Gor » Aporia

Communities of Constraint, take 1

Aug 222010

A few days ago I delivered a Works in Progress presentation to the people paying my way this year, the Center for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University. It was the first time I’d done anything that comprehensive, and my first time before an audience completely unfamiliar with, and not necessarily inclined to appreciate, my subject matter and research methods (yes, you can draw inferences from the quality of the website to my general relations with the Center!).

It was a terrific exercise (which I’ve taken to calling “Virtual Bondage for Policy Wonks”), and it went a lot better than I’d expected. Here’s the presentation, my first ever Prezi:

I’ve got two key hypotheses, I think. While they’re definitely hypotheses – starting-off wild-ass guesses supported by the barest bits of early observation – I think they’re solid enough to start field-testing:

The differences in how canon is deployed in argument and training depend on the platform, not the content. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether the document engaged with as the supreme authority is (picking from the communities I’m looking at) the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the Qur’an, the Gor novels or Batman Comics: they’ll be used similarly in similar sociotechnical environments and differently in different ones. This is not to say the content isn’t different in all sorts of ways, just that training and argument are platform-dependent more than content-dependent.
Preferring managerial communities to self-governed democratic ones is in some significant way similar to choosing to participate in BDSM practices. This isn’t as wild as it seems, but I’m not entirely sure of it right now. It seems to me that there are important similarities in the choice and pleasure of relinquishing/taking control in both the managerial and the Dominant/submissive contexts, and that those pleasures are more popular online than those of coequally sovereign, responsible citizenship.

I think people are voting with their time and dollars to choose hierarchy – and usually a very clearly subordinate role in hierarchy – over any and all forms of egalitarianism. I also think this phenomenon, what I’m calling “Communities of Constraint,” (TM) is insufficiently studied and critically important for understanding emergent political behavior offline.

However, I’m not sure how close the relationship really is between managerialism and BDSM. I’m comfortable asserting that they’ve got a common ancestor in a culture with no meaningful experience of active citizenship and a lot of training in being a consumer. I’m not sure how close these two branches off the same trunk really are, however, and that’s an empirical question for my fieldwork.

That’s where the second hypothesis fits with the first. I’m going to look at training, socialization and conflict in communities with a close relationship to a canon text (and some that don’t, for contrast), to see if groups with profoundly different ontologies use tools in similar ways in similar environments. If, for example, a secular managerial community uses canon in similar ways to a fundamentalist religious community or strict RP group, then it might be possible to argue that either (a) they’re fulfilling similar needs or (b) platform architecture shapes the kinds of groups that thrive on that platform, or likely (c) both.

There are a lot of dots to connect, no question, and much of the interpretation will be the product of the specific theoretical lenses I’ll be using: someone else might well interpret the same elephant in a radically different way.

All in all, I think I’ve got a coherent set of questions and strategies for answering them. It’s telling that the strongest critical comment I got on my presentation from perhaps my biggest skeptic was on one thing: the connection between online observations and offline behavior. After a year immersed in the business and education literatures of online behavior, I considered that something to toss off as a given.

I’ll certainly ensure I nail that point in future work, but if that’s the stickiest issue in “Virtual Bondage For Policy Wonks,” I should have pretty clear sailing!

Mixy Things 1: The CDS as Modernist Bastion

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Jul 302010

Last week I found myself deeply immersed in a group of texts that went together all too well, and generated some insights into how and why my long-time interests and quandaries are related. Put Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers, politics in the Confederation of Democratic Simulators, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Stargate: SG-1 into a brain blender, and here’s the tasty energy drink that results: a series of posts on the politics of modernism, hybrids, fandom and cyborgs.

The CDS as Modernist Bastion

As I’ve been preparing to write my second year project paper on the now-terminated merger between the CDS and Al-Andalus, I’ve struggled to understand one key element. There’s been an asymmetry of mistrust that’s seemed to me to defy rational understanding, so I started casting about for non-rational explanations.

My partner technosage offered a key insight, that’s seemed to connect a number of my current projects (particularly my ever-forthcoming work on Gor – this substantiates the gut feeling I’ve had that the CDS has a lot in common with Gorean communities). She suggested that an explanation for the confusing (to me) package of views held by the CDS conservative faction was united by an abhorrence of “mixy things,” and that the Al Andalus principals (in which I have to include myself, at least in the context of recent political debates) are very “mixy” people.

What’s mixiness? Harraway’s cyborg feminism embodies it (and I’m deeply grateful to Kristine Ask for connecting the cyborg/trickster/kokopelli dots for me), and it’s part of what Latour describes as the “amodern.” It’s a taste for hybridization, of category-erasing, of synthesis and adaptation. It’s me comfortably one gender in RL and another in SL. It’s believing that a single principle (say, “democracy”) can and should manifest differently in different environments. It’s a view that most things are contingent and few fundamental, that the global and the local are inseparable, that nature, culture and technology are one seamless ball and not foods that can’t be allowed to touch. It may in fact be a preference for the treyf over the kashrut, and hence our opponents in the CDS were quite right for considering our politics unkosher.

The CDS conservatives share a basket of traits and views: they regard nation-state institutions as coequal with democracy and equally applicable everywhere; they are “immersionist,” resolutely pseudonymous within Second Life, and policing a tight border between SL and RL. They trust pseudonymous avatars with large amounts of RL money, with negligible oversight, but are deeply suspicious of identity-transparent people and RL-based checks and balances. They loathe Al Andauls’s manager, Rose Springvale, in a way that transcends politics and requires an explanation that encompasses revulsion, not mere dislike or opposition.

What unites all these things? Well, there are several important factors, one being political-cultural differences between Europeans and Americans. But another is between modernism and Latour’s amodenism.

Latour argues that modernism did two simultaneous but contradictory things: it enabled the creation of “hybrids” (we’ll be coming back to that word a lot) of nature and culture while simultaneously insisting on rigid dichotomies between them. He describes a “double separation,” between humans and nonhumans on the one hand and “above and below” on the other,” arguing that it was exactly the denial of the existence/legitimacy of hybrids that enabled their proliferation, and that the whole enterprise worked until it was so successful that we’ve ended up choking on hybrids, with a mental and political tool kit that denies their existence.

This explains – or at least describes – how it’s been that the conservatives and I spent six months entirely arguing past each other. We simply were inhabiting different ontological planes that didn’t intersect. They inhabit a mental landscape where things don’t mix. RL and SL identities, strictly separated, same with trust mechanisms. A solution valid in one environment is valid in all, and to mix it with other elements is a perversion.

For us in Al Andalus, we live in the mixiness: the community has a mission specifically linking SL activity to RL political problems. We’re comfortable being avatars and corporate directors, of treating SL as both recreation and a venue for professional standards and practices. Rose is a terrifying hybrid, truly a cyborg feminist: alluring and professional, SL avatar and RL mom, a Texas liberal, a legal and a creative writer, a Protestant leading a Muslim community. It’s notable that the loathing largely came from older men, a class of people many of whom find “professional woman” entirely too much of a repugnant hybrid to start with, let alone all the other antinomies.

The CDS enterprise is resolutely, fundamentally (in both senses of the word) modernist: its goal is to impose modern political institutions onto the environment of SL. Al Andalus is equally resolutely amodern, encompassing antimodern critics from within Islam, some occasional postmodern cynicism, and quite a lot of amodern hybrids.

The merger of the two communities proved up Latour’s statement that “the modern constitution allows the expanded proliferation of the hybrids whose existence, whose very possibility, it denies.” Al Andalus spun off of the CDS three years ago, explicitly to undertake a hybrid project, of using SL as a meaningful laboratory for RL political change.

The merger was undertaken by people who read the mission of “political experimentation” each community claimed as common, when in fact it was contradictory: the CDS experiment being one of fundamentalist modernism, an imperialist expansion of bureaucratic state institutions into virtual space, the Al Andalus experiment one of radical hybridization of online and offline.

The merger was doomed to fail: our ontologies were so different we were literally inhabiting different worlds, with different physics. We didn’t just disagree, we didn’t even perceive the same world.

Next up: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and John Connor as amodern hero.

10 Big Pieces: Gang Leader for a Day

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Jun 152010

At GLS 6.0 last week, in presenting “Legal Anthropologist of Gor! a methodological conundrum,” I argued that online researchers have largely been ducking a serious issue of ethics and methodology. It was definitely an “out on a limb” move for a noob – I was betting that (a) I hadn’t missed something everybody else knew about and (b) I wasn’t going to get crushed like a bug for my temerity.

Immediately after the panel, Constance Steinkuehler, who I fangirl like whoa, came over and very intensely talked with me for a good while, a pep talk that’s the highlight of my academic apprenticeship. Among other things, she recommended Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader For A Day, as an example of someone working in the territory in RL that I want to explore online.

I ordered it while I sat there I regularly read a lot of great stuff, but this one’s the highlight of my year. Even if I weren’t doing participant-observer fieldwork myself, Venkatesh’s story of his graduate work with a Chicago street gang is more gripping than any movie. It’s a great read, and it gave me one huge insight, along with a lot of smaller ones.

Fourteen years ago I came across a question that I took on as my own, and in fits and starts came to recognize as what I want to devote my life’s work to. Science fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson, in his Mars trilogy, and later in Antarctica, asked, what kind of a society do bright, capable people create when you take them out of the establishment world of nation states and finance capitalism? He argues that what you get looks like the academy writ large: apprenticeships, a gift economy, management and administration as a burden rather than a (healthy) goal, meritocracy.

I was drawn to similar people, similar environments: my mentors at NASA founded a polar research station to ask very similar questions, and I got my start kibitzing on their work. I started writing about the political economy and cultural dynamics of the space community, speculating on what might evolve on space stations or planetary research outposts. I argued that Robinson’s socialist-utopian answer wouldn’t always be true, that other concurrent forces would shape different ends. But that was the idiom I kept writing in during my space phase, from 1996 to 2004.

In 2007, I ventured into Second Life, after hearing of how my old NASA colleagues had thrown a Yuri’s Night party there. I saw right away that the forces and people I was interested in were right there, doing every day the work I speculated about for some future Mars mission or distant polar station. But, I never clicked with the environment, largely for a bunch of personal reasons, but in part, I think now, because what was actually happening there didn’t mesh with my theories and expectations at all.

Not only were people not building Polanyi’s Republic of Science, they were providing a texbook-perfect proof of the failure of anarcho-capitalism (an ideology I’d strongly adhered to until then), as the Linden-owned mainland quickly turned into a pit of griefing, bad architecture and incessant petty annoyances. But they were building and doing amazing things, in unexpected directions.

What surprised me about Venkatesh’s book was how similar the society of Chicago’s housing projects was. I’d been asking, “what do smart, privileged people build in highly technological spaces away from (some of) the constraints of the status quo?” Venkatesh came to ask, “what do people who have next to nothing, who’ve gotten the short end for generations, build where the status quo has largely abandoned them?”

Turns out, there are an awful lot of similarities. The institutions arising from the projects – gangs-as-police, gangs-as-corporations, fixers, grifters, hustlers, communities of support and cooperation – none of these things are alien to the social history of Second Life, or of World of Warcraft, or of any significantly large and complex grouping of people who, out of freedom or necessity, improvise their own institutions.

The structures of power in the projects look very much like those of the “adhocracies” or “dictatorships” of SL communities, gaming guilds, LiveJournal roleplay communities – and nothing like those of the bureaucratic modern nation-state.

I’m going to be building an argument that that’s no coincidence, that what we learn in “bowling with others,” so to speak, is that the social dynamics of human groups is really fairly constant, and that it will adapt itself around, route itself around, institutions that seek to make us other than what we are. The attempts to create the Christian city on the hill, the New Soviet Man, all the projects of the right, left and otherwise that sought to remake us, simply fail.

Only by understanding who we are – and recognizing that while advanced technology or malign neglect may create freer spaces for expressing our nature, it is always there, constant, and at work – can we build tools for solving social problems that have some hope of actually working.

My class of law and graduate students struggled in frustration with the free rider problem, coming to recognize it as a variant of low voter turnout, economic incentives to pollute, and a host of other issues. Advocates of the state order in the Confederation of Democratic Simulators cannot account for the immense unpopularity of their model, and turn to vicious personal attacks to cover their political failures. The Goreans argue that both submission and mastery are deeply ingrained, each joyous in their way, and roleplay accordingly.

These responses may be frustrating, ugly, horrifying – but they are real. Venkatesh struggled with the chasm between his faith in the status quo and his admiration for people working to fill in where it had failed.

I think there may be two sets of responses to a failure of modernity, a failure of the institutions we forced ourselves into in the 18th through 20th centuries. One looks backward from the chaos, and seeks to impose clarity and order. These are the fundamentalisms of the book, be that book scripture or roleplay canon. These argue that order must be imposed, boundaries policed, categories reified, a place for every one and every one in their place.

The other, one I openly advocate, not despite but because of my presence as a researcher in fundamentalist communities – looks forward from the chaos into a new synthesis, a perpetually dynamic equilibrium, and celebrates the blurring of types, the intermixing, intermingling, the miscegenation of peoples, genders, politics and forms. It looks to the cyborg, but to the Dionysian, the embodied, the radical politics of the intermingled mind and flesh, rejecting the sanitized and compartmentalized world of the fundamentalism.

Technosage said the other day that embodied politics is vigilante politics – and I’d add Venkatesh’s “guerrilla sociology” as well: it holds that passing off responsibility to institutions, from persons to mechanisms, is simply wrong. We need tools to use to solve our problems – but we must not let the tools use us. In the world of modernity, we have. Systems – of politics, of finance, of sexuality – have run and shaped us, rather than us using those tools to shape our world towards useful and agreed ends.

In this, I agree with technoskeptics like Langdon Winner, but I find these people look backward in an unconstructive way. I think the solution is to do as the people in the Robert Taylor Projects did, as people in Al Andalus in SL have done, as radicals in education are doing, and act as if the system doesn’t matter.

The solution is to be ourselves, know ourselves, and build what works for us. Some of us will get crushed: Al Andalus may not survive the months-long assault of conservatives, vicious old men and hand-wringing incompetents. Promising educational projects may not survive the pressure of fixed curricula and standardized testing.

But some of us will thrive, and succeed by simply out-competing the tottering old institutions. There’s no guarantee at all that what survives will be the most progressive, rather than the most ruthless. Forced simplicity may beat out embraced complexity. That’s the struggle for our time, though.

Powerpoint Champion of Gor!

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Jun 142010

My presentation (available for download here) at Games+Learning+Society 6.0, on ethical and methodological challenges of research in Gorean roleplay communities in Second Life, went well and accomplished what I was hoping for – the beginnings of a discussion of some issues that really seem to be more complex and nuanced than generally acknowledged.

The presentation covered most of the territory of a paper I wrote for Alice Daer last semester, and currently in alpha revisions for publication. It wasn’t what the abstract, written at the very beginning of last semester, promised: the results of an ethnographic study of how canon is used politically in Gorean disputes and training.

That project still hasn’t started: I’ve got a new principal investigator, and over the next few weeks I’ll hopefully be working with Elisabeth Hayes to craft a new application for IRB exemption, go through that process, and finally, six months after I expected to start, get out into the field and get to work.

However, I’m hugely glad for the delay, as it gave me a chance to explore a set of ethical and methodological issues that I thought really needed and deserved more attention.

I’d been exploring them on my own, though, and when I walked into the room to deliver my presentation and saw Constance Steinkuehler, Rebecca Black, and Thomas Malaby in the room, I was really hoping I hadn’t missed something disgustingly obvious! I definitely had nightmare flashes of one of them saying, “oh, you didn’t read the classic text in the field that solved this problem ten years ago?”

Given that, when Constance sat me down and talked with me very intensely afterwards – gods, what a relief! She had brilliant, brilliant advice, and the reassurance that I’d spotted a real problem and was more or less on the right track in addressing it was terrific news.

Over the next two days, quite a number of people came up to me and engaged me on the issues I’d raised. While not everyone agreed with the approach I proposed for my own work, I got to see that I’ve come across a somewhat extreme case of a very common problem in participant-observer fieldwork, and that the very extremity of my example can shed good constructive light on issues common to many of us.

One of the things I took from people’s comments was that there’s a tendency of academics to look for their lost keys under the streetlamp, rather than in the alley where they dropped them. It’s easier to research good behavior, communities of conventional values, groups who’re open and friendly to the research process and community, and that that creates an academic map of the world that simply overlooks “here there be dragons” territory.

The advice I got was to go ahead and explore anonymously, in addition to my open, disclosed, transparent research efforts – but not to use the fruits of that exploration in work for academic publication.

In other words, while I can know what lies past the fuzzy edges of the mapped territory, I really should only report back on the places to which roads go. I’m not entirely convinced that that’s a good answer for the pursuit of understanding, though I do agree that it’s the best choice for balancing the norms and expectations of ethical human subjects research, the values and integrity of the people and communities being studied, and the desire for a comprehensive, synthetic understanding of the world.

It’s a shame it’s not reasonably or ethically possible to have parallel careers, one as “academic alt,” one as “journalist alt.” For all my snark at the foolishness of academia, it really is where I belong and want to work, so I will have to constrain what I report about what I do to fit within academic norms.

That said, I do think I’m doing something broadly valuable in challenging the community on methodological and ethical issues around studying online communities. We’re growing past the 1990s absolute privileging of RL in studying online behavior, and the idealistic, unrealistic and often wrong assumptions of early research driven by psychological paradigms. We’re also seeing a necessary pushback against disembodied scientism, and an embrace of subjectivity, reflexivity, and a willingness to take seriously and study digital embodiment, performance, and sexuality.

I’m reading more and more work from the past half decade, much of it in fan studies, who have been pushing for an inclusion of the emotive, physical, sexual in online cultural studies. I’m glad to be following in their footsteps, and I hope that once I get past this initial phase of research design, I can start doing some good fieldwork to add to what’s been done.

We Can Do Better

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Jun 022010

I chose the Confederation of Democratic Simulators as a research site, as a community to live and work in, and to be a legislator in, because I don’t understand it.

The government of the CDS isn’t exactly a community management organization, and it isn’t exactly a roleplay site – though to me it’s historically been much more of the latter than the former. It’s a utopian experiment without the experimental spirit, or much of the utopian impulse. It’s been a closed, isolated, stagnant community – yet it voted to merge with one of Second Life’s most dynamic, experimental, utopian regions. It’s home to some of the nicest people I’ve met, and to some truly epic douchebags.

It’s a study in contradictions.

It’s not the only one. You can’t examine politics, culture and law online without becoming enmeshed in baffling antinomies which are both mirror and bellwether for the wider world.

Part One: Observer

One question in particular has risen to the top for me, not only, or even primarily, in studying the CDS, but in online political behavior more broadly: why are people who are clearly terrified of change here? I don’t understand wanting to turn back the historical clock, but I especially don’t understand using the most advanced technology to try to do so.

I don’t understand a group of people who defined themselves as engaged in “an experiment in democratic governance online,” and recreated some of the most undemocratic institutions of a bureaucratic nation-state, and slapped them onto the structures of a particular virtual world, with particular needs and affordances, without seriously engaging with the fit between goals and tools.

I don’t understand the naked viciousness when faced by the prospect of actually doing something beyond playing at factional politics in a church-like meeting room, the existential horror in the face of an agenda of concrete actions proposed by a strong professional woman – and I believe both those factors, actual work and a strong woman, to have provoked yesterday’s vileness in equal measure.

I’m studying Gorean communities for a similar set of reasons, and the behavior I saw yesterday from the minority faction in the new Representative Assembly is what I would have expected and understood more in a Gorean meeting hall. Though, Gorean roleplayers seem to be a practical bunch, with a firm eye on where roleplay ends and management begins, a notion lost to more than a few in the CDS.

What unites these genuinely disparate cases, I believe, is a rejection of one fundamental notion: we can do better. The Gorean would say, human nature is what it is, slavery is an essential part of the human condition, as is the inferiority and subjugation of women. The Enlightenment and modernity was largely a mistake, unnatural and irrelevant. Some in the CDS old guard would recoil in horror, standing fast by the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which is incorporated into the CDS constitution – and then in the next breath say that the structures of the 18^th or 19^th century European nation-state are the last word in management and governance, and apply everywhere without adaptation or exception, just as the Goreans do about their canon of novels.

There are a number of other issues to be explored here. A big one is my hypothesis that essentially no one is interested in democracy, if taken to mean active participation in community management by essentially all members of the community. The CDS bills itself as “SL’s only democratic self governing community” – while inaccurate in a number of ways, the statement is largely true. Why, in a space of millions of people over half a dozen years, who have created everything the mind can conceive? Why only one community?

“Democracy” and “Government” are not fun games. Virtually no one chooses to play them. A tiny handful do – a very tiny handful. Most people in most circumstances will, and do, gladly pay to not play that game, and hire other people – corporate managers, elected officials, community liaisons – to play it for them.

What people seem to want online is to be left the hell alone to play the game they want to play, while knowing that there are fair rules in place to deal with problems and conflicts, and while happily paying a team of people to provide, or enhance, their fun. This is not so different in the external world, at least in America.

Another issue is the powerful, visceral appeal of reaction, of rejection of modernity, equality. For more than a generation, commenters have looked worriedly at the popularity first of Tolkieneque fantasy, then of games based on Tolkien’s medieval tropes. We spend our entertainment dollars on and in worlds of masters and servants, castes and kings, the building and destruction of empires – and not on games of “Democracy,” “Government,” “Human Rights.” Some of the most popular products in Second Life enable restraint, subjugation, submission. We seem to want simple worlds where our place is clear, with simple lines of strong authority over us. The Goreans are right in saying that the urge to bend the knee is wide, and deep. It’s an unknown, illicit craving deep inside many, that finds expression in the worlds of our imagination. That’s a territory I want to map, where the deepest parts of our psyche become utterly politicized.

Taken together, if what we build in the spaces where we are most free is prisons of the past, chains of our deepest urges, then perhaps the Enlightenment experiment is a niche product, destined to gather dust on the gaming shelves. I don’t like this answer. I firmly believe, We can do better. But we cannot if we delude ourselves into thinking our games are more popular than they are. We have to examine, define and acknowledge our natures, then make those games of freedom that appeal. That’s the challenge of the progressive activist in the current age.

My grim hypotheses may or may not be supported by further evidence and study. But it’s a damn important question to be asking.

Part Two: Participant

I said above that what people seem to want online is to be left the hell alone to play the game they want to play, while knowing that there are fair rules in place to deal with problems and conflicts, and while happily paying a team of people to provide, or enhance, their fun.

Whether that’s understood or accepted is one of the fracture lines between the two voting blocs in the new Representative Assembly. One faction doesn’t really care how many people play “Politics,” but charges a subscription fee to non-players to subsidize their play. The other doesn’t really care to play “Politics,” but wants to use those subscription fees to provide a really first-rate space for the fun of the people paying.

And by “fun,” I don’t mean just the social mixers and dance parties that drive the old guard into apoplectic fits. Fun in Al Andalus, and for some in the CDS, is putting on an academic conference. Or hosting a book club, or contests for writers. Or experimenting with consensus decisionmaking. Or participating in a discussion series on religion and philosophy. Or designing and building new towns. Fun takes a lot of forms – but that “Politics” game isn’t one of them for most people.

We differ in opinions, values and goals. The group wanting to enable fun has a one-vote majority in the RA. “Experiments in democratic self governance” include losing elections, right? Then why the rabid, vicious assault by reactionary forces?

Why?

We can do better is more powerful a force than any explosive. It shames the contented, horrifies the backward-looking, terrifies the lazy. We can do better invalidates the very existence of the mediocre, the incompetent, the reactionary. It goes beyond the give and take of votes and elections, the disagreements of the politically active. It is a slap to the face, and it is being taken as such.

Unfortunately, We can do better implies a question at least as uncomfortable for the progressives as the reactionaries. As the old joke had it, “Whaddaya mean ‘we,’ white boy?” The naysayers have acted as if there is no “we,” while talking from both sides of their mouths on the matter. They have opposed the merger with the progressive elements of Al Andalus, they have viciously attacked our leaders, pointedly failed to publicize or support our events. They act as if there is no “we.” We have claimed there is a “we,” that the CDS and Al Andalus can be one progressive community.

Yet as we announce, We can do better, we look around, and have to ask ourselves, “with these clowns tied around our necks?” The six reactionary votes in the current RA are not the CDS. The handful of nasty old men, on and off the RA, are not the community. And yet, what if we took a good sharp knife to the rope tying the liars, fools and nutcases to our necks?

We’re spending hours every week, every day, countering Big Lie allegations, pushing back against stall tactics, losing energy, momentum and faith to the sharp-toothed ankle-biters.

We can do better, indeed….

Literature Review of Gor

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Mar 212010

In ENG 654: Social Media, Alice Robison has assigned us the task of creating a hybrid annotated bibliography/literature review of approximately 10 works as a midterm project in our study of an online community. Here’s the introduction and list of works I’ve chosen. I’m not sure the analysis of the works themselves will be of any particular interest, but the list of references may be. So, here’s the skeleton of the thing.

