I could chat with Tom Boellstorff all day – but I’ll take an hour when I can get it, as I recently did on Metanomics (full video at the end of the post).
During my recent interview with Rod Humble, the new CEO of Linden Lab, I had one major piece of advice: reach out to Tom and spend some time with him (and while you’re at it, hire an ethnographer to work at the Lab!).
Excerpts from my interview with Tom might help explain why:
On Virtual Worlds, Techne, and the Concept of the Overlay
DUSAN: So one of the concepts that you followed in your book quite beautifully and, I think, made clear that although there may be multiple cultures within Second Life, there was also a Second Life culture, which was defined by certain things that the broader community had in common. And then you also posed the question that broader community, was there anything particularly defining, and you talk about techne and episteme. And I’m still fascinated by that idea, and I’m fascinated whether your thinking on that has moved further since you wrote the book. Maybe just explain a little bit what you meant about techne within techne.
TOM BOELLSTORFF: Sure. One thing for me, especially as a researcher, that I’m extremely lucky. I have a job. I’m a professor. I have tenure. They can’t fire me unless I just do something incredibly stupid. I can take some risks, right, and say things that people might debate with or disagree with. But to try and put my virtual hiney on the line a little bit and try and push the envelope. And so one way in which I did that is, I really want to say that there is such a thing as Second Life culture. There is a broader, general culture, even though there are, of course, all of these other subcultures. And it reminds me how often Americans don’t think there’s such a thing as American culture. We’re so diverse. There’s 50 states. But then, when you go to Indonesia, right from the outside, they’re like, “Tom, there’s a thing that’s American culture. You don’t realize it because you’re in it, but there are some things that Americans share.” And then there’s all this diversity as well.
Another interesting thing that anthropologists have talked about for a long time is what can unite a culture can be disagreements and conflict, not just agreements. We can be bound together, and, if you look it by conflict, and if you look at the political debates in the United States right now, it’s a great example of how conflict and disagreement can be something that binds people together. I guess some people could talk about that’s how it is with their family or something. But that culture isn’t the same thing just as consensus, as agreement. It’s about shared meanings and beliefs that we can disagree on.
And there’s always subcultures in any culture, but there are also sort of broader cultural issues that you will find. For instance, in Indonesia or in the United States or in Second Life. And when I try to think about what are those really broad things, things like AFK show up. And then, in the book, when I try and step back, and this is something I still think about, the difference between knowledge which the Greeks call episteme and crafting and making things, which the Greeks call techne and is the root of our term technology.
In the western tradition, the origin myth for knowledge is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and the Christian tradition is the best known example. And the back of my Apple computer has a picture of that, right, the apple with a bite out of it. But in the old Greek mythology, the origin of craft is from Prometheus stealing fire from the gods. And, in the original Greek, what he actually steals isn’t just fire, but the ability to use fire, which they call techne, this ability to craft things.
And so I’m very interested in especially the sort of user generated Virtual Worlds, like Second Life. But even in things like World of Warcraft where there’s a lot of modding things, people doing creative, unexpected things with the platform that the designers never intended. We see all of this stuff around crafting, and that even spreads out to people putting their photos up on Facebook and doing blogs. People used to think that mass media would mean that people wouldn’t write anymore. They would just buy and mass produce newspapers. No one expected that these technologies would lead to all of this new authorship and all of this new creation in so many different ways. And so I play around with this in my book, by talking about this age of techne, this way in which crafting has become this really interesting not new at all, obviously it goes back to the Greeks but it is really becoming visible in a new way.
And then when I try and think about what makes a Virtual World different than email or then making something in my back yard or something with wood, it’s that you can have techne inside of techne, in a way. That we are sitting here in this Metanomics place, in this Sim that is made by silicon and chips and computers, and people building things with prims, and then we are building stuff inside of that thing. There’s this interesting kind of recursion, this kind of way in which it’s eating its own tail. I still am trying to think that through.
