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Millions of people around the world today spend portions of their lives in online virtual worlds. Second Life is one of the largest of these virtual worlds. The residents of Second Life create communities, buy property and build homes, go to concerts, meet in bars, attend weddings and religious services, buy and sell virtual goods and services, find friendship, fall in love--the possibilities are endless, and all encountered through a computer screen. At the time of its initial publication in 2008, Coming of Age in Second Life was the first book of anthropology to examine this thriving alternate universe. Tom Boellstorff conducted more than two years of fieldwork in Second Life, living among and observing its residents in exactly the same way anthropologists traditionally have done to learn about cultures and social groups in the so-called real world. He conducted his research as the avatar "Tom Bukowski," and applied the rigorous methods of anthropology to study many facets of this new frontier of human life, including issues of gender, race, sex, money, conflict and antisocial behavior, the construction of place and time, and the interplay of self and group. Coming of Age in Second Life shows how virtual worlds can change ideas about identity and society. Bringing anthropology into territory never before studied, this book demonstrates that in some ways humans have always been virtual, and that virtual worlds in all their rich complexity build upon a human capacity for culture that is as old as humanity itself. Now with a new preface in which the author places his book in light of the most recent transformations in online culture, Coming of Age in Second Life remains the classic ethnography of virtual worlds.
The glamorous world of a silent film star’s wife abruptly crumbles when she’s forcibly quarantined at the Carville Lepers Home in this page-turning story of courage, resilience, and reinvention set in 1920s Louisiana and Los Angeles. Based on little-known history, this timely book will strike a chord with readers of Fiona Davis, Tracey Lange, and Marie Benedict. Based on the true story of America’s only leper colony, The Second Life of Mirielle West brings vividly to life the Louisiana institution known as Carville, where thousands of people were stripped of their civil rights, branded as lepers, and forcibly quarantined throughout the entire 20th century. For Mirielle West, a 1920’s socialite married to a silent film star, the isolation and powerlessness of the Louisiana Leper Home is an unimaginable fall from her intoxicatingly chic life of bootlegged champagne and the star-studded parties of Hollywood’s Golden Age. When a doctor notices a pale patch of skin on her hand, she’s immediately branded a leper and carted hundreds of miles from home to Carville, taking a new name to spare her family and famous husband the shame that accompanies the disease. At first she hopes her exile will be brief, but those sent to Carville are more prisoners than patients and their disease has no cure. Instead she must find community and purpose within its walls, struggling to redefine her self-worth while fighting an unchosen fate. As a registered nurse, Amanda Skenandore’s medical background adds layers of detail and authenticity to the experiences of patients and medical professionals at Carville – the isolation, stigma, experimental treatments, and disparate community. A tale of repulsion, resilience, and the Roaring ‘20s, The Second Life of Mirielle West is also the story of a health crisis in America’s past, made all the more poignant by the author’s experiences during another, all-too-recent crisis. PRAISE FOR AMANDA SKENANDORE’S BETWEEN EARTH AND SKY “Intensely emotional…Skenandore’s deeply introspective and moving novel will appeal to readers of American history.” —Publishers Weekly
Bullied by two mean girls in her sixth-grade class, a lonely, plump girl gains self-confidence and makes new friends after a mysterious fox gently bites her.
Malaby shows how the workers of a very young but quickly growing company were themselves caught up in ideas about technology, games, and organizations, and struggled to manage not only their virtual world but also themselves in a nonhierarchical fashion.
Sarah Phillips examines how disabled persons in the Ukraine struggled to secure their rights during the tumult of the past two decades. She documents their creative strategies & argues that public storytelling is a powerful means to expand notions of relatedness, kinship & social responsibility.
An anthropology of Harbin Hot Springs, virtual Harbin, the 1960s forward, counterculture, virtual worlds and information technology The book's target audiences are undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, information technology social scientists, Internet studies' researchers, academics interested in the "virtual," and people with a fondness for the 1960s. My book comes into conversation with Tom Boellstorff's "Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human" (Princeton 2008), and could be read in academic courses in direct conversation with "Coming of Age in SL." For my next Harbin book, I plan to build a virtual Harbin, ideally in a movie-realistic interactive 3D virtual earth, Google-made, and do actual virtual comparative fieldwork, what I'm calling ethno-wiki-virtual-world-graphy - http: //scott-macleod.blogspot.com/search/label/ethno-wiki-virtual-world-graphy - as an innovative methodology in Anthropology. I'd like for readers to be able to visit virtual Harbin and have a Harbin experience, in their bathtubs, for example, for the meditative releasing action of the warm waters, - and write ethnographically about this. Naked Harbin is an actual-virtual ethnographic comparison based on extensive field work at actual Harbin Hot Springs, but comes into direct conversation with Boellstorff's "Coming of Age in Second Life," which is based on extensive field work in the 3D interactive virtual world of Second Life. My "Naked Harbin" also examines the significance of making a virtual field site for actual-virtual comparison. After you check in at the gate at Harbin, one resident who has worked there for years often says, "Go play." This ethnography of Harbin Hot Springs in northern California explicitly and theoretically brings together approaches to the comparative study of both the actual and virtual, by developing new methodologies in studying Harbin - as a kind of hippy or Alternative haven from modernity. Through this anthropological book and conceiving of virtual Harbin, you can begin not only to "be there" - to visit Harbin virtually in the text, as it were - but also to revisit the 1960s and its related freedom-seeking movements. Moreover, Harbin Hot Springs' clothing-optionality, spirituality and alternative culture are attractive in mysterious ways. In the way that Margaret Mead's work was theoretical and gained widespread attention at the same time, this book will appeal due to the broad interest in emerging interactive virtual worlds, as well as 1960's informed alternative Harbin's exotic, yet familiar, attractiveness, now mediated digitally. As information technologies and wondrous developments like virtual worlds continue to develop rapidly, I hope to engage you, the reader, further in the conversation about the creativity in countercultural thinking, in virtual worlds, in comparative ethnography, and in the experiences of interacting in this virtual Harbin, even as visitors to actual Harbin enjoy visiting this hot springs' retreat center. - Scott MacLeod http: //www.scottmacleod.com/ActualVirtualHarbinBook.html Academic Press at World University and School http: //worlduniversityandschool.org/AcademicPress.html
What if you could do it all again? The Unusual Second Life of Thomas Weaver is a Sci Fi/Metaphysical journey about time travel, second chances, what life was really like in the 1970s, and one man's chance at redemption. Thomas Weaver was an ordinary kid, coming of age in the seventies, when a tragedy changed his life. Forty years later, at the end of a life forever changed, Thomas gives up and takes his own life. He is surprised to immediately open his eyes and find himself back in his teenage bedroom, in his teenage body, with all memories intact. The Unusual Second Life of Thomas Weaver asks the question, "What would you do differently, if you could live your whole life over?" With a tragedy to avoid, a serial killer in training, a girl he grows close to, and trying to figure out why he has been given a second chance, there's a lot happening in Thomas Weaver's second life.