This review will focus on sources providing a theoretical construct for studying the use of “canon,” or original authorial texts, for political ends in Gorean roleplay (RP) in Second Life (SL)(referred to as SL-Gor). The resulting construct is composed of two primary elements, methodological and analytical tools. With Law, J. (2004) I hold that, as research methods create the realities being studied, methodology and analysis cannot be neatly separated. The works chosen largely reflect this perspective, preventing a clear delineation between process and product.

SL is a persistent social virtual world, essentially an infrastructural tablua rasa enabling individual and collective creation of objects and communities. (Boellstorff 2008) While far from the most common use of the world, SL enables the creation of roleplay communities through the building of three-dimensional virtual environments recreating the settings of fictional works. One of the largest such communities is built around the novels of John Norman, set on a “Counter-Earth,” called Gor, of city-states modeled after various cultures of the classical world, and marked by a uniform caste system, chattel slavery and the complete subjugation of women to men. (Norman 1966)

As with the city-states of Gor, SL Gorean RP communities are autonomous, tending to regard outsiders and members of other communities as potentially hostile. One of the primary issues, if not the primary issue, separating these communities appears to be the interpretation of canon with respect to the treatment of women. “By the book” Gor holds that subjugation is absolute and unconditional, within the cultural institutions described in Norman’s novels. What they refer to as “Disney” Gor adapts the novels to allow for a broader range and interpretation of roles for women.

This dispute involves: literary interpretation, through the selective use of quotes from the novels to bolster positions; ideology, both with respect to the value of textual orthodoxy and to the proper role and nature of women in general; notions of citizenship, in who can and cannot be a legitimate member of a particular community; positional goods, in claims of higher status by the most rigidly orthodox communities and of members within those communities; and economic questions, as the RP communities are also businesses responsible for collecting funds to pay for the rental of their regions from the corporate owners of SL.

The study of SL-Gor presents a number of obstacles, which may account for its under-representation in the academic literature examining SL. The values of Gor are arguably diametrically opposed to those of Western academia: separatism versus openness; caste system versus egalitarianism; sexism versus feminism. The author has been advised that some Goreans perceive researchers as hostile and biased. Additionally, reflexivity seems an essential prerequisite for the study of SL-Gor: it seems inescapable that one’s own perspectives will be strongly determinant of what one sees, and what meaning one attaches to it, within SL-Gor. Reflexivity is a problematic and contested concept in ethnography (Law 2004): the sort of personal disclosure called for by Kendall (2009), which would seem essential to an honest and scientific ethnography of SL-Gor, is still far from the norm within academia.

The works chosen thus grapple with questions of reflexivity, ethical engagement with research subjects in online communities, the social construction of gender in technological domains, fan appropriation and interpretation of canon texts, and theories of gender-driven transmedia adaptation of texts. Works excluded, while useful, are those specifically focusing on methodological tools, such as discourse analysis, ethnographies in which there is not a sharp ideological or gendered distinction between researcher and subject, and studies of transmedia production in which relations to canon do not bear significant political ramifications.

Bardzell, S. and Odom, W. (2008) “The experience of embodied space in virtual worlds: an ethnography of a Second Life community.” Space and Culture, 11; 239-259. doi: 10.1177/1206331208319148
Boellstorff, T. (2008). Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge.
Haraway, D. (1991). ”A cyborg manifesto.” In Haraway, D. (1991), Cyborgs, Simians and WOmen: The Reinvention of Nature (pp. 149-181). New York: Routledge.
Hutcheon, L. (2006). A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge.
Jenkins, H. (2006). “Star Trek rerun, reread, rewritten: fan writing as textual poaching.” In Jenkins, H. (2006), Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press.
Kendall, L. (2009). “How do issues of gender and sexuality influence the structures and processes of qualitative internet research?” In Markham, A. and Baym, N. (Eds.), Internet Inquiry: Conversations About Method (pp. 99-118).Thousand Oaks: SAGE.
Kendall, L. (2002). Hanging Out in the Virtual Pub: Masculinities and Relationships Online. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Law, J. (2004). After Method: Mess In Social Science Research. New York: Routledge.
Norman, J. (1966-7). Tarnsman of Gor. New York: E-Reads.
Springer, C. (1999). “The pleasure of the interface.” In Wolmark, J. (1999), Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace (pp. 34-54). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Stone, A. (1996). The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. Cambridge, The MIT Press.

Ilinx of Gor

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Mar 182010

More than halfway through the semester, yet to have entered SL Gor for my planned term paper, three questions seem most pressing:

am I doing this project?
if so, why am I doing it? and
why haven’t I done it already?

My honest answers aren’t mundane (a stalled IRB application, a community contact who’s moved around more than I can keep track of), or related to my grade in ENG 654, but are both deeply personal and at the heart of methodological quandaries around participant-observer research in online communities involved in sensitive issues.

I’ve been deeply influenced by Lori Kendall’s essay in Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method, Markham and Baym, eds., “How Do Issues of Gender and Sexuality Influence the Structures and Processes of Qualitative Internet Research?” (a title only Jim Gee could love!)

Kendall makes “the case for doing qualitative work with the whole body, and not cutting off certain types of experiences as irrelevant or inappropriate, even in situations, such as wholly online social interactions, in which the body might seem relatively unimportant.” (p. 101) She quotes Kleinman and Copp (1993) to the effect that “Fieldwork analyses reflect our identities, ideologies and political views. Yet we often omit them from our published accounts because we want to present ourselves as social scientists: objective and neutral observers.” (p.102) She goes on to say that “[e]ven in nonsexual situations and nosexual relationships, sexual aspects of identity influence interactions at the most basic and minute level.”

I think it’s impossible to come to the study of Gor without a tremendous mount of identity-related and ideological baggage. The participant observer in Gor must, of necessity, confront their own core values around politics, gender identity and gender relations, at least to the degree that any Western anthropologist must confront their own issues of racism and colonialism in studying “tribal” peoples.

Any attempt to elide or deny the researcher’s perspective, identity and biases seems deeply unscientific: there is no “outside” position for a researcher to take in studying this culture. The study of Gor has to be the study of oneself engaged with Gor. As dualisms, antinomies and paradoxes seem central to the Gorean canon, so too it seems that the self that engages with Gor cannot honestly be unitary, unreflexively ideological, constant and coherent.

Entering Gor seems to involve opening the doors of perception, behind which are only mirrors – twisted perhaps, but reflecting in uncomfortable and unpredictable ways perhaps previously unseen, unrecognized or denied aspects of one’s “self” and those of others.