And, if my next book I haven’t told anyone this before because it’s years from being done because of all the work I’m doing that right now I think maybe the title for it might be something like Overlay because I’m very interested in all of the stuff on augmented reality, on immersion, on even language about addiction and compulsion, ambience, the way in which people are using cell phones and laptops and iPads and mobile devices to augment an overlay these different technologies in the physical world, in all kinds of directions, without them blurring into each other: that layering for new kinds of meaning and new kinds of social groups and all kinds of new stuff. And I can’t say more about that yet because I don’t know. But I really think I want to try and do some research on that and think about what techne might mean in that kind of space.
On Cyborgs and the Avatar
DUSAN: Do you want to talk a little bit about that and where might research take us as we start to understand the impact on other cultures or on ourselves by embodying through an avatar?
TOM BOELLSTORFF: That is such an interesting issue and actually by June or July, I have a new piece coming out. I just put the information on it in the text, about the virtual body. I just wrote a whole article, trying to think theoretically even more about the idea of the avatar and how the avatar is different from the cyborg that works quite differently because a cyborg you’re attaching physical flesh and machine, right? But I don’t walk around with an avatar arm attached to my physical arm. Instead I have two bodies that lie across a gap between the physical and virtual. So that’s actually very different from a cyborg.
We have a lot of ideas and theories about cyborg embodiments, and we need a lot more actually about avatar because it is quite different about how avatars work and how the idea of embodiment works. It’s one of the biggest areas of difference because, in the physical world, I could cut my hair, I can do whatever, but I can’t become a puppy dog. I can’t become two people at the same time and have sex with myself or have an alt. I can’t change my gender or my race or become a glowing ball of light that bounces around the room. There are some really interesting differences when the body is crafted from top to bottom, so to speak.
In the physical world, I could change my gender, but I couldn’t do it and then change it back one hour later, like I could in Second Life. It’s a much bigger thing. I couldn’t become two feet tall or whatever. So the way in which that shapes ideas around choice, ideas around nature, ideas around the body, I mean there’s been really interesting work people have done about how avatars of different races or genders get treated differently inside of Virtual Worlds. How might that change as people get more accustomed to Virtual Worlds and when there’s avatars around that are a snake. I’ve seen avatars where the person’s a refrigerator. I mean how do you even think about that. It’s so interesting.
So there’s a couple separate issues. One, the range of possibilities. Number two, the ability to change and change back very quickly and easily. Number three, the possibility that the link that you have in the physical world between one person and one body can be changed in both directions. Right? You can have two people controlling one avatar. Some of you may know Hamlet, and New World notes early on had that great piece on Wild Cunningham where you had nine persons controlling one avatar together. So if you interview that person, am I interviewing one person, or am I interviewing nine people? That’s a really interesting, philosophical and culture question.
So the issue of embodiment just goes in so many directions and this is such interesting issue. I have this article coming out in a couple months about it, that it’s still just a big question mark. It would be awesome to do more research, and we need more people doing research on all kinds of questions of embodiment. It’s so interesting.
On Kids on the Grid and Our Life Journey
DUSAN: Okay, so here’s another question that probably has no answer, and I know it’s something that you’re not studying, but we had a bit of back and forth email about the fact that teens are now allowed on the main grid. They closed down the teen grid, and they changed the age criteria for the main grid. I mean I guess the first question would be, would you expect to see an impact on the broader culture, is the first question. I think the second question is–or is more of a comment: You had some interesting thoughts about how our journey as avatars isn’t dissimilar to our journey as humans. So I’ll ask you to just kind of riff off the topic of teens on the grid.
TOM BOELLSTORFF: Sure. And welcome, teens, any of you who are around. First, Botgirl just had an awesome point about how people experience their avatar in different ways. A really important thing you learn when you do ethnographic research and you’re really hanging with people is very often there’s not just one answer to any question, like: Is an avatar a representation of a body or a body? There may very well not be one answer. It could be that, for some people, it’s one thing. For some people, it’s others. And even for some people, they have one avatar where it feels like a representation and another alt where it doesn’t feel like a representation. All of those possibilities might be out there. Very often people are so complex and interesting.
To a lot of these questions, sometimes there is a single answer, but most of the time there’s a cluster of answers. And, as a researcher, when I know I’ve discovered something is when I interview and I’m talking to hundreds of people, doing participant observation around an issue like this, I’ll find out that there’s not just one answer, but there’s also not a hundred different answers. There’s like four or five top answers. And then you know you’re starting to learn about a culture because a culture doesn’t mean that everyone has the same view, it’s not unanimous. But it’s not total chaos either where there’s a million different opinions or approaches for a million different people.
So I think that question of: Is an avatar a representation? My guess is that as we do more research, what we’ll find is that there’s going to be three or four or five dominant ways that people experience that, and that’s going to tell us something really significant. And it probably won’t come down to just one thing, but it probably just won’t be a hundred zillion random things either, that culture clumps in a certain sense, and, to me, then I know when I’m onto something when I find, hey, here are the three or four most common ways that people are thinking about some issue, and it’s not just one thing, and it’s not a hundred. Anyway, it was just a great point that Botgirl made.
So about the teens, and welcome to any teens here because, as we know, there were no teens in Second Life prior to the closing of the teen grid. But it is exciting. I remember in the early days–does anyone else remember this. I think Hamlet wrote about this, that in the early days of the teen grid, some of the teens figured out that the teen grid was actually a continent in the Second Life ocean that was connected to the main continents. And they scripted these rockets, and they would shoot themselves into the air and the move it over one degree and shoot it again and move it over another degree and that they actually managed to land on the main grid and wander around.
I’m pretty sure Hamlet even has some pictures of this. But how awesome! Teens always get around what parents tell them they can or can’t do. But I think it’s so awesome that they were shooting themselves around in the early grid. It’s so cute. So awesome.
So in terms of thoughts around the teens, let me just throw up two or three thoughts, and people can add more because it’s such an interesting issue. From my earlier work on gay identity and sexuality, no topic brings up people’s desire to control more than the topic of children. It is a place where so often the regular rules don’t apply, and forms of control and oppression can often show up, under the excuse of protecting children. I mean even when you think about all kinds of discrimination, anti Semitism thing where “they’re drinking the blood of children” or whatever, all those kinds of things. And when you look at the internet in general, all of the fears around children.
Obviously, I have a kid. You want to protect children. Please don’t misunderstand what I’m saying. In most societies, children are exposed to sex and death from a very young age. I mean I grew up in Nebraska with much of my family on the farm, and we forget how kids are not as naive as we often make them out to be and that segregation is a really limited way of approaching that. Up until recently, we had a Second Life world where anything was possible. You had anything was thinkable except for one thing: there were no children. I mean that’s so interesting that, in a place where anything is possible, the one place we draw a line is that there’s no children. So anyway, I think this issue of children is a really interesting issue.
And then the question of the life course. Different cultures divide up the life course in different ways. Sometimes they do it in two or three ways. In the Jewish tradition, you have a Bar Mitzvah when you’re 13, and then you’re an adult. Really, there’s no category of teenager. Even in the western society more generally, the idea of the teenager was a fairly recent, I think a twentieth century invention. And now we have tweens and all this other kind of crazy stuff. We’re dividing up the life span into more and more pieces often in the west. And how we think about the life course is a really interesting issue.
And then what’s the relationship between a virtual life course and a physical world, life course, where there’s all these great examples. Bonnie Nardi talks about this in World of Warcraft, where you could have an 18 year old kid, who’s a level 60 super player and a 60 year old doctor who’s a newbie in World of Warcraft and can’t even figure out how to swing their axe or something. So these kinds of disjunctures between different kinds of life courses is a really interesting issue that you’re seeing in many of these different technological spaces. Margaret Mead, I think it was, actually had some great quote about how one of the biggest ways you see a change from a traditional society to a modern society is that, in a traditional society, the elders teach the young. And, in a modern society, the young people teach their parents, teach the older people. And, if you’ve ever helped your parents with a cell phone or a DVD player, you know what I’m talking about.
How technology changes these ideas of the life course is really interesting, and it’s going to be so exciting in the next year or two, to see how Second Life will shift now that it is multi generational in a new way. Personally, I think it’s just so exciting, in terms of the questions that it throws up.
On Future Research and Where Next
DUSAN: If there was a fertile ground for research related to Virtual Worlds, where do you think it lies right now?
TOM BOELLSTORFF: I think that the direction that things are going is in multiple directions. It’s like a big rock has been thrown into a pond and those ripples going out everywhere. So we need more people to do in depth studies of Virtual Worlds, in general, like studying Second Life or studying EVE Online. And then also, in some cases, looking at specific communities, looking at uses around education or looking at Furries or looking at religion or whatever. We need people doing comparative work, comparing different Virtual Worlds, and that could be people who do a study of one place and then compare notes with a colleague and do something together, like I’m doing right now. Or, someone who does a project in a couple different virtual Worlds. They’re not going to be able to spend as much time in each one, but if they focus the question they can do that.
We need more research about ways in which physical and Virtual Worlds are shaping each other. And you’re absolutely right that that goes in both directions. The overlay goes in both directions so Virtual Worlds are changing the physical world in ways we don’t completely understand. We need research about the relationship between Virtual Worlds and social networking sites, like Facebook and Twitter. Those aren’t Virtual Worlds themselves, but they share many underlying concepts, like the idea of friending someone, and they link up with a Virtual World in so many interesting ways.
We need to look at the transnationalization of these spaces and how they work differently in different parts of the world. And, as well, how new cultures are coming into being, that can’t be reduced to any one physical world location. So when people from Peru and Mexico and Indonesia get together in Second Life or wherever, they can make something new that you couldn’t just learn about by going to Mexico or Indonesia. It’s a new thing in that in world space. What’s up with all of that kind of thing is an interesting question. Those issues of governance that you mentioned are so interesting. So, for me, in the next year and a half, my personal goal and people here in the audience and elsewhere I’m happy to get ideas and talk to people because there’s so many interesting possibilities. The problem isn’t what to study. The problem is what not to study.
One last thing I’ll add is that, to me, one of the most exciting things that’s happening is not just all of these new questions and issues, but the real emergence in the last three or four years of a research community that includes people with formal research jobs, like my own, includes people who are bloggers or journalists, includes all kinds of people out there, who are interested in these questions about Virtual Worlds and that we have an emerging community of people who are putting our heads together and challenging each other and coming up with ideas and methodologies and things to look at.
So to me, the excitement isn’t only just about these spaces, but about a research community of people that we are sharing ideas and right now writing this book with three other people. I mean how exciting that I can do that. Five years ago, six years ago when I started this research in 2004, no way was that possible. So another very exciting thing moving forward and something that I think we need to think through how can we nurture it is this new research community of people from all over the world and all walks of life, who are sitting back and saying, “Wow! What’s going on with all this stuff?” And learning from each other, I think that’s another very exciting aspect of what’s happening. And so, in closing, for myself, just thank you so much for inviting me, and I hope this wasn’t completely weird or boring to people, that this was so unscripted and informal that I’ve had a lot of fun, and I’m happy to do it again. I think it’s great that we have these kinds of conversations.
I read this a couple of times… thanks for pointing me to it! About Twitter, Facebook, and Second Life, I wanted to mention two things.
One is that members of my family don’t regard the people in SL as “real people” even though they know some of them in RL.
In the same way, Twitter was (to me) a mass of noise with some news in it — until I had a small epiphany of seeing that there were people I know “in there” — and Twitter became something different.
The other thing is the *hostility* that a lot of Second Lifers have toward Facebook and Twitter. It’s something that LL seems oddly blind to, and they often wave what amounts to a red flag by supposing that everyone’s on Facebook and Twitter.
I think there’s a common idea that Facebook and SL are antithetical… I know that a good number of us in SL talk to each other via the various SL forums and Twitter… but I don’t know anyone who uses Facebook as a substitute when they can’t get inworld.
Maybe that’s just a matter of who I know?
I enjoyed the tv chat, but it’s even better to read it. Thanks.
I wish LL had even a vague idea of these issues, it seems that they have absolutely no idea of how huge virtual worlds are.
i know all the vr stuff is shiny and great for book deals and meta..but i wonder if instead of “new” waiting times , if that a more clinical examnination of the last 40 years of virtuality shouldnt be of more interest.
that “American culture” was the TV. The box created an interface to shared “moments” since lets call it 1960, as we elected our first TV star leader, then watched him killed on the same medium.
As for avatars, we have actors,, as for multipuppeaered avatars we had Muppets on Sesammme street and animated cartoon characters TEACHING our children since the late 60s with more “face time” than mom/dad or teacher.
Its true “childhood” was a 18-19th century invention in many ways(marketing/machines/city living birthed), but as we segment more (marketing again-machine needs to quantify to monetize)in current times it seems that its not only children who get older… but adults who perpetually keep acting younger. — WE flatten, as we know network machines tend to do….
natural life forms curves when graphed…machine systems flatten lines with a spike here and there, that spike usually considered the anonomoly that must be debugged.
a world of 21 year olds living via a machine and being deleted by said machine as a system?
Logans Run… run runner run!..:)
food for human thought,
Before his death in 1946 Wells provided his own epitaph to an interviewer: “God damn you all, I told you so.”
i love this..lol.
ironically i think Vernes is in more favor nowadays. faith in techne and all.
Interesting article, but use “Opensim” or http://openpensimulator.org I believe Opensim will go global and I’m not the only one who believes this . . . check it out, its free if you can host. Run a science fiction themed virtual world for those who are into sci-fi. There could be all kinds of branded-themed worlds out there if opensim takes off! make your own, you don’t have to be a big company to do it, look at me… then we could all experiment with various combinations both virtual and real until we get what we want. I cross brand mine with a blog, twitter, facebook and I’m now thinking of finding a way to do mobile app?
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The techne inside a techne issue — well, yes, but then there’s episteme inside the episteme too, maybe?
What are the original technocrats’ constraints on the techne inside the techne?
I so much prefer Tom’s ideas and thoughts to Thomas Mallaby’s. And it’s because their subject matter is different — the resident population versus Linden Lab itself — but it’s also because they are different kinds of people, and I dare say their methodology is even different. Mallaby is in the tradition of the corporate anthropologist, and I would argue that that’s a very limited take on things, it’s like the Kremlinology books that never looked all the different social movements and nationalities resisting Russification in the USSR.
On the other hand, you can never understand the residents’ culture until you look at the source of what agitates them, and then it’s the Lab. And therefore I wish there would be a Tom and Thomas fluffernutter, if you will, because I think you can’t understand one without the other.
The whole metaphor of “Lab” and “innovation” and “experiment” — it’s like Susan Sontag’s “Illness as Metaphor” meets Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” — it’s a sort of kitschy kitchen science that we have in Second Life, not *real* science…yet we are experimented on…by social engineers…what are engineers anyway? etc.
Well then — as merely an amateur blogger and not a official solutions provider much less a real scholar with degrees, I’ve also been situating this culture of SL in the wider culture of Silicon Valley. Can we understand virtual worlds without first understanding the culture of Silicon Valley? No, we cannot. Transnational this and transgressive that and trans–whatever — but we have all come out from under Tim Berner-Lee’s overcoat.
I’m not liking the feel of Silicon Valley culture much these days. I’ll sure you’ll find the metaphors in this essay rather blunt, perhaps offensive. But I have to write what it feels like, that combination of culture spread by a consensual fashion that is subversive in ways that the carriers don’t realize; and then the coercive culture spread unconsciously that is also subversive…
http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2011/02/the-evils-of-silicon-valley-culture.html
When you read the Pogue story, and then read the MC Siegler story, you’ll see what I mean. The culture of coercion and consent in the form of collusion that indeed does lead to addiction that then further subverts the norm of even being to call it addiction….
I think I need to put in a station break here to explain once again (I think people really don’t get it) that changing your gender in SL isn’t merely just some act of whimsy, some sort of very twee thing that you can laugh about at a coctail party and say, I did this at 2:00 o’oclock, I did that at 3:00 o’clock hahahah. That is, I’m quite prepared to accept that it *is* that for some facile types (and botgirl questi comes instantly to mind) that end up betraying their transition.
But quite a few people change their gender — and stick. And they go to a lot of effort never to break character — ever — for years on end. So that has to be respected.
I mean, look at real life, which is, after all, where people go to get story ideas for Second Life.
