Last week's open forum with Leslie Jamison, author of this month's much-discussed Atlantic Monthly feature article on Second Life, "The Digital Ruins of a Forgotten Future", unsurprisingly provoked many pointed comments from Second Life devotees and experts -- most prominently, from my pal Professor Tom Boellstorff of UC Irvine, author of Coming of Age in Second Life (which Leslie cites several times in the article). Tom posted a strong critique which you should read in full here, and I'm excerpting below -- and after that, Leslie's reply. First, Tom's turn:
I do appreciate all of the time you put into it. I also recognize the incredibly strong headwinds we face when writing about Second Life, because the misconceptions about virtual worlds and what people do in them are so significant. But for that very reason, three comments are in order...
[I]t’s unfortunate that throughout your article you distinguish Second Life from “the real world.” From the moment you do that, on some level you might as well pack up your bags and go home, because you have assumed from the outset what you should be investigating... We must remember that the Euro-American culture that dominates the tech world, there is a Christian metaphysics that assumes the physical is more real, as when Christ becomes flesh.
... It is empirically, obviously wrong that not everyone who spends time in Second Life does so to escape or compensate for something they cannot find offline. That might be true for some people on occasion, but for the vast majority of residents, Second Life is additive not supplanting. It creates multiplicity, new possibilities in one’s life, rather than compensating for a lack... Your article simply gives us no way to understand experiences in Second Life that are not about compensating for a lack of what “good fortune,” and this is the vast majority of what happens in-world.
... It doesn’t seem that you ever built anything in Second Life, owned (or even rented) land, or participated in a community in any ongoing manner. The fact that your interaction with the virtual world was quite superficial seems to shape your rather superficial understanding of the virtual world. A limited understanding seems to also seems to be behind the contradiction that on the one hand you speak approvingly of “the grit and imperfection that make the [physical] world feel like the world,” yet speak disapprovingly of the errors and crashes you encountered in Second Life. That virtual grit and imperfection is also part of the online experience: it doesn’t indicate failure.
Leslie's reply to this (and more generally to other commentators in the open forum thread):
It's true that I was present in Second Life as a writer and journalist, not as someone going for a social experience--that's part of why I was so interested in talking to people who had sought and found intimacy and community in SL, more permanent residents of the snow globe! If I'd been offering a first-person account of a decade of SL residence, it would have been a different piece, written by someone coming from a different place; and I would love to read that piece! I found some of the blogs of my interview subjects fascinating for precisely that reason. I also appreciate the questioning of “escapism” as an overly reductive term for a complicated, fascinating, and often adaptive or generative human impulse--I try to get at that very idea in the piece itself, but I agree that there is so much more to say about it.
Addressing Tom and his points in particular, Leslie continues:
