Noreen's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

Some reactions to my post-human pedagogy task which was situated in Second Life – the opportunity for experimentation and ‘gathering’ but also, as Jen suggested, the notion of role play and challenging the students’ sense of themselves as boundaried subjects, new rules of interaction etc. On a similar note, recalling that communication and interaction are vital for both establishing and maintaining a sense of community, many of my lifestream posts this week attempt to re-create the MSc social community in a Second Life Christmas Party. I have asked my tutor to provide Christmas decorations in Holyrood Park café area in SL and asked party-goers to ‘dress up’ their avatars in festive fashion. To encourage this I have tweeted SL locations which have free Christmas outfits, in my lifestream. Is this an attempt to recreate the real life cultural experience of Christmas through the cultural symbols of clothing, objects, music or is the party a ‘skeuomorph’ – a sentimental representation of old cultural practices in a new cultural context?

Certainly, like Bell, quoting Anderson on the sense of nation, I felt that

“…..we need ‘things’ to coalesce a shared sense of identity around..”

Much of my ‘virtual identity’ on the course and particularly in Second Life has coalesced around my interest in avatar appearance, particularly clothing and hairstyles. This was reinforced by a comment from a colleague

I have spent the whole course wondering if cyberculture is simply real life culture reproduced in a different medium. However, a short way into readings on storytelling, John Seely Brown (2000) suggests that digital natives use a ‘bricolage’ approach to storytelling rather than traditional narrative structures. With this in mind, I intend to use either Issuu or Prezi as the platform for the assignment. To experience cyberculture is to become a ‘cyberculture native’?