The following is my response to a reading assignment and how it might be applied towards our group project in Second Life:

Taylor’s book talks about the social transfer of skills and knowledge in-between virtual and real worlds and the eroding boundaries between each. She makes problematic the ideas of “work” and “play” in order to create a new framework for evaluating our social participation in virtual spaces and its impact on our “everyday lives,” and vice versa. For example, through her discussions about gender and race, she makes explicit the ways in which we can use virtual spaces to acknowledge how these notions “circulate and the meanings they hold” in order to approach our social and institutional practices more critically (113).

For our group project, we are approaching our re-building/re-imagining of Govt. Center based on the idea of collaboration. In class last week, our group talked in Second Life about what collaboration in SL means and how it might be applied to our building process. In her chapter on “Productive Players and Remapping Ownership” Taylor writes

Given the intense ways users are living and embodying themselves in these virtual environments, we need to develop more complex ideas about the life of digital cultural artifacts, joint ownership, and the autonomy of user experience. (147)

Similarly, there is an opportunity for our group to use this project as a way “to develop more complex ideas” about collaboration in real life using Second Life as a platform. After reading this passage, I realized that while our goal is to build, it should also focus on how we can experiment with new forms of collaboration that might not be possible in real life. With the blurring between virtual and real, and work and play, as Taylor’s book suggests, we might then later think about how our methods can be applied to real life participatory group processes, particularly in the context of civic engagement.

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