[Air-l] identity readings?

[Ren Reynolds]

Nathaniel,
There is such a range of material out there. I co-ran a day on  
identity in virtual spaces at NY Law School earlier this year which  
had a mixed group of legal scholars, game designers, social  
scientists etc. I put together a reading list for this which tried to  
get at identity from a few angles, I kept the philosophy to the  
minimum. Here is the reading list I came up with, I stressed that if  
people had not spent any time in a virtual world then actually being  
in one for a while was probably more valuable than the reading, but  
in this group each were experts in their respective fields, here is  
the list which I have re-ordered with the ones that I think might be  
most relevant to your audience plus a few notes:

M Consalvo, S Paasonen, Women & Everyday Uses of the Internet: Agency &
Identity. Gender, Identity, and (the limits of) play on the Internet pp.
21-43

- Challenges Turkle and Stone in some interesting ways.


D Williams, Trouble in River City - The Social Life of Video Games, Ch5
ON the Screen on the 'Net pp74-78 Social Capital and the internet.

- Interesting because it has an empirical slant based on observation  
of a group using Ashron's Call 2 (I think).


always_black: Bow Nigger
http://www.alwaysblack.com/blackbox/bownigger.html

- quintacental 'new games journalism' piece that give primacy to race  
in virtual spaces


R Bartle: Designing Virtual World
Chapter 3: Players  esp. pp174 - 185

- The creator of MUD's ideas on identity


S Zizek: The Plage of Fantasies
Cyberspace, or, the unbearable closure of being p133-143

- Thought provoking but possibly not for absolute beginners


D W Winnicott: Playing and Reality Ch 4 Playing - Creative activity  
and the search for the self  pp53-64

- One psychological theory that links play with identity

  	
Krzywinska, T (2004) ‘Who’s World is it?’: Creative Play and Player  
Presence in World of Warcraft, digra.

http://www.gamesconference.org/digra2005/viewabstract.php?id=2



Reynolds, Ren
http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2005/08/the_four_worlds.html

- My first attempt at creating some kind of taxonomy for talking  
about classes of virtual space. One of my axes relates to identity.

The Laws of Identity...

Kim Cameron, Identity and Access Architect, Microsoft Corporation  
(May 2005)

http://www.identityblog.com/stories/2005/07/25/thelaws.html

- This is from the world of identity that is more interested in  
systems of trust, ID cards and all that.


Solove, D (2004) The Digital Person - Technology and Privacy in the  
Information Age. New York: New York University Press,

- The introduction might be of interest.



FYI the 'experience' list that I proposed is as follows:

Anarchy Online (Free)
www.anarchy-online.com/

Second Life (free) secondlife.com and / or There (free 3 day trial)
www.there.com

Achaea (Free)
www.ironrealms.com/achaea.html




On 21 Dec 2005, at 18:41, Nathaniel Poor wrote:

> hello group
>
> anybody know of a good online identity piece for a 400-level class?
> 20-25 pages? recent?
>
> I like some of Turkle's chapters for this, but they're so old they  
> talk
> about MUDs and such and instead of having the students focus on online
> identity issues they end up rejecting the entire thing because they
> don't understand what a MUD is and it is very foreign to their online
> experience
>
> so if there was something more recent...
>
> something like "here is identity.... here is how online identity  
> can be
> different and why"
> (so yeah sort of intro)
> but academic!
>
> (yes, I'm building syllabi...)
>
> oh, and something about facebook
> they all know what it is (all the freshman at Albion had accounts
> within the first two weeks of school!)
> but something that put an academic spin on it
> looks at it through the lens of THEORY!!!!
> something like that...
>
> thanks
>
> I hope everyone's end of term went well (or is continuing to do so)
>
> ^_^  ndp...
>
> ---------------------------------------------
> Nathaniel Poor, Ph.D.
> www.umich.edu/~natpoor
> Visiting Assistant Professor
> Communication Studies Dept.
> Albion College
> http://www.albion.edu/speech/
>
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