So that’s the abstract answer to my three questions (insert obligatory Monty Python flashback here).

The concrete answers are, yes, I’m doing it. The project itself may run much longer than the semester, if I get some traction in an SL Gorean community, but there will be a coherent, well researched, and likely really interesting paper to turn into Alice Robison on time.

Why am I doing it? Oh, there are all the plausible reasons: SL Gor is one of the largest online communities in the world, and largely unstudied; Gor’s politics of canon can reflect on the role of fundamentalisms and religious interpretation in physical communities; it’s a good attention-grabbing topic for a grad student looking to make a mark. And, a topic for a later post, I think there’s something absolutely essential in online communities built around Dominance/submission, Gorean or otherwise, for our understanding of ourselves and our offline culture.

The last point leads into the real reason: the chain and the collar, of Gor or otherwise, take me to a point beyond reason, beyond comprehension, and I need to go there, to know what lies beyond the point where my rationality seems to have no traction.

There’s the strange literary aphasia that Norman’s novels produce in me: I expected to be shocked, horrified, disgusted, coming as I do from a deep and visceral, as well as fairly well-read intellectual, feminism. I’m mostly not, though I have had those moments of horror. I read the sequences that justify female slavery, and my mind skitters off them like a beetle on a lake’s surface tension. It’s like reading mathematical notation: there aren’t even points of engagement that lead to comprehension, as there might be in reading a foreign language and looking for common root words. It’s a disturbing phenomenon, and I need to know what my own barrier to understanding is, and how to cross it.

And, I read the slave submission passages with a feeling reminiscent of what Roger Caillois calls ilinx, in referring to a category of games “based on the pursuit of vertigo and which consist of an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind. In all cases, it is a question of surrendering to a kind of spasm, seizure, or shock which destroys reality with sovereign brusqueness.”

That ilinx, that very real and not at all intellectual sense of disorientation, came over me last night reading Nomads of Gor. The protagonist, Tarl Cabot, once of Earth, now utterly gone native on Gor, brings new arrival Elizabeth to accept, to feel, her enslavement as a liberation of her true nature. And I find, reading it, I can’t place myself. Slaver/enslaved, aceeptant/rejectionist, male/female, immersed/critical – I seem to try to occupy all points at once, and any residual sense of an atomistic self just shatters.

As a kid, I was terribly phobic of carousels: I couldn’t even look at them. I have to think it was because I’m very prone to motion sickness. Now, I find them beautiful: attractive works of art laced with melancholy for childhood experiences I didn’t have. I appreciate them, and they move me – but I don’t ride them.

So that’s why I am where I am with this project. Ilinx is both centrifugal and centripedal in its effects: I’m both drawn in and spun out, and being more chicken than not, I’ve stayed over on the intellectual sidelines rather than risk the dizziness (the original title of this post was “Great Big Chicken of Gor,” but I suspect I’ll have greater need of that title later on!).

Halfway through the semester, my original plan seems like a better idea than ever: go into SL Gor in character as a male member of the Caste of Scribes, with identifiers in my profile as a researcher, and ask a lot of mostly intellectual questions about the politics of canon interpretation, and base a moderately conventional paper on that.

And, face my fear of ilinx, confront all the terrifying dualisms in my response to Gor, and experience slave training (or citizenship education, or ideological indoctrination, or whatever lens you want to view it through) in a canon household, and see if I can’t break that surface tension, find some point of equilibrium between repulsion and attraction, and understand what’s beyond the point where my ratiocinating mind stops when confronted with the coffle.

Why am I going to join an SL Gorean community?

It holds a fundamental mystery, and I have to know it, intellectually or otherwise. It’s a blind spot in my field of perception, an itch I can’t scratch, and I have got to come to deal with it.

Oh, and make a mark on the academic field: I may be dizzy, but I’m still vain!

Research Ethicist of Gor, another sequel

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Mar 062010

While my entry into SL-Gor is still on hold, after a terrific talk with Alice Robison last week, that hasn’t been a bad thing. The delay is giving me a vastly stronger grounding in theory and method, or in non-academic-speak, the glimmerings of a clue as to what I’m doing. It’s also occasioned some serious reflexivity: a hard look at what I bring to my research question (and that’ll be the topic for my next post).

I’ve just devoured Markham and Baym’s Internet Inquiry: Conversations About Method. While it sounds more like the academic equivalent of a root canal than something to be lost in as breakfast reading runs into the afternoon, Internet Inquiry is perhaps the best academic anthology I’ve ever read – and I only say “perhaps” because I’ve had several years of referring back to Oudshoorn and Pinch’s How Users Matter: The Co-Construction of Users and Technology.

From the introduction, in which the authors encourage us to ask

“what counts as an authentic self-representation? How are we conceptualizing the embodied persons we study? How are we framing our own embodied sensibilities? Do we approach what we are studying as traces left in public spaces or as embodied activities by people situated in rich offline contexts… how to interpret other people’s selves and how to represent ourselves to the people we study, especially when we may not be meeting them in person,”(pp.xviii-xix)

I knew I’d found an essential resource, not only for this conundrum of researching questions I consider legal/political in SL-Gor, but for my own development as a researcher. The chapters on privacy and sexuality in particular were directly applicable to this project.

Malin Sveningsson Elm’s essay on privacy neatly captures the problems I’ve had making sense of the IRB biomedically-based framework for evaluating privacy and consent in the context of a reclusive online community. While I think her description of a continuum of public and private is deeply flawed in its particulars (IMO, registration for “membership” when there is no prospect of that registration being rejected is not fundamentally a move to make a public space more private, but to collect marketable demographic data), the general framework and the rest of her discussion provides factors for evaluating privacy and consent issues that I will use regularly in my work.

Her conclusion, as well as the “response” essays focus on respect for the people being studied, a serious asking of the question, “what do they get out if it,” and a focus on ensuring “that our research subjects are not harmed, humiliated or offended,” (p.85) back up my course of carefully negotiating the terms of my participation in SL-Gor with both my PI and advisors, and the community members who’ve invited me, prior to my beginning work.

Lori Kendall’s essay on sexuality is the most revolutionary thing I’ve read in years, since my first foray into trying to understand online communities and the impact of new technologies on selfhood. She states, “I make the case for doing qualitative work with the whole body, and not cutting off certain types of experiences as irrelevant or inappropriate, even in situations, such as wholly online interactions, in which the body might seem relatively unimportant.” (p.101).

