Imagined worlds

Here's my last post reviewing the new publication 'Connected Minds, Emerging Cultures'.

When we started out writing our chapter on cybercultures, Helen Keegan and I didn't know that it would eventually end up being the final chapter in the book. We first hit on the idea for the chapter while we were talking together at Online Educa - a conference held at the end of every year in Berlin. Because Helen lives in Manchester and I live in Plymouth, the best solution for our collaborative writing turned out to be Google Docs. It worked superbly. We wrote in different colours so we could track who was doing what, and eventually, the chapter was completed. We are very pleased with the result. Entitled 'Imagined Worlds, Emerging Cultures', chapter 17 focuses on the experiences found in technology mediated communication within virtual environments and we attempt to identify and explain some of the emerging practices, behaviours and self-representations. We pay particular attention to the 'imagined' elements of social networking services and multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs), and specifically on relationships:

It is often the fantasy component and the freedom to let one's imagination run riot that first attracts adherents. Imagined worlds facilitate a number of experiences that could never be conceived as possible in the real world, but they also mediate familiar experiences. One familiar feature of the human experience - friendship - is increasingly mediated through new technologies and social spaces. For some, even this fundamental human experience may need to be reconceptualized (p 262).

We go on to discuss a number of experiences such as 'virtual promiscuity', weak and strong social ties, the clash of old and new media and the implications on formal learning, and discuss the breaches in cultural boundaries that have been caused through liberalized social media such as YouTube ('Star Wars Kid' for example) and Facebook. We also compare the popular digital clan cultures of Flickrites and Facebookers. We conclude with a discussion on how shifting perceptions of privacy, identity and ownership as well as friendship are being redefined due to the imagined worlds we inhabit for increasing proportions of our time.