When you think of some men who have endured unbelievable harassment, even beatings, even maiming, and incredible ridicule, etc. for being transgender. I used to live in a gay neighbourhood in New York City, near Christopher Street. One of the saddest sights was the transvestites who were so persecuted in their own very oppressive communities, mainly black and Hispanic traditional families, that they could only come on the train from New Jersey at like midnight when no one would see them on the train, change into their dresses and wigs and makeup for a few hours in an alley behind some garbage cans, leaving their street clothes in a bag, and then slink back to the alley at 4 or 5 am to change back into their straight attire again. That profound oppressiveness of the alleyway behind the PATH train to New Jersey — I don’t know if I can describe it to you.
But these men would *do anything to feel right*. They would go through *that* just to feel “at home”.
I recall at SLCC in Boston, there was a man who is a female in SL. He decided to come to SLCC in a dress, but without any elaborate effort to pass as a woman — he just came in a dress and had some makeup. Now, he might have gotten a second look by the tourists in the hotel, but among Second Lifers, he was taken for granted. Nobody turned to stare because he was known, accepted. And there was a look of “belonging” on his face.
I’m trying to convey these somewhat dramatic moments because I think the idea that SL is just a costume party or SL is just Mardi Gras — it doesn’t quite capture the need people have to make a second life and reshape themselves online. It’s not like a sex tour to Thailand, you know.
I personally don’t feel casual about my avatars. Even if they are mules to hold groups or inventories for various themed areas so that they are easier to load, or even if they just seem to have a cool last name, they have a certain dignity. I remember when the Lindens cracked down on us and told us we could only have 6 accounts, I think it was. So there was an avatar I had to delete, who I hadn’t used much — he was holding a group together, but I still felt I had to give him “a decent burial”. So I came online, seated myself in a kind of funeral pyre in an Asian home, and set to meditating and left the avatar until he dropped offline before deleting him.
As for teens — it’s just not a big deal. There aren’t that many of them. The teens are a metaphor. They are an icon for fears of exposure that various adults on Second Life are experiencing who are the equivalent of the people who have to take the PATH train from New Jersey at midnight, and change in the alleyway. That’s all. They are projecting fears, they are valid, but they can’t be allowed to shape the entire space, either. They are afraid more than anything not of teens being exposed to sex; they are afraid of *being set up by other vindictive adults* who would like to persecute them by charging them with unlawful relations with minors. That’s it! That’s the Teen Grid agida in a nutshell, and let’s not pretend it’s more grand than that. Second Life is a hateful vindictive place; PG exists not as a zone where you can feel relief from the endless display of maturity; PG is where people lure their enemies to in order to trip them up swearing, so they can then AR them.
One of the ways Tom (and others who do this) go off the rails for me is when they begin to get all “meta” on Western culture and say “But you know, 150 years ago, we didn’t have childhood” or “Childhood was a Victorian invention” or “But you know, people used to marry at the age of 16 so really, we shouldn’t be obsessing so much”.
Um, ok. But there are reasons — and they aren’t just economically determinist reasons like the Marxists imagine — why we have evolved a concept of children that doesn’t put them to work at 9 years old or doesn’t marry them off at 16. Part of the liberation of women is in part a liberation of children from being pressed into service as miniature adults. It’s funny how people invoke notions of child work and child sex to justify liberationist notions in the modern world today in the West, when in fact those notions were categories of oppression in the past, that in fact the Western concept of a prolonged childhood liberated human beings from while they were in formation. To hear people talk about it these days, you would think that the Western notion of prolonged childhood is a plot by the religious right. But it’s helpful to remember that it is itself a function of a previous liberation.
That someone thinks that we need to stop being net nannies if a 16 year old sees Second Life rauchiness because 16 year olds were married 200 years ago or are married today in Afghanistan is to overlook the problem of oppression — and I say this not without any heavy feminist Dr. Spivak type of overlay. There’s nothing grand about marrying a young girl off to some 50-year-old letch or even merely to serve as the inhouse farm help and breeder for the son in the extended family. Exposing teens to the deep mendacious oppressiveness of BDSM; to the deep coercive cynicism of the SL urban noir sex culture; or even to the idiocy of rural sim life — that’s not liberation. I think it’s important to be a little more critical of this.
Well, ultimately, somebody who pays the bills will ask: does any of this virtual research help us understand real life better?
I’m not certain it does.