Customer Reviews

Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human

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I felt obliged to respond after reading prior reviewers who gave this average ratings. Fair enough to be disappointed in this if, for some reason, you expected it to be an light-weight page-turner intended for Second Life residents.

This *is* an academic book by a professor of anthropology who uses plenty of footnotes. The target audience does *not* consist of those already well familiar with the intricacies of social customs in Second Life. And yes, there are references to anthropological thinkers throughout. Some of us actually like that kind of thing.

For its target audience, this is a great book. There are a limited number of academic books that treat the subject of contemporary virtual worlds carefully, thoughtfully, and well. This one really stands out as a study based on extensive ethnographic research and a firm grasp of the available literature. In my opinion, the audience is not just anthropologists, but anyone with a college degree and a serious interest in Second Life as a novel medium for social interaction. The style is educated, but accessible, and it is full of entertaining anecdotes and observations.

Writing as an anthropologist, I am deeply impressed by Tom Boellstorff's description of SecondLife "from an avatar's point of view," and by its clear and coherent engagement with theories of self, personhood, and "cyberworlding" generally speaking. I taught this book in a senior seminar on Cultural Identities/Differences, and while it was a reach for some students, it sparked a rich conversation about the ethics of identity-play and its flesh-world consequences, virtual self-enhancement and its relation to self-abnegation, the politics of corporate and individual authorship of persons, the valuation of social memory and purposeful forgetting in online/offline community "bleed through," and how creativity is problematized as a practice of consumptive production.

I can think of no field ethnographer who better writes the contemporary moment. In my view, this book is a future classic.

Debbora Battaglia

I have really mixed feelings about this book.

On the positive side, I think it will, in time, become an important book. While the title is a take-off on Margaret Mead's book about Samoa, this is quite different in the sense that while Samoans had been around for a long time before Margaret Mead arrived on the scene, the author of this book was a very early resident of Second Life and therefore was an eye witness as it developed. I think that's going to make his first person account valuable as virtual worlds evolve into something very different from what they are today.

There are also some important insights in the book that are well-known to Second Life participants, but probably have not received the external attention that they deserve. Two examples that come to mind are his points about the kindness SL residents routinely extend to one another and the extent of multi-channel communication.

Regarding the former point, the media gives a lot of attention to the more salacious aspects of virtual worlds, but what participants know is that those things are the exceptions. What doesn't get enough attention is the fact that virtual worlds are full of people helping one another -- whether that's to learn new skills or cope with some real life problem.

With respect to the latter point, as the book explains and SL participants know, it's really common for multiple conversational threads to be happening in SL simultaneously -- sometimes via the same method (e.g., all in local chat) and other times not (e.g., a speaker giving a presentation using voice with attendees having multiple conversations about the presentation as it is happening using local chat, group IMs, or individual IMs). Edward Castronova's Book "Exodus to the Virtual World" argues that habits and expectations that are formed in the virtual world will eventually find their way to the real (or actual) world, and I believe those changes in patterns of communication are an example of where that's very likely.

On the negative side, I have to agree with the person who observed that the book seems very much targeted toward other anthropologists. That's true in terms of the content as well as the writing style. A lot of space is devoted to justification of the phenomena being studied and the method being used. While that's certainly appropriate in a scholarly article, in book form it felt pretty tedious (particularly given that anyone who buys the book probably already accepts that virtual worlds are a valid thing to study and ethnography is a valid means of studying them).

The writing is also hard work. In my opinion, it's unnecessarily verbose, and distracts from the content rather than helping to elucidate it. I suspect a lot of people will lose patience with it, and that's a shame because, as mentioned previously, there are some important insights in the book.

It was a joy to read a book about SecondLife where I kept nodding my head instead of gnashing my teeth. The chapters describing SL activities and social conventions rang true to me and focused on the things I love about SL - it's culture of community, sharing, and friendship. The author obviously knows SL well and loves being here.

It was also a joy to find a serious academic study about SecondLife. There aren't many of them out there yet, and a lot of the existing ones seem to be written by people who have only a nodding acquaintance with SL.

