Coming of Age in Second Life by Boellstorff Tom; Boellstorff Tom;

Author:Boellstorff, Tom; Boellstorff, Tom;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2015-02-16T16:00:00+00:00

FRIENDSHIP.

Since the early days of the Internet, a widely disseminated dystopic narrative has portrayed virtual worlds as engines of isolation, the pastime of techno-hermits firmly ensconced in lonely rooms, consoled only by the deceptively warm flicker of a computer screen. Given the resilience of this narrative, one of the most surprising and consistent findings of cybersociality research has been that virtual worlds can not only transform actual-world intimacy but create real forms of online intimacy. Observers of virtual worlds have long noted that persons engaging in forms of computer-mediated communication often “come to feel that their very best and closest friends are members of their electronic group, whom they seldom or never see” (Hiltz and Turoff 1978:101, cited in Reid 1999:113). Even early virtual worlds could thus be “powerfully conducive to intimacy” (Van Gelder 1991:366); reflecting such conclusions, Second Life residents often saw it as “an intimacy-making culture.” This was a positive aspect of the disinhibition that, as I discuss later, could manifest itself as griefing. Desirable intimacies often took sexual forms, and I turn to sexuality in the following section. However, the prevalence (and sometimes, heated tone) of discussions regarding cybersex has obscured that for most residents of virtual worlds, nonsexual friendships are the most important aspect of their lives online.6 Friendships are the foundation of cybersociality; the friend is the originary social form for homo cyber.

Residents of Second Life and other virtual worlds expended enormous amounts of time and energy in finding, making, and maintaining friends (Jakobsson and Taylor 2003), a goal which extended beyond virtual worlds to locations for Internet-mediated friendship like MySpace, Facebook, and Friendster (Boyd 2006b). In the Western traditions that dominated the cultures of cyberspace during the period of my research, and in other traditions as well, there existed a range of hierarchical models for social relations—husband and wife, parent and child, teacher and student, employer and employee—and others that were quite egalitarian, like siblings, coworkers, and neighbors. Yet the cultural concept of “friend,” defined by its two key characteristics of choice and egalitarianism, represented the dominant rubric residents of Second Life (and beyond) drew upon as the default category for social relations.

One possible interpretation of this predominance of friendship is that it is congruent with the “creationist capitalism” I discuss in chapter 8, and with the overall ethic of individualized choice and intentionality that is a key element of techne. In this interpretation, friendship is the ultimate form of “pure relationship” associated with modern selfhood, in which “a friend is defined specifically as someone with whom one has a relationship unprompted by anything other than the rewards that relationship provides” (Giddens 1991:90). However, it is also possible to see friendship as a more subversive “way of life” that questions naturalized categories of kinship, ethnicity, and nation (Foucault 1997a). Perhaps friendship is not just “pure relationship,” but “virtual relationship,” built through techne rather than any received biological or social arrangement. Were this the case, then one reason for the ubiquity of friendship online might be that like ethnography, friendship anticipated the emergence of virtual worlds.

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