The effort of being immersed

Yesterday, I hosted a talk at my department by Jonas Linderoth (University of Gothenburg) entitled The effort of being in a fictional world: Upkeyings and laminated frames in MMORPGs. Its topic was hard core role playing subcultures within the World of Warcraft community, and it illustrated how these players — wanting to achieve a maximum level of authenticity and immersion in their gaming — navigate the nexus between rules/ludology and fiction/narratology. Immersion does not come easy, which is something that the moral entrepreneurs who see nothing but dangers in MMO gaming seem to think. Rather, it takes a lot of hard work to actually “lose grip of reality”.

The presentation made me realize that I really have to look more into Goffman’s frame analysis, which is something that I have been meaning to do for quite some time now. Also, “Hamlet on the Holodeck” by Janet Murray seems to be important reading to anyone interested in cultural and linguistic aspects of digital cultures. There is more information on Jonas Linderoth here, and those who understand Swedish will definitely enjoy his talk WTF r u female IRL?!? from the latest Dreamhack festival.

virt3c@hull, day 2

The second day of VIRT3C included even more interesting meetings and presentations. Mathieu O’Neil spoke on the possibilities of doing research on the net and being critical. According to him, critique is about distance. You establish a distance from an object and look at it while standing away from it. Sociology is a history of the present, and being critical in the context of sociology therefore means standing outside of the present. Mathieu applied Bourdieu’s field theory to internet networks, and also mentioned an interesting paper The Sociology of Culture in Computer-Mediated Communication by Elizabeth Lawley.

Stefan Merten of Oekonux gave a great talk about peer production. Peer production is not “facebook”, it is a production process featuring external and internal openness. It is based on Selbstentfaltung. In short, Selbstentfaltung is an important precondition for peer production, which merges individual well-being with societal needs. Volunteers contribute what they select themselves, which guarantees non-alienated leadership.

sub*culture

My talk from VIRT3C@Hull 2010

from simon lindgren on Vimeo.

virt3c@hull, day 1

I am now at the Inaugural Interdisciplinary Conference of the Virtual Communication, Collaboration and Conflict (VIRT3C) Research Group at the University of Hull. The overall themes are collaborative production and the exploration of strengths and weakness of peer technology and open projects.

VIRT3C will bring leading cybertheorists, internet, peer production and social networking experts together for knowledge-sharing, and collaboration in interdisciplinary academic projects, facilitating original ideas for research and funding applications. It will provide a physical base and a hub of activity, provoking and supporting new ideas of research to several successful virtual networks, such as the P2P Foundation, Oekonux and other virtual communities.

During the first day, I did a talk called sub*culture: exploring the dynamics of a networked public. It was part of the session on “Network Publics, Citizenship and Piracy” where the two other presenters were Johan Söderberg, who gave an interesting talk about the Swedish pirate movement, and Athina Karatzogianni whose presentation was on the China-Google cyberconflict. The full programme can be found here.

Some highlights from my notepad during day 1:

– “bankable dissent” (Yang, 2009) seems to be an interesting concept

–  Judith Butler’s paper “Sovereign Performatives in the Contemporary Scene of Utterance” (1997) has some nice passages about how “one cannot know in advance the meaning that the other will assign to one’s utterance” (p. 365)

– “the Megan Meier affair” is a telling and tragic, however extreme, example of cyberbullying

– the paper “Sharing Nicely” by Yochai Benkler seems to be worth checking out

– three recent trends in web 2.0 as identified by Geert Lovink: (1) the colonization of real-time [using technology to get as close as possible to real-time events]; (2) comment culture and the rise of extreme opinions; (3) the emergence of national webs [a global internet has become utopian, again]