This book should be required reading for anyone who is considering using SecondLife as a platform for social research. The author draws heavily upon his knowledge about ethnographic traditions and his previous fieldwork in Indonesia, in order to place his fieldwork in SL into proper perspective. He does a good job of describing how his study was conducted and the ethical principles he employed while doing it.

If you are looking for sensational stories about genderbending or online sex, you probably won't find them here. If you need help learning how to use SecondLife or how to make money there, buy a different book. But if you would like to take a thoughtful look at the way people behave online during the early days of virtual worlds, this is the book for you.

I have to admit that at first I thought an anthropological study of Second Life seemed a bit pre-mature, if not pretentious. I dunno. It just didn't seem to warrant that much attention since, until recently, my perspective on Second Life was that it was a piece of internet novelty and nothing more.
But my opinion about that and this book has changed.

First of all, I believe this book is important for people like myself who have never made so much as a binary print in the virtual landscape and yet still find themselves curious. People who have a daily diet of Second Life may be put off by the arms length academic tone of the book, but I'm not sure that the book is written for them. I feel as if I'm the audience, since every page is news to me and all of the descriptions did a more than ample job at satisfying my curiosities. My aging friend who is a college professor, and Second Life skeptic, would devour this book. He has no interest in joining Second Life, but he does asks questions about it. Mostly because he hears so much talk about it from his students. I also think people who have been following the ideas of Ray Kurzweil will also find this book helpful, since a lot of the psychology discussed in these pages speaks to the larger topics of Mind Transfer. At first, the digitization of "Mind" (whatever that is) was just fun pseudo-scientific speculation. But when the author begins to talk about "immersion" and the selfhood and all of its quiddities being projected into this environment, I began to wonder if this is the precursor to all of that futurist babble.

There was another book that made me rethink this one: "Being Virtual" by Davey Winder. Winder's book, which is much more anecdotal instead of academic, personalizes the leap into Second Life by offering a back story for each person characterized in his book. These two books paired together actually broke through the bias that I once held against simulated identities and environments. I won't say that this anthropological book brought me any closer to joining Second Life. But it's pulled me as far as could be expected out of the dark. And now it's in my library. An odd addition for a Luddite like myself.

www.sniffcode.com

This is one of the most important books written in the last few years. It might seem like simply an exploration of the anthropology of Second Life, but it is much more. As bandwidth become more available, virtual worlds will become standard in a society in a future not far from now. When that happens people will be faced with psychological and sociological issues really new to mankind, issues such as personal identity and your social status and significance. These questions will have profound effects on the question: What does it mean to be a person? When those questions are asked, Coming of Age in Second Life will become a standard reference book of life and meaning in virtual worlds. This is an academic book, but anyone with intelligence will read it and see in it our psychological future. A profoundly important book, it goes way beyond Second Life and is the first really cohesive book on what 50 years from now will be a change in how humans view themselves.

I came to this book expecting to dislike it. I am an anthropologist myself and I have never had a high opinion of other anthropologists... lol. I won't get into that here. However, I found this particular book to be very, very good. In fact, it was - despite the fact that I really didn't want to like it - one of the best books I have read that was written by an anthropologist. I think there were at least 4 or 5 profound points made in this book that caught me off guard. I hesitate to say it... but yes, I think this book should be considered one of the classics of anthropological literature. It really was that good in my opinion. We are all living in a virtual reality all the time. Coming of Age in Second Life helps the reader to understand what this really means.

well-written and insightful study of sl with an interesting view of virtual worlds as actual alternative realities

I'm beginning to think I know this person's character, and remembering our interactions. Very interesting person, we'd clicked well. I'm ordering this book *now*.

Met the character in The Wastelands, had a nice chat.

To the author: BSI! <--- :)

I was looking for more about human interactions, more like psychology. The early part of the book is mostly background information that I, an old resident, already knew but that newer residents might need to understand the later part. The later part was interesting but as much so as other anthropology that I have read.
Perhaps Second Life is too diverse to describe deeply, but I would have liked some examples that show the diversity more. For example, I know one site that is owned by a real life museum of technology, and I have seen an other SL site that appears to serve partly to get around restrictions on advertising prostitution, in a country where prostitution is legal but advertising it is not legal.