Letras
Reader Commentary
RE: “COLLAPSING GEOGRAPHY” BY CORY ONDREJKA,
“A SILICON SILICON VALLEY?” BY PHILIP EVANS,
AND “CONTRIVING CONSTRAINTS” BY THOMAS MALABY
Geographies of Virtual Selfhood
In “Collapsing Geography,” Cory Ondrejka draws upon his vast knowledge of the
virtual world “Second Life” to provide an insightful analysis regarding place, inno-
vación, and virtual worlds. I here reflect on several points raised by Ondrejka, como
well by Philip Evans and Thomas Malaby in their responses to Ondrejka’s contri-
bution. My own ethnographic research in Second Life (Boellstorff 2008) leads me
to conclude that Ondrejka, evans, and Malaby have identified crucial domains for
further research with regard to the emerging impact of virtual worlds upon human
sociality.
Ondrejka’s analysis centers on the relationship between physical and virtual
geographies. As Evans observes when noting how they represent a “vindication” of
geography (pag. 55), virtual worlds do not so much “collapse” geography as displace
geography from an actual to a virtual plane. Actual-world geography persists (como
Malaby emphasizes), but its consequences are transformed by the parallel existence
of virtual places. This transformative efficacy of virtual worlds is distinct from the
(nonetheless significant) effect of other communications technologies that do not
instantiate virtual geographies (though they may represent them visually or textu-
ally), such as newspapers, television, or webpages. This transformative efficacy is
also distinct from games. As I note below, such distinctions demand new theoret-
ical frameworks.
Ondrejka sees virtual worlds as posing a threat to aspects of nation-states,
which remain the dominant mode of organizing actual-world human geographies.
Malaby reminds us that nation-states originated from a context that conflated lan-
guage, etnicidad, and place. In his classic work Imagined Communities, Benedict
anderson (1983) linked this historical emergence of the nation-state to what he
termed “print capitalism,” specifically the spread of newspapers. In asking after “a
new model for citizenship” (pag. 45), Ondrejka queries how virtual forms of what
Renato Rosaldo has termed “cultural citizenship” might rework notions of nation-
al belonging. As indicated by Ondrejka’s January 2008 departure from Linden Lab
(the company that owns Second Life), the actual-world politics of virtual-world
ownership, diseño, and governance will also have consequences for virtual worlds.
In pursuing these fascinating sets of questions, I would underscore the need for
frameworks that derive their theoretical architecture from prior open-ended
research into virtual worlds themselves. There is often an early phase during which
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the implications of new technologies are unclear, so that ways of thinking about
them are obtained from elsewhere (see Marvin 1988). Por ejemplo, in the 1990s
many understandings of Internet webpages were derived from print media (como el
metaphor of “pages” indicates), obscuring their specific implications for com-
merce and society. Since full-fledged virtual worlds are less than ten years old, cómo
their geographies will contribute to new modes of human life remains poorly
comprendido. Evans rightly notes (pag. 57) that there does not yet exist broad evidence
for successful cases of virtual world innovation that have translated back into actu-
al-world innovation—in the same way that in the 1990s there did not yet exist
broad evidence that the Internet could support retail sales or social networking.
The fact that ways of thinking about virtual worlds are, Actualmente, overwhelm-
ingly imported from other domains now represents the most significant barrier to
understanding them. While it is crucial to be aware of the historicity of virtual
worlds, they cannot be reduced to what came before them or what exists alongside
a ellos. Por ejemplo, Ondrejka claims that “residents in Second Life may choose to
leverage the pseudonymity inherent to virtual worlds” (pag. 36), but in fact it is not
inherent to virtual worlds that they be anonymous (virtual worlds already exist
that require registration with a single actual-world name).
More broadly, it seems we have reached a point of conceptual exhaustion with
the idea that game studies paradigms can underpin understandings of virtual
worlds. Malaby is correct in noting that virtual worlds share a history with mas-
sively multiple online games (pag. 63). Además, virtual worlds can contain
games within them, and massively multiple online games can contain many virtu-
al-world-like elements; some can be classed as virtual worlds themselves. To claim,
sin embargo, that the “performative contingency of avatars… helps us to account for
why [Second Life] feels like ‘play’ or a ‘game’ to many of its users” (pag. 63) is certain-
ly not a view I ever encountered during my own fieldwork. Among other reasons,
residents are more likely to think of Second Life as a game if they regard it as a
place for escapism or role-playing, not because their avatar can fall from the sky if
manipulated incorrectly.
Malaby’s insistence on “the gameness of Second Life” casts the definitional net
of “game” so widely as to include all human sociality, and thus to render the term
“game” tautological—what, from this perspective, is not a game? Después de todo, perfor-
mative contingency applies to physical bodies as much as avatars, and one must
learn how to dress and behave in the actual world, not just in virtual worlds. Es
an interpretation only intelligible from a game studies perspective in which “con-
tingency” becomes a topic of interest when set against a rather straw-man notion
of non-contingency (typically associated with games seen to have clearly defined
normas, like chess). That something involves play does not mean it is any closer to
being a game, since all human sociality is in some sense contingent. What Malaby
does helpfully identify is the need to develop frameworks for understanding the
specific and often novel ways in which contingency shapes virtual worlds. Estos
new geographies of virtual selfhood hold great promise and great peril in regard to
forging new possibilities for human social life. It certainly behooves us to follow
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the lead of Ondrejka, Malaby, and Evans in working to better comprehend their
implications for all of us, online and offline.
