Virtual Environments and Cultures

This collection of essays explores a wide range of topics current in the field of ethnographic research, including the virtual world of Second Life for virtual cultures and environments, assessment of «digital codes» as a vehicle for demonstrating the development inside user-generated worlds. Authors reflect critically on challenges facing a reality entangled with virtual reality. The results of these investigations will benefit readers, from early career researchers to experienced scholars, whose interests not only intersect with the topics presented here but which also encompass broad methodological issues affecting freedom of expressions.

Virtual reality is no longer an issue that we can avoid or ignore. It is an essential part of our experience, influencing cultures and individuals all over the world. This book presents a collection of ethnographic research in the virtual world of Second Life, and can be seen as an attempt to discover the challenges and limits of social anthropological research with an avatar in virtual cultures and environments. The contributions in this book demonstrate that the development of «digital codes» has meanwhile gone so far that anthropologists have started to conduct fieldwork inside digital user-generated worlds. This volume investigates the challenges facing a reality that is strongly and maybe irrevocably entangled with virtual reality. This development holds disadvantages and dangers but advantages as well - such as freedom of expressions for minority groups, social online activists, religious communities or artists. All research is based on qualitative methods, with group and single interview situations and participant observation over a period of between three and ten months.

Autorentext

Urte Undine Frömming, born 1970 in Eutin (Germany), is junior professor at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and the head of the Master's Program in Visual and Media Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin. She has completed several visual anthropological fieldwork studies in Eastern Indonesia, in East-Africa (Tanzania), in Iceland and in the virtual world of Second Life. She is a member of the work group «Visual Anthropology» at the German Anthropological Association (DGV) and member of the European Forum for the Study of Religion and the Environment.

Inhalt
Contents: Urte Undine Frömming: Entangled Realities in Virtuality Emily Smith: [Dis]Orientation: Mapping in Second Life Christina Voigt: From Wilderness to Virtuality: Virtual Nature and Landscape in Second Life Josefine Borrmann: Place and Non-Place in Second Life Alina Trebbin: Waiting for Zowie: Notes from the Digital Uterus Sarah Kiani: Crossing Boundaries or Reinforcing Norms? Gender Performances in Second Life Elena Quintarelli: The Amazon of Aquarius: An Ethnographic Journey Through Gender Issues in Second Life Emma Corbett-Ashby: Queer and Trans Experience in Second Life: An Experimental Dialogue Katharina Frucht: Virtual Romance: Love Relationships in Second Life Julia Zaremba: Furries Ranty R. Islam: Cyberspace and the Sacred Thomas John: Religiosity in a Virtual World: Reasons and Motivations Manizhe Ali: Muslims and the Virtual Mike Terry: Tabernacle in the Wilderness: Hierophany in Virtual Space Tobias R. Becker: Virtual Representations of the Middle East Conflict Sara Ferrari/Tiina Kivelä: Becoming an Activist in Virtual Worlds - Experiences of Social Activism in Second Life Samantha Fox: Listen to the Radio: AM Radio, Second Life, and Innovations in an Emerging Medium Lidia Rossner: Art Production and its Conceptual Systems in Second Life Jordana Goldmann: Second Life: Exploring Virtual Space and its Creative Possibilities Fidel Devkota: The Story of a Digital Samurai.