Product Description

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. Coming of Age in Second Life is 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #34708 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

Review
The gap between the virtual and the physical, and its effect on the ideas of personhood and relationships, is the most interesting aspect of Boellstorff's analysis. . . . Boellstorff's portrayal of a virtual culture at the advent of its acceptance into mainstream life gives it lasting importance, and his methods will be a touchstone for research in the emerging field of virtual anthropology.
(David Robson Nature )

Boellstorff applies the methods and theories of his field to a virtual world accessible only through a computer screen....[He] spent two years participating in Second Life and reports back as the trained observer that he is. We read about a fascinating, and to many of us mystifying, world. How do people make actual money in this virtual society? (They do.) How do they make friends with other avatars? The reader unfamiliar with such sites learns a lot--not least, all sorts of cool jargon...Worth the hurdles its scholarly bent imposes.
(Michelle Press Scientific American )

Boellstorff's book is full of fascinating vignettes recounting the blossomings of friendships and romances in the virtual world, and musing fruitfully on questions of creative identity and novel problems of etiquette.
(Steven Poole The Guardian )

If you thought a virtual world like Second Life was a smorgasbord of experimental gender swaps, nerd types engaging in kinky sex or entrepreneurs cashing in on real world money making possibilities, think again. . . .Could Boellstorff be right that we're all virtual humans anyway, viewing the world as we do through the prism of culture?
(New Scientist )

Boellstorff's anthropologist's insight into advanced societies helps us to see them anew.
(Art Review )

Where many of his colleagues insist on making a mystery of things that are straightforward (so to neglect mysteries real and pressing), Boellstorff is a likeable, generous, accessible voice. . . . This book, once it gets down to it, does truly offer a detailed and deeply interesting investigation of Second Life.
(Grant McCracken Times Higher Education )

Boellstorff makes important contributions to ethnographic theory and method while providing a fascinating excursion into a virtual world, Second Life, inhabited by graphic manifestations of real-life people who interact with one another in localized parts of a vast virtual landscape that they themselves have largely created. . . . In classic anthropological fashion, Boellstorff entered Second Life, conducted ethnographic research within it as an avatar, and has written a vivid, highly engaging account of that world for real-life readers.
(A. Arno Choice )

While it is geared toward anthropologists, the book will be of interest to a wide general audience, with the caveat that it may be helpful to keep a dictionary handy to decode some jargon. . . . [Tom Boellstorff] provides us with a solid foundation for important discussions about he value of technology in our everyday lives.
(Peter Crabb Centre Daily Times )

This is a remarkable book. Tom Boellstorff has successfully achieved the extremely difficult task of writing a book that will appeal equally to the general reader and scholar alike. Coming Of Age In Second Life is well written, very well researched and whilst it does not get bogged down in academic detail and theory, it does provide reference to such theories that undergird the author's research.
(Rob Harle Metapsychology )

One can almost guarantee this book will become one of those contemporary classics in anthropology that travel beyond the discipline as well.
(Marilyn Strathern European Legacy )

The book is absolutely invaluable for anyone who wants to understand what's happening with virtual worlds. Like the very best of ethnography, it transports; it is classically thick with descriptions of everything from the linguistic and the proxemic to the metaphysical and the erotic.
(Christopher M. Kelty Current Anthropology )

Review
Tom Boellstorff describes Second Life warmly and intelligently, highlighting its issues in a thought-provoking manner that is always backed up with evidence. There's an almost tangible depth to his analysis that makes it really stand out. This is just the kind of portrait of a virtual world that I've been waiting to see for years: a full-blooded, book-length tour de force.
(Richard A. Bartle, author of "Designing Virtual Worlds" )

From the Inside Flap

"Tom Boellstorff describes Second Life warmly and intelligently, highlighting its issues in a thought-provoking manner that is always backed up with evidence. There's an almost tangible depth to his analysis that makes it really stand out. This is just the kind of portrait of a virtual world that I've been waiting to see for years: a full-blooded, book-length tour de force."--Richard A. Bartle, author of Designing Virtual Worlds

"This is the first book to take a sustained look at an environment like Second Life from a purely anthropological perspective. It is sure to become the basis for a new conversation about how we study these spaces. It is impossible to read this book and not come away asking questions about how our lives are being transformed in very real ways by what is happening in the virtual."--Douglas Thomas, author of Hacker Culture

"Taking the bold step of conducting ethnographic fieldwork entirely 'inside' Second Life, Tom Boellstorff invites readers to meditate on the old and new meanings of the virtual and the human. He presses the inventive and compelling claim that anthropologists would do well to imagine culture itself as already harboring the notion of the virtual. Boellstorff argues that being 'virtually human' is what we have been all along."--Stefan Helmreich, author of Silicon Second Nature

Customer Reviews

Yes, academic, but very good
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.

Important for anthropologists; patience required from everyone else
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.

A Future Classic
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