school » 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!

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.

10 Big Pieces: Women and Gaming

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May 242010

I’ve got a number of entries to catch up on in my “10 Big Pieces” series of key works at the intersection of games, governance, new media and education, but I’m going to start with the newest: Women and Gaming: The Sims and 21st Century Learning was released just last week. Co-authored by James Paul Gee and Elisabeth R. Hayes, it represents an important step forward for Gee’s work, and is a quick must-read for anyone interested in education, technology and social change.

For years, Gee has been a primary and lucid advocate for fundamental changes in education, to encompass the kind of process- and skills-based learning embodied in video games. His critique of the failures of schooling is clear and incisive; his advocacy of the learning model embodied in games effective.

But previously, Gee’s vision of games and gaming was drawn from that of the boy (of whatever age), seated at a console, playing with friends present in person or online. Gee understands the role of class in American society better than almost any contemporary social scientist and is really pretty good on race, but has failed to understand gender and sexuality in gaming, education and culture.

This collaboration with Hayes (who is on my dissertation commitee) marks a giant step forward in Gee’s thinking. Foregoing action and strategy for the world of The Sims, Gee enters Henry Jenkins territory through the work of Hayes and her students, looking at women across a broad range of ages learning demanding skills and producing valued and respected content in fan communities.

The case studies – an older shut-in woman become a multimillion-download content creator, a young teen fanfic writer inspired by the Twilight books, a professional woman whose life in The Sims and Second Life devastates the old academic concept of the “magic circle,” a German woman using The Sims as a platform for a simulation game about poverty in America – are gracefully woven into a narrative of learning reform.

Gee and Hayes argue that a certain kind of community with very specific features – a “passionate affinity group” – can generate enormously effective learning and personal growth by channeling impulses to learn particular things for particular ends. From mythology to Photoshop to machinima, they provide a learning environment that allows people to transform themselves from consumers to producers, to achieve expertise and recognition.

I think they’re on shaky ground with this concept. Leading a long list of elements of the “ideal” passionate affinity group is “A common passion-fueled endeavor – not race, class, gender or disability – is primary.” Gee and Hayes add

These latter variables are backgrounded, though they can be used (or not) strategically by individuals if and when they choose to use them for their own purposes. This feature is particularly enabled and enhanced in virtual passionate affinity groups (Internet communities) because people can enter these spaces with an identity or name of their own choosing. They can make up any name they like and give any information (fictional or not) about themselves they wish. This identity need not, and usually does not, foreground the person’s race, gender, age, disability or social class. (p. 107)

Gee is neither stupid nor inexperienced, so one has to interpret this passage as some mixture of willful ignorance and prescription over description. Such a passage, typical of 1990s academic writing about internet communities, simply does not reflect reality. Internet identities, as a dozen years of scholarship have shown, tend to be closely tied to offline identity. When they are not, they tend to involve either passing as higher status (e.g., “whitewashing” identity – Gee commits the privileged fallacy of reading “white, straight, middle class” markers as “no markers”) or digitally transgendered men. What they almost never do is fail to foreground some claim of race, gender, age, disability or social class.

Gee and Hayes write about The Sims fan communities which profoundly put the lie to this claim of external status-blindness: they are highly gendered, setting forth and enforcing by social pressure a very particular view of gendered behavior. They are also profoundly heteronormative. True, race and class are elided, but those factors are extraneous to cultural identity as a The Sims fan. Gender and sexuality are not, any more than they are not in male-gendered spaces like World of Warcraft forums or first person shooter fandoms. Gee makes much of how nobody cares that one of his exemplars is Asian-American: that’s not a factor of the focus on learning in the community, but that “mixed race” status is unremarkable in young contemporary America, while particular expressions of race, gender and sexuality remain highly remarkable and remarked upon, even in gaming and learning communities.

The implication also that a community focusing on support for people from particular circumstances: gay gamers, inner-city gamers, disabled gamers – are somehow inferior environments for support, learning and growth than those of some race-blind liberal ideal, is deeply offensive and unscientific, an ideological assertion unsupported by contact with reality.

Gee and Hayes contrast the communities that meet their definition of “passionate affinity groups” with a “leet” community, a “school of hard knocks.” Their brief sketch of such a community in within a fandom seen by “leet” male gamers as irredeemably feminine and “carebear”-y is a major contribution, and one that deserved to be expanded upon.

They consider this community an inferior learning environment, while noting that several people they studied were members of both the “hard” and “soft” communities, adjusting their behavior to each. This suggests that there may not be one ideal style of a learning community, hardly a radical insight. Some people learn best from drill sergeants, tough teachers, demanding sensei, and some learn best from nurturant peers. A vital ecosystem of learning offers both, along with communities tailored to distinct cultural backgrounds, to enable anyone wanting to learn to find a niche best suited to them.

Failure to see this point may be a flaw of the social science case study approach: it focuses on organisms rather than ecosystems, on individuals in small communities rather than on “communities of communities” and issues of choice and migration among them. In fact, the ecosystem of fandom around The Sims (or any other large fandom) may be a practical example of Robert Nozick’s libertarian ideal of small, diverse communities with low barriers to entry and exit, each an experiment in governance. Such an ecosystem approach need not lose sight of the individual, or of Clifford Geertz’s exhortation to thick description, but acknowledgment of the system level would not only more accurately depict reality, but would serve as a further critique of the one-organism ecosystem of schooling.

Gee and Hayes also acknowledge, but might have expanded on, the not-unrelated tensions between nerfing and challenge. Making more user-friendly tools, they note, enables more people to participate, but if the tools are too easy, there is no impetus to find a community to help in learning and training. While the deep learning and mastery the authors describe is an important development of participatory culture, the opposite strain, of automatic reward, runs deep, especially among a cadre of children raised on praise without accomplishment.

Games and gaming communities can veer towards either end: towards a demand for more and easier rewards, or towards calls for deeper challenge. World of Warcraft is torn between these two, and many argue that Blizzard has chosen empty rewards for participation over a need for real mastery. At the same time, EVE Online is so demanding and unforgiving as to limit its appeal to an audience a tiny fraction of WoW’s size. A healthy ecosystem, of course, has niches for both, and for a wide range of variations. Again, a systems-level focus might have enriched the authors’ discussion of this tension.

Despite these small shortcomings, Women and Gaming is an excellent, accessible book which should be read by everyone interested in educational reform (especially the STEM-education cadre), and by traditional masculine gamers who don’t “get” feminine game spaces and cultures.

Talking Governance in a Virtual World

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Mar 272010

Mitch Kapor, the Chairman of the Board of Linden Lab, the corporate owners and operators of Second Life, delivered a speech in June 2008 in which he declared the “frontier era” of SL closed. He was wrong.

Yesterday’s conference, “Governance of Virtual Worlds,” held in SL and co-sponsored by ASU’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law and World2Worlds Inc., demonstrated that the frontier era of innovation, experimentation, and citizen involvement in local communities and issues of the day is alive and well.

Even more than the panelists, drawn from academia, law, business, NGOs and community activism, that frontier spirit manifested itself at the pre-conference reception, which saw a vigorous discussion of intellectual property rights, theories of government and of the nature of the self in society, break out among the attendees, and carry over into the text-chat “backchannel” of the conference throughout the day.

When the frontier closes, the professionals arrive, push out the amateurs, and declare the great issues of the day settled – to their own benefit. Yet even the panel of attorneys and law professors agreed – with some relish – that the issues we confront in living, working, and playing in online spaces are still only roughly understood, and far from settled.

John “Pathfinder” Lester, a consultant formerly of Linden Lab and Research Associate in Neurology at Harvard Medical Center, delivered a keynote around Neal Stephenson’s concept of “metaphor shear:” the sense of disconnect (or ilinx) when you discover technology not behaving just like the thing you’ve analogized it to – when you realize your computer isn’t really like a desktop, your car isn’t really like a carriage without horses – or your online community isn’t really just like a national republic.

Two years ago Kapor tried to seize control of the metaphor, and through a rhetorical turn declare the experiments over, the issues settled, the territory ripe for the arrival of bankers and politicians. How this conference sheared his metaphor!

We heard of a vibrant experiment in uniting South Africans and the global community of discourse, of the challenges posed by putting powerful creative tools in the hands of ordinary people, of the shifting legal grounds of identity online, of the challenges of merging two political communities with distinctive views of the role of personal participation and public discussion.

We hosted a global, yet very local, community: well over a hundred people joined us, from five continents, a full day’s range of time zones, a vast range of professions, politics, and experiences, who were no passive recipients of expert wisdom from the stage, but carried on the lively backchatter that distinguishes virtual-worlds conferences from their staid, elitist physical-world analogs.

We could have gone much, much longer: our half-day format was tied to the needs of a physical space we ended up not using, and the event was intended as an appetizer platter, an array of bite-sized savories of interesting people and issues, to encourage further consumption.

In that, we succeeded: that evening, we received a formal request from a self-governing community to screen the day’s video in their amphitheater, to carry on the discussion begun in backchannel by its members in attendance.

The conference showed that we still want to explore, we still want to be involved in creating meaning for ourselves; we still want to innovate, experiment, and live in communities where we can make a difference.

Kapor was wrong. The virtual frontier is vibrant, and it is open.

Come join us if you dare.

(submitted to Soapbox, the blog of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes)

The Postmodern Mirror

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Mar 232010

A colleague of mine, Gretchen Gano, did a wonderful talk today: “Megamachine in the Megalopolis: a living picture of Lewis Mumford‘s technological city.” Using the motif of the tableau vivant, a Victorian amusement in which people would stage re-enactments of famous paintings, she used a set of artifacts held by volunteers: a mirror, a clock, a vase and a lamp, to engage us with Mumford’s ideas of the city.

There were many rich echoes of my own work on virtual communities in Mumford’s writings in the era of high modernism. The simple one is that some of us live in places both virtual and actual, both the “Invisible City” of omnipresent civilization and the city as container, of things drawn in from all around to be held together.

But a more interesting reflection, I think, I found in Gretchen’s floor-length mirror. An accompanying handout quoted Mumford’s The City In History:

If the outward world was changed by glass, the inner world was likewise modified. Glass had a profound effect upon the development of the personality: indeed, it helped alter the very concept of the self…

If the image one sees in the mirror is abstract, it is not ideal or mythical: the more accurate the physical instrument, the more sufficient the light on it… show(s) the effects of age, disease, disappointment, frustration, slyness, covetousness, weakness – these come out as clearly as health and joy and confidence.

And that was the experience of modernism: the social creation of an atomistic self as that which one sees in the mirror, and through the process of seeing in the mirror, particularly the mirror of psychoanalysis, which, needing selves to study, created them in the act of turning mirrors upon them.

Now we can go beyond mirrors, not in a simple return to the ideal or mythical, but to the intentional, to the mirrored self as the product of agency, both personal and social.

I threw a party last night, one which Mumford might have celebrated as the product of city as container of civilization: I had some 40 people over from all walks of life, to dance to a DJ’d set of Arabic club music, to chat, to meet, to display our fashion, style and wit in my beautiful well-appointed home.

And yet. We had people from at least five time zones, three countries, all in the same space at the same time! Surely that is the Invisible City! But no, it was no mere importation of culture produced elsewhere and consumed locally, as Mumford described, but a moment in a truly global, temporally united, space of civilization.

And yet. We were not – or, not only - tired meatbags of unitary egos. We wore our true names, our inner selves, our identities composed from software tools, fashion design, observed or flouted conventions of age, gender, species – truly the cyborgs of Harraway’s ironic vision.

We are all these things at once: realist and impressionist, united and dispersed, recognizable by any civilized ancient and something almost indescribably new.

I have a dear friend who loves to answer binary questions with “Yes.”

Are we any one of these things, or are we their opposite?

I’m happy to answer, along with Galatea, “Yes.”

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.

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 Trough of Noobery

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Jan 312010

Dear Student:

No, you’re not any one of my students in particular: this song isn’t about you. But you are a composite. You’ve asked me a set of questions about virtual worlds, ones that I haven’t been able to answer satisfactorily for either of us. I’m going to try again here, and see if a day’s reflection and consultation can make a difference.

You’ve made some observations and asked some questions that I think sum up as, you’re not readily connecting with the space and don’t see why you should learn it. I think what underlies your (very legitimate) questions is, you’re in the Trough of Noobery, and it sucks to be there.

I said in the first class that there are three reasons for studying governance of virtual worlds: as a model, a small-scale online reproduction of larger and more complex offline phenomena; as a convenient nexus of offline political, economic, legal and cultural forces, all interesting in their own right; and as a potential source for innovations that might transform offline institutions.

Let’s talk about the model. What I’m having you do is model an experience many of you will have in your professional lives, not least of all those of you who want to practice law: entering into a new field, leaning what it’s about and what’s important, earning respect among the people in that field, and being able to make meaning within it.

We all do this throughout our lives, from starting at a new school or job, moving to a new town, picking up a craft or hobby. Those things are either inevitable or freely chosen: your parents got relocated, and you were dragged along, or you decided you really want to spend your evenings learning luge, or Thai cooking. In both cases, theory and methodology really don’t help: you’re either fine, or stuck, without them. Desperation or desire will propel you out of the Trough of Noobery sooner or later.

But the professional case, the one we’re modeling in this class, is an intermediate: somewhere between compulsion and desire, tools come in handy for navigating your way down the the road to Leetville.

So far, you’ve read insiders’ views and outsiders’ views, academic articles, works of in-depth journalism, newspaper articles and blogs. You’ve gotten a bit of political science, anthropology, economics and law. These intellectual tools, we think, are good and useful, but mostly for people who’re already out of the Trough of Noobery and rolling down the road to Leetville. You’re not there yet, and telling the political scientists and economists to get out and push isn’t getting you the momentum to get out of the Trough.

You have to do that.

You have to be a noob, and you have to keep going through that till you reach comfort and fluency on the road to Leetville.

We haven’t stressed this enough in class, in part because we’re really not sure how to approach it (and pretty sure, from keeping up with the field, that nobody’s really sure), but what we want you to be able to do by the end of the semester is to be able to make meaning convincingly and coherently, at a graduate-appropriate level, in a game world and a social world.

That’s why we’re suggesting alternatives to the traditional seminar paper: we’re confident you know how to make meaning in school. You’ve had a lot of practice at that. What we want you to do is enter into a new field, figure it out, and “read” (understand what people are saying, and what they mean by it) and “write” (create something that people in the space consider meaningful and useful) in it.

Much of legal practice is built around this skill set. A client comes to you with a problem. You need to understand what it is they do well enough to understand the problem in their terms. Then you have to sort through your knowledge of the law, figure out what applies and what doesn’t, and then (ideally) translate that in terms that the client can understand, so they know what the law expects of them. Then, you have to explain the situation, to a judge (who doesn’t know anything about the client’s business or situation), a jury (who doesn’t know anything about either the law or the client’s situation), or a potential investor (who understands finance, but not the law or the client).

That’s some very sophisticated “reading” and “writing” across a range of very different, mutually ignorant, communities.

That’s the skill set we’re hoping to train you in, in this class. We’re not here to get you to develop a hobby, or to share our hobbies. We don’t much care if you like either world we’re using, or if you like virtual worlds at all, at this point. We do care that we do a good job teaching you, and you do a good job learning, how to enter into a technologically-bounded space and become literate within it.

So what can you do to get past noob-hood and come out literate?

My PhD program faces the same sets of issues: how to take a bunch of lazy noobs and get them making meaning in their academic field. One of the things they’ve done is to create a mandatory 1-credit course, in which we have to attend an on-campus academic talk every week, like it or not. It sucks, and I whine, but it works.

We’re not going to mandate time inworld, or that you attend one event a week. We didn’t establish those ground rules, and we’re not going to change the rules in mid-game. But if you want to do well, if you want to achieve literacy, try this:

This week:

Go to one of the freebie stores on the notecard we gave you. Get some clothes and change into them.
Go to one of the events on the weekly recommendations. No, go to two, one academic/professional and one social, like a live music event.
Talk to strangers until you’ve found someone you’d like to add to your friends list.

That’s the advice for SL. The advice for WoW is much the same: level to 15 or so, and join a pickup group to fight (not get run though, fight), Ragefire Chasm. Or click the PvP button and join a battleground. Or join a pickup group to quest for a couple hours. Buy and sell a green item in the Auction House. Raise your professions and at least one of cooking, fishing or first aid to equal your defense level.

Do that, and you’ll be out of the Trough of Noobery and well on your way to Leetville – and to success in the class.

Legal Anthropologist of Gor!

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Jan 242010

I’m starting the semester in another class of Alice Robison‘s: English 654, Social Media. One of our core assignments is a digital literacies project that will see us actively engaged with the discourse of an online community – one that’s completely new to us. Subject to approval, and negotiation of research protocols (and isn’t *this* going to make for an interesting IRB application!), I’m going to do participant-observer work in Second Life’s Gorean community (or, in the internet vernacular, I’m going to be a kajira FOR SCIENCE!).

Discussing my research interests in virtual worlds governance with a friend recently, she suggested that I spend some time exploring SL Gor. It’s perhaps the largest network of themed communities in SL, apparently (though I haven’t found any reliable and current statistics yet) larger than the well-known steampunk nation of Caledon (another potential research site), yet operates largely in isolation from SL’s media and elites. In 2007, Goreans were something like vampires are today – a public nuisance, spilling their roleplay over into conventional spaces. This seems to have subsided dramatically, with Goreans largely staying in their own vast realms, and thus dropping off the public radar.

Gor is an ideal topic for a social media study: it’s got the canon of original novels, whose interpretation and application are hotly debated across a multitude of internet forums. There are lifestylers, who try to recreate the customs of the novels full-time in their lives; roleplayers, who delimit their involvement to particular times and places; orthodox and reform movements; machinima, parodies, blogs, and much more.

Remarkably little has been done in academia with respect to SL-Gor, and there’s definitely room in the field for a good paper, especially one treating SL-Gor as an object of legal-anthropological study.

I’m about halfway through the first (of 27) of John Norman’s novels of Gor, Tarnsman of Gor (I’m hoping to get by reading only the first seven, after which non-devotees seem to agree the author descended into abysmally-written rants, and much greater hostility to women) I’ve done a preliminary survey of forums and blogs, looked at some machinima, read some parody fic, and begun to think about methodology.

Tentatively, I’m thinking of a two-pronged approach: one, to go in as an itinerant member of the caste of scribes, roleplaying as a student of laws and customs across the cities of SL-Gor; and two, as a kajira, or slavegirl. I don’t know how Gorean RP breaks down between the roleplay of living in a barbarian-fantasy world, and how much of it is BDSM wrapped in an ideology deeply hostile to women. I think both perspectives, of scholar and slave, will be necessary to really understand SL-Gor.

I hope to learn how the Gorean cities of SL govern themselves; how they debate and dispute the application of canon and negotiate the boundaries between casual play, RP and lifestyle; how they handle the boundaries between Gor and non-Gor within SL; how they handle the boundaries among Gorean sexuality, knowledgeable BDSM and sex tourism; how identity is created and negotiated; to what extent SL-Gor is a transmedia experience or is limited to face to face RP in an SL Gorean sim; and hopefully many questions I can’t imagine yet.

I’m calling what I want to do legal anthropology, as I see it grounded in questions about what people actually do in creating communities and setting rules and customs for who and what they are, and how they deal with others, within those communities. Lawrence Rosen has written extensively on the legal anthropology of North African communities, with a focus on the interplay of Islam, culture and law. I think something very similar can be done with SL-Gor, and that it will provide some real insights into the politics of gender relations in offline society as well as into microcommunity governance in online spaces.

This will be an immensely controversial project. Gor has many impassioned antagonists, and based on what little I’ve known, I’ve long been one of them. I suspect that anything which might be construed as sympathetic, or anything other than full excoriation, will bring down immense internet wrath on me from the Left. Likewise, I suspect that anything other than blind praise will engender accusations of bad faith from my Gorean hosts. It won’t be a dull semester.

Next up: creating my avatars and RP backstories, making contacts in SL-Gor and getting started; and really figuring out what my participant-observer work will look like. And reading more novels.

Some Resources So Far:

SecondLife Gor forum

Gor-SL forum

Sheraka The Scribe’s Gor-SL blog

Thoughtful Kajira’s Weblog

Avatars in Wonderland: What is this Gor? (an interview with Sheraka the Scribe, with some fascinating comments)

New World Notes: Second Life of Gor – Nearly 50k Gorean Roleplayers in SL?

Gay, Bejeweled, Nazi Bikers of Gor

Houseplants of Gor

YouTube: Submission – SL Gor

10 Big Pieces #11: Noveck, Wiki Government

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Jan 242010

Alice Robison’s challenge to me last semester, to select and blog short reviews of key texts at the intersection of games, community and innovation, proved to be so useful that I’m going to keep doing it. Beth Simone Noveck’s Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful, ranks high on my list of essential texts.

For the past year, I’ve been struggling to articulate a critique of the citizen-outreach efforts undertaken by Arizona State University’s Center for Science, Policy and Outcomes and Center for Nanotechnology in Society, institutions I’m loosely affiliated with. I’ve considered their programs to be based on, and to reinforce, a model of the citizen as passive consumer of expert policy, whose role is to have “opinions,” which are the result of expert scientific inputs, and are in turn outputs to be processed by policy officials and their academic hangers-on. I think it’s an anemic, unattractive and misguided model, and one that, intentionally or not, perpetuates citizen apathy and vested-interest control of governance, and indeed of the shaping of society.

While I’ve been looking around for a conceptual hammer to beat on my esteemed colleagues with, Noveck has gone ahead and slaughtered them. Wiki Government is an impassioned case for participatory governance built around a successful case study: the open-sourcing of patent review.

Summary

Noveck argues,

It is overdue to rethink the legacy of attenuated participation in a small number of representative institutions. Instead, democratic theory and the design of governing institutions must now be rethought for an age of networks. The opportunity now is to move toward collaborative democracy… in which institutions afford the public the opportunity to select themselves to participate actively in diverse ways.

Collaborative democracy is a new approach for using technology to improve outcomes by soliciting expertise (in which expertise is defined broadly to include both scientific knowledge and popular experience) from self-selected peers working together in groups in open networks. (pp. 16-17)

Deliberative democracy, “the dominant view of participation in contemporary political theory,” and the view underpinning CSPO/CNS efforts, comes in for a blistering attack. Efforts in the field continue “despite the fact that some recent empirical research even suggests that talking to people of differing viewpoints correlates to reduced participation in community life,” (p.36), an outcome suggested by CNS’s flagship research, which fits perfectly to Noveck’s charge of “a benign paternalistm that spoonfeeds the public a dumbed-down version of solutions achieved by qualified scientists after the fact of their achievement,” quoting political philosopher Roberto Unger. (p. 142)

Deliberative democracy’s proponents, she writes, “assume that people are generally powerless and incapable of doing more than talking with neighbors to develop opinions or criticizing government to keep it more honest.” “The anthropology of deliberative participation leads to practices designed to present the finished work of institutional professionals, spark public opinion in response, and keep peace among neighbors engaged in civic discourse. The goal is not to improve decisionmaking.” (p. 37)

She contrasts collaboration: “Deliberation measures the quality of democracy on the basis of procedural uniformity and equality of inputs. Collaboration shifts the focus to the effectiveness of decisionmaking and outputs…. Deliberation focuses on self-expression. Collaboration focuses on participation. To conflate deliberative democracy with participatory democracy is to circumscribe participation by boundaries that technology has already razed.” (p. 39)

In her chapter, “Designing for Collaborative Democracy,” Noveck moves beyond theory into solid details of tool-creation and use, of the role of user interfaces in shaping constructive participation. Her notion of “visual deliberation” has potential for game and virtual world design, in user interfaces and orientations, which perform a similar civic role in their own spaces. Visual deliberation links software, custom and politics to shape and constrain collaboration, a principle equally important to work, play and governance.

Critique and Analysis

Noveck provides an excellent blend of theory and practice, with half the book dedicated to a discussion of her successful initiative, Peer to Patent, which developed and fielded tools to open-source review of US patent applications. Far from being either dry or self-congratulatory, this focus grounded her solid democratic theory in real application. Noveck stays close to the code, putting the software-driven concept of visual deliberation at the center of her methodology.

The book is clearly intended as a polemic, and a call to spread collaborative democracy. I would have appreciated an academic “director’s cut,” with expanded theory both in support of her proposals and in the potential breadth of their application. As noted, “visual deliberation” could merit a book of its own, as a concept at the intersection of software design, business practices, gaming, and governance.

Then again, that might make for an excellent dissertation or paper by someone else.

Utility

The direct application of social media tools to the work of government is not my area of primary interest, in no small part due to my cynicism about the capability of the formal political system to adapt to the social changes being driven by information technology. Ultimately, I regard Noveck’s efforts as close kin to Gorbachev’s perestroika – reforms that can only make the ossification and illegitimacy of the system so brutally obvious as to trigger its disintegration. Which, while possibly not a a bad thing, is not as interesting to me as the peer to peer work being done, which may potentially be the site of the evolutionary successors to the terror lizards of the bureaucratic nation states.

Nonetheless, her critique of the current order and its academic supporters and legitimizers will be fundamental to my work, as will her practical recommendations for internet-enabled collaboration as an alternative to passivity in entertainment, work and governance.

Older Entries

Communities of Constraint, take 1

10 Big Pieces: Gang Leader for a Day

10 Big Pieces: Women and Gaming

Talking Governance in a Virtual World

The Postmodern Mirror

Literature Review of Gor

Research Ethicist of Gor, another sequel

The Trough of Noobery

Legal Anthropologist of Gor!

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