Of course, in studying Gor, the body is of fundamental importance, and it’s issues around embodiment and its political meaning that are both at the core of why I want to study Gor and why my entrance has been so problematic. Gor is about gender and its embodiment, as the iconic “kef,” or slave brand, attests. It is about the performance of hyper-masculinity and hyper-femininity (I’d say, “whatever the actual-world performance of the subject might be,” but that’s exactly one of the points in contention), and in no small part the sexual component of that performance.

Kendall’s essay gave me key insights into the eroticism of online attraction, a huge component of my life for more than a decade, both personally (my wife and I met online) and academically (I’m fascinated by the construction and performance of gender and sexual expression in online spaces).

Both responses enriched Kendall’s essay – Sunden’s in making the case for the embodied richness of online sexuality, and Campbell’s in providing strategies for research within sexual communities.

Baym’s concluding essay, on the nature of quality in qualitative research, is a guide I will refer back to regularly, despite my discomfort with the notion of “dialectic” as a framing mechanism – I’m with Markham in finding the “di-” aspect limiting and problematic.

All this leaves me seeing the beginnings of a negotiated solution that could produce a good research project in SL-Gor. I see multiple stages: the first, to meet my semester deadlines, may just involve a conversation with select persons, in which my identity as a male researcher is foregrounded, on questions of canon adaptation. A second may be to take up my host’s offer for slave training, again with the key participants aware of my identities, for insights into the appeal of the community and how initiation, training and meaning-making take place. A third is the most problematic one, of continuing my involvement(s) in a larger, more public Gorean community, either as kajira or free man or both.

Regardless of what may come of the second and third phases (my next blog post will address some concerns about the second, and I’ve already aired concerns about the third), the first seems like it should work to produce some solid answers to my research question.

The Pleasures and Politics of Canon

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Feb 242010

“Canon” is one of the fundamental concepts of media fandom – the original work or works that one is a fan of. But canon isn’t just that stuff, that body of work, but as the term suggests, it’s in some way sacred, privileged. There are personal pleasures in a good new addition to a favorite body of work, but what’s the deal with the sacred dimension of canon?

That sacred status can be used to turn the personal pleasures of canon into a politics of legitimacy. For the individual engaging with a text, canon is literary, but in the context of a fan community of co-producers of new works, canon is political: contesting within a fan community the status of a work or performance is the stuff of power and status . Canon in fandom lies, then, at the intersection of play and politics, of literature and law.

I’ve found Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation a tremendously useful framework for evaluating the politics of canon, though her own focus is on the literary appreciation of adaptations to canon (and the concomitant academic politics, but that’s a different beast entirely).

But let’s start with the literary pleasures of canon. Over dinner the other night, a colleague enthusiastically described his experience playing Star Trek Online. He didn’t evaluate the game mechanics – which have gotten largely unfavorable reviews in the gaming blogs, but instead talked about the joy of immersion in the world of Star Trek, of visiting places familiar from stories he’s returned to his whole life, but this time as a participant rather than a spectator. Commanding a Federation starship, being spoken to by the famous voice of Starfleet computers – that was fun, regardless of the affordances and limitations of the game engine.

As Hutcheon observes, “what is often most significant for videogames is the adapted heterocosm, the spectacular world of digital animation that a player enters.” (p. 51) I think she’s wrong, deeply wrong, with respect to gamers approaching a transmedia game, but right insofar as she’s referring to fans of the original property who pick up the game seeking a transmedia experience.

Likewise, another colleague and guildmate of mine in World of Warcraft is reading Christie Golden’s novel, Arthas: Wrath of the Lich King. The joy for him was in recognizing familiar places in a new medium, and having those places enriched by canon lore, and learning more about iconic figures from the game.

These pleasures of new, transmedia, works slotting into canon are personal, matters of one’s own opinions and engagement with stories and characters across platforms. Of course, the transmedia experience is not always pleasant: adaptations or additions can feel like violations of canon. Everyone has a favorite book badly adapted into a movie or a movie into a game, or has seen a sequel that fails to capture the spirit of the original. But this appreciation of canon is personal, aesthetic, the stuff of humanities scholarship.

Right now I’m more interested in the other sort, the social use of canon as a tool of politics. Hutcheon describes a “morally loaded discourse” of discussion about adaptations of canon (p.7), quoting another researcher who found terms like “infidelity,” “betrayal,” “deformation,” “violation,” “desecration” used in evaluating new adaptations.

She states that such thinking is “based on the implied assumption that adapters aim simply to reproduce the adapted text,” arguing that, rather, “’to adapt’ means to adjust, to alter, to make suitable,” especially in a transmedia context, as “[w]ith each mode, different things get adapted in different ways.” (p.12). “Suitable,” of course, is in the eye of the beholder.

Hutcheon quotes Susan Stanford Friedman, who has applied the anthropological/political concept of “indigenization” to adaption, stating that the concept “implies agency: people pick and choose what they want to transplant to their own soil. Adapters of traveling stories exert power over what they adapt.” (p. 150). That power is utterly, fundamentally political. Indigenization is often applied in a religious context, of the creation of a “nativized church.” The immediate question in that context, as in the fannish one, is – is indigenization a revitalizing adaptation to local circumstances, or is it heresy?

In fanfiction, “canon” takes on some interesting nuances. Not that much fic strictly is close to canon, the sort of stories called “gen,” for general, that are typically “continuing adventures,” stories that could be an episode of the TV series, a sequel to the books or movies. Much fic explores non-canon romantic and sexual relationships – but there, attitudes towards canon still play a critical political role. A community will judge if a pairing is credible within the bounds of canon, and a fandom will typically split along “shipper” lines – Harry Potter fans into Harry/Hermione vs. Harry/Ginny, for example.

Slash – romantic/sexual fiction about gay relationships between characters that aren’t canon gay – is a staple of fic, yet even there, issues of canon split shipper communities into those who find the pairing canon-plausible and those who reject it. If you’re wearing “slash goggles,” interpreting emotional displays between male characters in a sexual context, well, certain pairings are “practically canon,” while others are too implausible to count.

