Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (review)

Placing

Coming of Age in Second Life (hereafter referred to as CoAiSL) begins with a description of a scene. An anthropologist lands on a deserted beach in Second Life (referred to by the natives as sl to distinguish it from rl for real life). This world is built on the foundation or platform of an online three-dimensional world populated with avatars representing the users. Outsiders might call it an online game, software platform, but the author goes to great length to explain why the avatars’ description is correct and more fitting: in-world life rather than a game. The Second Life platform has received much attention from mainstream media as well as those interested in art, pedagogy, and social networking online. Universities now have whole Islands in sl offering courses and virtual studio spaces. One can study everything from business, economics, and law to art, cultural studies, and language learning, or gamble, purchase goods, and have (truly detached) sex.

CoAiSL, addressed to academics, and especially to those most resistant to legitimizing studies of virtual worlds and cultures, offers a justification for even initiating this type of study. The copious research, with “thousands of pages of notes,” and arguments supported by theories from anthropology, cognitive psychology, grammatology, and more creates a context of justification. For that reason alone, the book should be required reading for anthropologists and new media scholars. It stands the test of even the most traditional and demanding ethnographers.

Beyond using a traditional approach and form, Tom B. (Boellstorff in rl and Bukowski in sl) finds himself doing untraditional activities: building an avatar and flying around this world-making place. Considering that context of discovery, and the epistemology of doing, participating, and performing which Tom B. advocates implicitly, my avatar wrote this review.

Avatars

The back cover shows Tom’s avatar, an attractive young man with tattoos. Inside the dust jacket a photo of the pleasant, but not exotic, looking author reminds one of a major argument of this book: sl is one more aspect of the lives of users, not a secondary reality, but a second aspect of life (an imaginative aspect) and that the avatars are often idealized or fantastic versions of their rl visages. As my avatar was reading and taking notes on CoAiSL, I was approached by my friend Hadafarm McDonnell, who urged me to purchase a flying balloon, like the one that Tom B. owns. We set off to consider one of Tom B.’s profound insights: identity and culture in sl depend on the foundational role of place-making.

Ethnography

Tom B.’s book—and he repeats the argument that he has purposefully written a traditional ethnography in a book form—begins to address how this particular research topic also impacts ethnographic study by making scholars aware of anthropology’s virtual reality: imagined identities of the ethnographer; the importance of imagination in comprehending lives and places; and that the real is always already riven with imagined or virtual realities. He discusses his role as an ethnographer in sl, but he does not mention any other ethnographers flying around sl during the time of his research, nor does he speculate on what an ethnography based on place-making might look like. In more recent times, Second Life has become a new platform for presenting ethnographies: installations as much as a culture to study. The most interesting of these ethnographies includes JC Fremont’s Imaging Place project with floating bubble-like-360-degree photographs with audio. The project’s narrative database includes an archive of hundreds of rl locations and hours of recorded narratives about contested real-life spaces, borders, and boundaries all haunted by an invisible narrative, a virtual reality, that nonetheless has formed those places.

Epilogue

Tom B. often uses the phrase “during the time of my field research” that suggests his awareness of sl as a world with its own changing historical development. Ethnographies can easily fall prey to a primitivism...