I have said in various post and pages that when I began Secondlife I was one of the people asking, “what’s the point?”. Although I have played my fair share of video games, I’ve never interacted online in a gaming situation, nor have I ever participated in anything like Secondlife. Therefore, it was difficult for me, as it was for many of those in the class, to comprehend why anyone would choose to spend time in a virtual reality instead of just going to a bar and fostering relationships in the physical world.
However, then I began to think about my area of interest in my IPC minor. As I have also mentioned in other posts, I enjoy focusing on social constructions and the way in which social norms are constructed and challenged. Also, I enjoy analyzing how people construct their identities, keeping these social confines in mind. From that context, I began to think that Secondlife would be an ideal place in which to conduct ethnographic studies. It would be far easier for me, as a researcher, to study a group of people in Secondlife than in the physical world.
Also, in Secondlife a researcher would be able to create a separate identity for himself or herself. I commented in class that I can never, in the physical world, stop being a white woman (without extensive surgery). However, in Secondlife, I am free to take on a new identity and through that identity explore my new found place on the social hierarchy and the way in which the social norms act on me differently. I suppose that the primary justification I would make for a Secondlife account is the possibility for research that may be utilized within this constructed world.