The Drax Files World Makers Episode 31 With Tom Boellstorff Ponders “What Is Real?”

The Drax Files: World Makers Episode 31 (sponsored by Linden Lab) features an interview with Professor Tom Boellstorff (pronounced “bell-storf”; the first “o” is silent). Tom is an anthropologist based at the University of California, Irvine. The episode is introduced by Tom saying :

If you’re trying to learn about a culture, the challenge is time and that’s something that applied to the work I’ve done with gay and lesbian Indonesians and it applies just as much when you’re studying something like virtual worlds, you have to live inside the community that you’re studying.

Already I’m interested in what is going to transpire in this interview, time is something I’m always battling with myself and the fact that Tom appreciates that you have to be among a community to study one suggests he’s not forming an opinion based on a few screenshots and a far away view. We also learn that Tom is not new to Second Life, when he first entered Second Life there were only around 2,500 users, this guy is an oldbie.

As an example of how much Second Life has grown since the early days, Tom explains how he decided to fly over all of Second Life in the early days, it took him about a week, at two hours a day. How long would it take these days? I have no idea but the grid is much larger than it would have been when Tom initially joined.

Tom says that in Second Life he is a digital ethnographer. Tom explains that an ethnographer studies how people live and think and that this involves hanging out with people. To this end he used to host weekly chats with anyone who wanted to teleport in. This sounds like the old Linden Office Hours but was quite probably more civil. I wonder if Tom did go to any Linden Office Hours, I’m sure that would tell a digital ethnographer a thing or two about digital communities too, even when they got heated.

The interview covers some great issues, including identity where Tom points out that people embrace their identities in different ways in virtual worlds. This has been discussed before, some people use their virtual world identity as an extension of their real self, to others, it’s a way of exploring their identity and who they are in a safe space, as we saw with  Cecilia d’Anastasio’s article for Motherboard Vice; Avatar IRL :

Originally, Veronica was merely an avatar. Now, Veronica Sidwell is a 37 year-old transwoman working as a picture framer in Atlanta, Georgia. Veronica, who would not disclose the name she lived most of her life under, changed her legal name to match her Second Life avatar. It was a gesture of respect to the sim who lent her the confidence to transition IRL from male to female. Veronica’s experience as a female-bodied avatar in a virtual world, she told me, convinced her that she would live a fuller, happier life in womanly form.

To some people, it’s just a bit of fun. The different uses of avatars are interesting and engaging but the avatar experience is also a chance to stand against the pervasive and intrusive nature of platforms such as Facebook, who don’t seem to want to give people the opportunity to explore who they are in the way that virtual worlds allow us to.

The question of real life comes into the interview with Tom saying :

To call the physical world real life is the number one problem in the study of technology. A lot of stuff that happens online is real.

He makes a great point here. I’ve made this point before but virtual worlds are by and large part of the real life, unless you’re running a bot, the person behind the avatar is someone real, with real feelings, real emotions and real interactions. A digital representation does not make the whole thing a piece of fiction, but what is real anyway? What does real mean?

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide, No escape from reality. Open your eyes, Look up to the skies and see …. umm enough of that! Unfortunately when it comes to the question of what is real , Tom doesn’t have the answer. We could get into the deep bar room conversation about whether this is the real life anyway, or whether we’re all just digital simulations in a future virtual world, but I’ll save that conversation for the bar, as it’s more fun there!

Another great piece in this interview comes with the issue of how people view technology, especially those outside virtual world circles. Technology moves fast and Second Life is now over twelve years old, so what’s relevant about Second Life today, indeed, why is Tom still studying Second Life? Tom provides a great answer :

I never have people ask me; why are you still going to Indonesia?

The point that I think gets missed at times is that virtual worlds are, as Tom says, places. Second Life s a place with places in it, people are still interacting inside the virtual world, there’s still plenty to observe.

Tom also feels that if the virtual reality explosion happens, virtual worlds are going to be a major use case. However Tom holds out hope for the virtual world enthusiasts who aren’t remotely sold on VR, he says that VR won’t take over virtual worlds, it will just be a different way of accessing them. I agree with this sentiment because for many people, the sort of immersion that VR offers is not going to be for them, but they will still engage with the virtual world experience one way or another.

The interview is around five minutes long and Draxtor again gets behind the person behind the avatar by allowing them to tell their story in their own words. The footage is the usual mixture of real and virtual world footage. Actually I may have to think of another term for “real and virtual world footage” after watching this episode!

This is another great episode and well worth watching.

Older members of Second Life may find the name Tom Boellstorff familiar. Tom is the author of “Coming of Age In Second Life“, which was first published in 2008. A new version is scheduled to be released later this month :

Coming of Age in Second Life shows how virtual worlds can change ideas about identity and society. Bringing anthropology into territory never before studied, this book demonstrates that in some ways humans have always been virtual, and that virtual worlds in all their rich complexity build upon a human capacity for culture that is as old as humanity itself. Now with a new preface in which the author places his book in light of the most recent transformations in online culture, Coming of Age in Second Life remains the classic ethnography of virtual worlds.

I’m not sure how many other updates the book has had.

Please note that all images published in this post are courtesy of Draxtor Despres providing permission.