I just found this interview with Tom Boellstorff, the author of ‘Coming of Age in Second Life’. One part of the interview stood out to me as I am struggling to come to terms with the virtual ethnography project. I am finding the ethnography a very partial piece of research as I am not including any of the participants’ voices and I am not in contact with any of them. I was wondering about how people who research virtual worlds interact with their informants. Boellstorff mentions how he has been tacken to task by many in his field, anthropology, because he did not attempt to contact his informants outside of Second Life. He states that such contact is unnecessary as it is enough to get to know the participants in the context in which they are being researched as such environments are ‘robust enough that there are forms of social relations in them that aren’t just mimicking or predicated on stuff that’s happening in the physical world. And as a result, we as researchers have to follow the ball. We have to go where they are, and in this case that means go online’.
Therefore, from Boellstroff’s perspective, these are discrete worlds that can be encountered as separate from, and without reference to, any other type of world. If, as Anderson (1983) states, communities are imagined, maybe our worlds now can be too, especially as we have virtual ones.