Great Poster of Online Communities

I love this!

See if you can find Second Life!

Can you finnd second life?

User Creativity, Governance, and the New Media

Ted and I have a publication out in First Monday. I have enjoyed the broad scope of the journal, and the editing process for an on-line journal is interesting.  The article is part of a special issue called “User Creatviity, Governance and the NEw Media.”  The editors are Bonnie Nardi and Yong Ming  Kow.

Please surf over to the First Monday site to read the paper, “Developing Virtual Worlds: The Interplay of Design, Communities, and Rationality.”

What is the size of the Metaverse?

I am working on one of my papers about the institutionalization of virtual worlds and I once again want some sort of clear statement about the size or scope of virtual worlds to quickly convince a reviewer that this is a “real” issue worth studying and that the hypecycle boom and bust around Second Life was a distraction from the real growth trends.

There is the widely cited Gartner figure of 80% of active users having an avatar by 2011. Many missed the adjective “active.” Gartner rightly, I think, was focusing on innovators and early adopters. It is still an eye-opening number.

There are academic papers documenting the dozens of worlds, as well as attempts to classify them along some variation of the following axes: overt gameness, ownership model, user-generated content, focus, or demographic target.

There is Castronova’s estimates of 20-40 million active users and economies on the scale of mid-sized countries (although this includes all those pesky MMO games).

I need to source this post better, but at least I have identified a few leads.

Writing About Virtual Worlds

This is a slight experiment. I keep a writing journal which is often too personal too share. It also often contains little nuggets or amusing anecdotes. From time to time, I may give them a longer lease on life here.

From today’s Academic Ladder:

Live updating!
I am back home. Need to do five sessions today. Got final, final confirmation from co-author that today is last moment to produce paper for big wig, or, in spanish, i think, peluque enorme? Had a nice few days off, off as I talked to my father and got some of his stories recorded on video. House is a COMPLETE disaster. Must ignore it for now.

What happens in SL stays in SL

I was thoinking about the businesses that people start up in SL or other virtual worlds.  That got me thinking about this word again that I invented (as far as I know). Digital + Indigenous= “Digindigenous.”  Prounced as “dij-in-dij-en-us.”  It is growing on me.  For example, a norm that emerges in SL (as opposed to something imported from RW) is said to be digindiegnous.

Here is original post form 2007:

I like to play with words.  When obtuse or overly specialized, this can become jargon in the worst sense of the word: words which deliberately obfuscate and insulate insiders.  When there is a new experience, a new phenomenon, the desire to name wells up and starts playing with words.

Operationalize is jargon.

Podcast is not.

I have seen people refer to the residents of virtual worlds (aside from editorializing them as geeks or nerds) as residents, digital natives, and so on.

Perhaps there is a whole category of practices and objects that are digitally native.

Hence, I humbly offer digital+indigenous= digindigenous.

Digindienous is not short and sweet, but it has a certain rhythm in saying it.

Maybe there is something better?

Digigenous?  Sounds like stuttering
Digenous?   Sounds to much like disingenuous.

Thoughts?

Discussion of governance at TN blog

Here is an interesting discussion of governance over at TN blog.

The premise is to compare Internet to VW governance and see how VWs differ.  Sensible approach (! one I am using!).

Reading it did make me wonder if we are using governance More broadly than it is usually used.  The post author, Ren Reynolds, is looking at very “normal” governance issues; taxation and criminal enforcement. And those are fine and good to look at.  I have just thinking about governance as not only government control, but the production of order especially from a phenomenological perspective.  How do people feel or experience a VW as regularized or ordered?  The basis for that experience of order (or ordering) includes the code written by programmers working for firms constrianed by national governments. But it also includes the more normative and cogntive sources of patterning and order (look, NOT being surprosed by non human avatars is a certain kind of order.  A libertarian one, i suppose).

That is why I keep looping back to neo-institutional theory.

Practicing trust and VWs

Terra Nova: Practicing trust
Here it strikes me that MMOs sit in a sweet spot between being different enough as a practice to externalize, among other thing, acts of trust and kindness. Yet familiar enough in terms of the generic nature of what’s going on for those acts to have emotional impact – at least some of the time.

This is a very interesting comment from the author- Ren Reynolds.  Don’t knwo much about him, but maybe I should look more.  Fits in nicely with the “why VWs matter” paper Ted and I are trying to write.   And it captures the in-the-middle, sweet spot I have been imagining between total disarticualtion of real world identity and VW identity on the one hand and tight coupling or specified articulation (buying on ebay, buying on Amazon? LinkedIn?) on the other.  In SL, to juice up, or catalyze, the ferment of the world, there has to be enough distancingto activate playfulness, but enough peresistence and accountability to allow community to emerge (at least at player-player level) and norm reinforcement (we used to call it social control) to operate.

Conference leads for Ted

Possible conference venues for SL paper… Some may be for next year assuming they repeat.

Social Aaspects of Web

Computer Human Interaction fro Managing IT:

Economics and Finance modeling- see mostly the idea of emergence in complex systems.  Thats our emergent layer.

Tools for participation. This one is more about VW as place for collaboration or new forms of community.

ACM Hypertext… They may be only about links now but by next year interworld links will be an issue?

Intntl Conf on Computer Mediated Social Networking

Weblogs and Social Media- isn’t a VW the ultimate social media???

You gotta love any conference with Hawai’i in the title. this is about VW specifically.

Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems

Any leads?

Peer-Reviewed Journals – SaLamanderWiki

Peer-Reviewed Journals – SaLamanderWiki

Aha!  A list of peer-reviewed journals.  That is nice to see since I am trying to publish an article about SL.  I wonder about SSRN?  Something else I ave been meaning  to check out.

First Monday as on my radar screen.  Ted, the others…?