[Air-L] PhD Thesis - Virtually Real:Being in Cyberspace

[human factor]

Congrats, Morgan.

Curiously, how would you see Nardi’s My Life as a Night Elf Priest comparative to your work? 
What were the platform affordance differences? 


> On Mar 2, 2016, at 7:12 PM, Morgan Leigh <morgan at wirejunkie.com> wrote:
> 
> Greetings,
> I have just uploaded my PhD Thesis to Academia and thought I would let
> all the members of this list know about it. As far as I know no one has
> published a monograph that is an autoethnography in Second Life.
> 
> The full thesis is available at
> https://www.academia.edu/22669120/Virtually_Real_Being_In_Cyberspace
> 
> A book will be available shortly. I'd appreciate expressions of interest
> for copies of the book as I am self publishing and need to gauge how
> many copies to print.
> 
> Abstract
> 
> This work is an autoethnographic account of my search for the sacred in
> cyberspace. The research was conducted in the virtual world Second Life,
> and in particular in two role play communities set in Ancient Egypt.
> Virtual worlds are often criticised as unreal, as just games. Here I
> explore the ontological status of virtual worlds, recognising the
> priority for their inhabitants of lived experience over purely rational
> assessments. This research is unique and important as no monograph of
> role play communities in Second Life has yet been published, and yet
> tens of millions of people spend an increasing amount of time in virtual
> and game worlds, often preferring them to the meatspace world. I recount
> my experiences with ritual in cyberspace, describing sacred virtual
> space, and its relationship to sacred meatspace from a Pagan
> perspective. I compare two initiation rituals, and describe how one
> produced the perception of sacred space, in both meatspace and the
> virtual world, while the other remained only a role play. Finally I
> analyse an opening of the mouth ritual to reveal the way we make sense
> of our own realities by building on and remixing what came before us,
> and to argue that there are many truths and that objectivity is
> impossible in the human condition. This is the story of how I became one
> with my avatar, despite my best efforts not to do so.
> 
> Themes of the fun economy, remix culture, and copyright inform the
> analysis in the work. I explore Castronova's concept of the fun economy,
> the amalgam of work, play and education which characterises twenty first
> century life in the developed world. Freedom and fun are the motivators
> for the inhabitants of virtual worlds and the bounds of these are
> defined by copyright. This issue is examined through the lens of the
> Second Life permissions system and the work of Lessig and his concept of
> remix culture. I argue that remix culture has permeated the entirety of
> human history, giving examples from ancient Egypt through to the present
> day, and consider the implications for human culture if restrictive
> copyright laws continue to dominate legal frameworks, despite their
> failure to achieve their desired ends. Exploring our future in
> cyberspace though Kurzweil's concept of the singularity, I consider the
> possibilities of his predicted combination of the worlds of meatspace
> and the virtual.
> 
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Dr. Morgan Leigh
> 
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