In roleplay communities, canon is used to judge not a static work, like fanfiction, but an ongoing performance. There’s a shamefully un-studied world of virtual-world roleplay on LiveJournal, text-based worlds like the old MUDS and MOOs, but persistent, with roleplay permanently visible in public or semi-public threaded logs. There, it’s expected that each roleplayer will bring their own interpretation (often slashy) to the character – but within the bounds of canon plausibility, and “playing OOC,” or out of character, is a primary ground for social criticism, and to some degree, ostracizing, as people prefer to play with more plausibly canon versions of the characters.

In SL-Gor, canon takes on a more explicitly political dimension. What separates Gor from medieval roleplay on the one hand and BDSM roleplay on the other is the explicitly ideological dimension, the unforgiving male dominance, the abject nature of female slavery. “Canon vs. ‘Disney’” seems to be the fundamental political issue dividing Gorean communities, with one side arguing for the orthodoxy of “by the book,” and the other for a “nativized church” of a Gor closer to mainstream liberal culture.

Why is canon so important that it’s used as a justification even for clearly transgressive fic and roleplay? How can canon fidelity even exist as a meaningful concept when a novel or TV show is translated to text or 3D roleplay, or heteronormative narrative is slashed?

We must love our orthodoxies, even the implausible ones…

Part 2 – Passing or Clashing?

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Feb 192010

Part 1, The Closing of the Alt Frontier, set up a distinction between the systems of trust in frontier communities (like Second Life) and metropolitan ones (like globalized RL). Now we’re going to get into special cases, which for some reason are problematic for trust systems and flash points for conflict between them.

Gender

Let’s start with gender. Many separate gender from sex – the cultural performance of “man” or “woman” from the physical plumbing. There’s a broad range of combinations of sex and gender, of course. For those of us whose gender and sex aren’t in tight traditional alignment, there seem to be two very different approaches to expression, and to getting gender and sex in closer aligment.

There are two terrific books on the subject, both memoirs.

One, Jennifer Finney Boylan’s She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders, describes the male-to-female sex change of someone whose gender performances, as male and later female, as I read them, were both fairly close to a center line: James was not highly masculine in presentation, Jennifer not highly feminine. The cover, left, catches some of the spirit of the book.

The other, Richard J. Novic’s Alice in Genderland: A Crossdresser Comes of Age, is the story of someone coming to express both highly gendered male and female sides – again well reflected in the book’s cover.

There are of course other differences and more nuances – I’m painting in broad strokes here to set up some general concepts.

So, many (hard numbers are about impossible to find) have found SL an opportunity for expressing a gender that they can’t, or can’t readily or safely, in RL. And again, there are (at least) two approaches to doing so. One is to use a body of the sex that feels more right or appropriate, and perform gender somewhere around the middle. Some of these people “pass,” and are “read” as women much of the time, some don’t. The other approach is to carefully perform gender to “pass.”

Lat time we said that systems of trust in frontier communities are based on personal reputation and consistency of dealing. By frontier values (and those of old SL, people who came in before later 2007), you are what you claim to be, unless your presentation is just not credible. And that applied to gender as much as to being a designer or architect or business consultant – if you did the job credibly, that’s what you were.

The values of the metropolis were explicitly rejected: a lot of SL’ers personal profiles, in the “First Life” tab say something like, “I leave my FL in FL – don’t ask, and I won’t tell.”

Gender was always a little different, and it’s perhaps gotten more so as the frontiersfolk have become outnumbered by people holding onto the values of the metropolis. In the metropolis, claiming to be something and doing the job is not enough, or even not that important: credentialing is.

In SL, credentialing for gender (typically for dating) can be done by insisting on voice chat in addition to text, or more subtly by demanding, or expecting, RL details to flesh out and substantiate in RL a gendered performance: talk of husbands, cramps, and such.

Is that deception? Someone bringing the values of the metropolis would say absolutely: false credentials were supplied to create an identity, and had real ones been supplied (that the person was a different gender RL) they’d be rejected for the, um, “job.” Someone from the frontier would say, “if it quacks like a duck, it’s a duck – and you’re never gonna see the RL bits anyway.” They might say, the use of RL information, accurate or not, just takes the problem of RL credentialing off the board, and allows for the SL performance to speak.

I don’t think there’s a “right,” but a clash of perspectives and needs. Personally, only personally, I’m not sympathetic to the RL demand, nor comfortable with the use of false information. But I don’t think I’ve got the answer at all.

Researcher

I’ve discovered that “social scientist” is as controversial an identity as “genderbender.” I’ve been hearing from a variety of sources that there’s a lot of hostility and fear towards social science researchers in SL. No small part of this seems to be due to stupid and/or unethical behavior by some researchers, but I think there’s more going on. I don’t pretend to have a good body of data or understanding of the phenomenon yet.

That is, aside from one personal incident. My profile says, “I live, work and study in SL. No, I’m not taking notes on you!” while my First Life tab identifies me as a graduate student of online communities. I did once have someone turn cold and then teleport away in the middle of what had been a good conversation, as she was convinced that I was “experimenting on” or “studying” her.

When I told that story in class last week, one of my students laughed and said that he’s gotten in the habit of never saying he’s a law student when he’s out in clubs. I remembered I didn’t either- I used to say I was in film school. People don’t like law students, and I didn’t look much like people’s expectations of one (my “law student performance” wasn’t convincing enough to “pass”!). For us, that was similar to the gendered case – it got a potential but irrelevant (to us) clash out of the way, so we could relate in the immediate environment (ok, in both cases, we all lied to get laid. Let’s be real!).

Transgendered Researchers of Gor!

My legal anthropology project in SL-Gor has been on hold for a couple weeks. One delay has been getting my application for IRB exemption approved by my supervising professor. Another has come from an email dialog with my Gorean host. I got a long email from him last week, describing the circumstances I’d be entering, and providing some background information. His situation had changed from the one that had been described to me, and I’ve gotten concerned about how I can answer my research questions in the new environment.

But what really brought me to a halt was his opinion that I conceal my identities as an RL male and as a researcher, due to profound prejudices against genderbenders and researchers among the SL-Gor community. He suggested that I might not learn anything, and face great hostility, were I to make those “metropolitan” identities known in the “frontier” community of SL-Gor.

I had to laugh, having defended the values of SL communities against the incursion of RL credentialing. Now the digital chickens have come home to roost.

I’ve got no good answers on this one, and neither do my faculty advisors: I’ve been referred to two authors of books on internet research ethics. I think I see the outlines of a solution, but I’m a long way from sure.

Coming soon: “Part 3 – If Code Is Law, Code Monkeys Are Rewriting Our Constitution!”

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