—Tom Boellstorff
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology
Universidad de California, Irvine
Editor-in-Chief, American Anthropologist
Irvine, California
Referencias
anderson, B., 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origins and Spread
of Nationalism. Londres: Verso.
Boellstorff, T., 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the
Virtually Human. Princeton: Prensa de la Universidad de Princeton.
Marvin, C., 1988. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric
Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. Nueva York: Oxford University
Prensa.
RE: “HARNESSING COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE TO ADDRESS GLOBAL
CLIMATE CHANGE” BY THOMAS MALONE AND MARK KLEIN
As an early designer and adopter of collaborative technologies with
PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Lotus/IBM, I found “Stories of a Possible Future”
very inspiring, and a practical example of how Web 2.0 collaborative technologies
serve a dedicated community of users. I can’t help but make the parallel with the
promise of knowledge sharing in large enterprises, which has led to runaway ini-
tiatives that move faster than an organization’s ability to absorb, thus creating an
organic model for collaboration. These technologies and collaborative models are
now available on the web.
The reality is that these models are not new; they merely have a greater reach
and are initiated without governance. In reading the paper, I found the scenarios
compelling but still catering to a federated extended community. The Web 2.0’s
social dimension and its interest in global warming do not appear to be captured
and leveraged in this proposition. Además, the elevation of scientific data to
the common people for actionable use in terms of political pressure and awareness
would require that Climate Collaboratorium’s actors be willing to extrapolate their
findings in a way that the public understands. I also would like to understand a lit-
tle more about rating information in such a complex corpus of information and
simulation tools. Simple facts and highly-rated information are not enough to
have an impact when faced with socio-political challenges and interests. Scientists
and reputable professors with empirical evidence and data are still challenged by
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an opposition that serves to undermine the reality they are trying to describe.
Throughout history, evidence that conflicts with economic forces and the
establishment’s power is met with resistance. A collaborative Web can serve both
sides, with user rankings as a path to elevate conflicting points of view. I would be
very interested to see how a social-conflict dimension could be made visible.
Perhaps a consolidation of the Web 2.0 though contextual lenses, instead of popu-
lar rankings with Climate Collaboratium, would elevate the Web 2.0’s contribution
to research and ideas, and make social implementation more feasible.
—Thierry Hubert
Arlington, MAMÁ
RE: “BEYOND LENDING” BY FAZLE HASAN ABED AND IMRAN MATIN
Microfinance has very likely been the most significant innovation in the financial
markets of developing and transition countries over the past three decades. Es
relevant, por lo tanto, that INNOVATIONS dedicated its Winter & Spring issue 2007
to this topic. In the article “Beyond Lending”, Fazle Hasan Abed and Imran Matin
describe a set of innovations within the Bangladeshi institution Building Resources
Across Communities (BRAC) that constitute services to the poor in addition to
microfinance. Por ejemplo, they illustrate how BRAC succeeded in making poul-
try a viable enterprise for the poor by training villagers to vaccinate poultry and to
prepare good quality poultry feed. The authors argue that the social infrastructure
created by microfinance can and should be leveraged for the creation of services
that address the remaining constraints on the poor.
Beside this, product innovations within microfinance are still an urgent mat-
ter. As Abed and Matin note, the expansion of financial services beyond lending,
es decir. including savings, insurances, and money transfers, has filled the agenda since
the mid-1990s but this process has not been satisfactorily completed. En particular,
the development of insurance products for the poor, so-called micro-insurances,
is still in its infancy though much needed. The poor are generally more exposed to
risks than the better-off but less able to deal with them and their consequences. En
developing countries, the coverage of public social security systems generally
amounts to no more than 10 percent of the population, commercial insurance
markets do not exist or are imperfect, and informal insurance mechanisms are
insufficient to keep consumption levels as constant as possible. Micro-insurance
therefore has the potential to be an effective way of risk management for the poor.
Actualmente, micro-insurance is not nearly as common as micro-lending but this
might change in the future. In many countries around the globe, microfinance
institutions, cooperatives, (rural) banks, service providers, commercial insurance
companies as well as informal groups have started to provide the poor with micro-
insurances, which mostly constitute different forms of life and health insurances.
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En algunos casos, micro-insurances are in fact a follow-up product to micro-lending,
as microfinance institutions have started to tie their loans to insurance against the
death of the borrower. Sin embargo, the provision with micro-insurances does not yet
cover the majority of poor people, partly due to constraints on the supply side and
partly due to constraints on the demand side. Regarding the latter, financial illiter-
acy, the lack of an insurance culture as well as mistrust in the insurance provider
constitute important obstacles. Building on the experience with micro-lending
and micro-savings, where innovative forms of product design, financial and sales
management have overcome severe barriers in the local financial markets, hay
hope that in a few years time micro-insurance will be just as prevalent as other
forms of microfinance.
—Susan Steiner
Lewis-Gluckman Fellow
Brooks World Poverty Institute
University of Manchester
y
Research Fellow, German Institute of Global and Area Studies
Hamburg
Hamburg, Alemania
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