Week1: Danny's Review on Knee-High Boots and Six-Pack Abs

Summary

This paper aims to discover, from the perspective of feminist, the experience and performance of gender in Second Life, an online platform, with a proposition that the gender is determined by both their own situated perspective and the vision provided by the virtual infrastructure, social and technical. Finally, through the autoethnographic methods, the authors argue that the relation between gender and virtual world is complicated and multifaceted; the position of the researcher in real life and the dominant discourses in in-world should also be taken into consideration in the studies on online experience in virtual worlds.

Review

SL is interesting not because of its function as an online game for global players to compete, but because of its limitlessness for residents or citizens to spend time as his or her will, which is a construction of “oasis of the surreal” (Ludlow & Wallace, 2007), instead of a replica of real world. Comparing with other online games, SL liberates players from competition, allowing them to spend much more time shaping their avatars’ physical appearance, equipping gears of their interests, interacting with others, and constructing their own world. In my opinion, it brings great convenience to practice and research in the fields of “soft sciences”, such as linguistics, sociology, and philosophy.

In this paper, the authors carried out their exploration with the method of autoethnography, which is quite controversial due to being too personal. Such critiques may derive from the ideas of those who believe in the reliability of data collection and analysis, which is much of quantitative methods. Autoethnography, however, is more of quantitative methods which traditionally involve both the researcher and the subject. According to my knowledge, qualitative methods can be as rigorous and reliable as quantitative methods only if they are carried out and analyzed in proper ways, for interviews, personal experiences are also important sources to researches. My suggestion for the paper is that surveys or statistics can make the argument more convincing.

Reference

Ludlow, P., & Wallace, M. (2007). The Second Life Herald. The virtual tabloid that witnessed the dawn of the metaverse. Cambridge: MIT Press.