culture. I will use the works of J. D. Jackson's historical approach and Denis Cosgrove comparative approach to landscapes. to form the basis of my landscape approach. The ethnography portion of my study will be a based on a feminist communicative approach and Lisa Malkki’s jazz inspired improvisation of field work. A third but minor theoretical approach is visual culture which I will use to help analyze the landscapes.

My primary source will be my year long ethnographic study in conjunction with several focus groups and a solid survey. I hope this information will generate a more clear picture of the different cultures in Second Life. I will also use my professional knowledge and contacts as a librarian. I will also attend “Steamcon,” which is a Steampunk convention being held in Seattle in October 2009. These last two activities will reinforce my knowledge of actual world culture knowledge. Following here are annotations for key sources I will draw upon: