The final two parts of Tom Boellstorff’s ethnography Coming of Age in Second Life focus on the culture and relationships of people in Second Life and also on the economic quality of Second Life. There is way too much information to cover, so I want to focus on a couple interesting ideas Boellstorff brought up. Boellstorff’s discussion of gender really highlights what sets a virtual community apart from an actual community. Gender in the actual world is essentially binary. Gender in Second Life is binary but fluid. An avatar can change gender at will, or become a genderless animal or even a ball of light. This allows people participating in Second Life greater freedom to explore new experiences or act out repressed feelings. Another interesting aspect of his discussion of gender is how irrelevant a person’s real life gender is for understanding their gender in Second Life. In Second Life, every interaction is done via the assumed gender, so that is how the person is defined despite years of living the actual world a different gender and operating everyday life as a specific gender.
The second part of Boellstorff’s ethnography that I want to discuss is his section on love and relationships. What I found interesting about these relationships was how they seemed to interact with the real world and simultaneously be completely separated from real life. On one hand, there are virtual world relationships that completely transition into real world relationships. On the other hand, there are virtual world relationships between people who have completely separate and healthy relationships in the real life. This begs the question of what this means to both relationships. Does the Second Life relationship constitute an affair (or maybe the real world relationship is an affair from the second life relationship)? Does one relationship mean more than the other to the person in both relationships? These are loaded topics, but are also very interesting topics.
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