Chapter 6 Reflection
Chapter 6 is all about intimacy. The chapter covered friendship, sexuality and family in Second Life. One thing that I found interesting was when Boellstorff was discussing conversation in SL. There are two communication features, the chat and IM. The chat makes all speech public to people within a given distance from the speaker, while IM allows people to engage in private speech. He made an interesting point about how in SL if you have four people discussing something, each person could be individually chatting with other members of the circle without the others knowing about it. Boellstorff said this allows for a type of conversation that people can’t have in RL. People can’t whisper to two different people about different things at the same time, but in SL I agree this type of conversation is unique to SL, but in RL it is more likely for people to be able to do this by texting someone in a circle of friends and making private comments to only certain members.
Another interesting point was about how in SL the main reason many point log into it is to make friends. People in SL may never reveal their true identity, their job, hobbies or family life, but they still say they truly value their SL friendships. Other people may discuss all kinds of RL personal details because they know they will never meet this person so it is OK. Boellstorff mentioned that most people in SL have no desire to meet their SL friends in RL, which seemed odd to me. But I guess they don’t feel the need to potentially ruin what is a good thing.
Sexuality is discussed as well. Sex in SL is the main reason some users sign on and for others it is something they will never or rarely partake in. One thing I thought was interesting was that people in SL feel more connected sexually by textual messages describing sex than by visual representations of avatars. It makes sense that communication like that would be more personal, but I think of SL as a place so reliant on visuals. When you think about it SL is still driving by textual communication more than physical representations. They were some disturbing issues covered in this section, especially with ‘age-play’, which should be illegal, but must be very difficult to enforce in an anonymous virtual world.