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The Archives
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03.31.09Neo-Positively Immersed: Virtual Worlds Give Us Back the HumanitiesI'm wading in well over my head when people start talking about neo-positivists and non-neo-positivist traditions and "the academy" (which should probably be capitalized, and seems to be what people who are professors call, um, that place where they work and all the reams of deep thought that comes out of it). I mean - too many isms, but there's an interesting story hidden in here somewhere, and it all started when Robert Bloomfield commented in his "Connecting the Dots" segment on Metanomics that anthropologists should join up with OpenSim developers and work hard to collect hard data, provable data, SCIENTIFIC ...
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08.23.08The Social Life of Avatars: 30 Days in Active WorldsBy way of Digital Urban a chapter by Dr. Andrew Hudson Smith on 30 days in a Active World tracing the evolution of a virtual community, condom machines and, well, a ghostly abandoned sim with a lot of spare prims lying around. Worth a read however, described as:"a project aimed at documenting the development of a virtual environment from the beginning to end, the point where a plot of virgin land would develop into a community with a urban layout. In a sense the project was similar to an early days 'Big Brother' in that the community was watched and logged 24 ...
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08.19.08Journalism in Virtual Worlds: University of Syndey Student, 4th Estate, 2nd LifeThe Metaverse Journal highlights the work of Annabelle Boyd Jones at the University of Sydney, who is researching the role of journalism and governance in Second Life. Blogging her progress, I was intrigued (or maybe bemused?) to note her comments on the issues of studying virtual world governance because of the seeming contradiction between, well, totalitarianism and participatory democracy. She notes: "Firstly, the situation resembles (Note resembles, not is!) a totalitarian government, whereby all aspects of the ‘contituents’ lives are effectively controlled by the government, they hold absolute power over their society and can rule without any real mandate or permission ...
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