Topic Focus:
For my final project I would like to focus on "families" that are created in Second Life and other virtual worlds. I would also like to discuss the prominence of "families" in SL compared to the other virtual or online worlds like Facebook and World of Warcraft. Does having an avatar that you can completely control and the ability to create a new life for yourself influence the prominence of families or do more "families" exist in Second Life because of the social capabilities or the ability to be anonymous. All of these are questions that I would like to address in my paper. Also, I would like to extend the scope of my paper to include how people in families of Second Life users respond to all of the time spent and families in Second Life, does creating a family in Second Life influence people's real world experiences? I would have to be careful not to introduce any of my bias or feelings about creating a family in Second Life into my research or paper because that has the potential to skew my findings into things that only support my thesis and not challenge it and I will not be able to accurately study the effects of families on other avatars in Second Life and people in the real world.
Works Cited:
Boellstroff, Tom. Coming of Age in Second Life. Princeton: Princeston UP, 2008. Print.
This would be a good source to use because it is the first anthropological study of Second Life and it studies families in SL.
Botterbusch, Hope R., and R. S. Talab. "Ethical Issues in Second Life."
TechTrends: Linking Research & Practice to Improve Learning Jan. 2009: 9-13.
EBSCOhost. Web. 19 Nov. 2009.
http://web.ebscohost.com/.
This article dicusses ethical issues in Second Life, but it has a little section on social networking and realationships in Second Life. It dicusses the effect that anymonity has on avatar's relationships in SL.
McKenna, Adam. "Alice Addiction in Cyber Land." Eureka Street 31 July 2009: 18-20. EBSCOhost. Web. 19 Nov. 2009. http://web.ebscohost.com.
This article dicusses the addiction that Alice has to Second Life, and it dicusses her extenive social network within Second Life. This will help me adress the effect that strong relationships within SL affect people in the real world.
This article dicuesses ageplay as well as agenices where the child avatars live and play. This article will help me look at the relationship between ageplay and familes, becuase most families want to have children and to do that an avatar must be a child.
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Comments (2)
Joe Essid said
at 6:28 pm on Nov 7, 2009
You'll need to consider what sorts of other "family" groups gather online. I have heard the term "family" used SO often in SL, or spotted it in profiles, that I at first believed it to be a phenomenon unique to SL.
Is the language of "family" used in any other online context? Do WoW players refer to their guilds as "family"? Do Facebook users ever group their friends that way?
I did a lazy-boy search of "Second Life Family" and came up with this article..far from academic:
http://foo.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2007/04/virtually_famil.html
For an academic source, see what the book Coming of Age in Second Life (I've just begun reading it) or the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research have to say.
antoine.waul@richmond.edu said
at 2:46 am on Nov 20, 2009
This sounds like a really interesting topic. I think you should also try to find out if there are certain islands in Second Life that cater to families because then it would be interesting to get a first hand account of someone that has a family in Second Life.
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