Both of the readings for tomorrow things that caught my attention, but the most interesting of these was the notion of “home(land)”. Before getting further into the reading I began thinking of what qualified something as a home, and whether this entity could exist online. I say entity because my idea of home is more complex than a physical global coordinate or a building. Home is a place you take refuge in with people you have come to know and love, the activities you partake while there, overall a place you have history with and usually affinity for. After this train of thought I had run into nothing that could refute the existence of a home online. I’ll admit there were times back in middle school where I would get out of class, rush back home (to neopets) and spend enjoyable hours there with friends. If we open up the term to home-land, it gets more complicated. We usually associate the notion of homeland with a certain peoples/ethnicity/culture.
In the Mallapragada reading Willam Sanfran is cited for his 6 qualification of a diaspora. Each one I can see an online community passing. Their participants are located in many different areas around the world. Depending on how long they’ve been there, they have a history with the website, seeing how it has grown and changed. If their host society (current location in RL) really fulfilled them, they would not find a need to keep returning to this online site. Through continued time spent on a site, you grow fonder of it, some fond enough to donate to keep the site running. Like multiple readings of ours have said, there are users who use VL to work on aspects of their RL, and there’s probably crossover in the other direction. So is it possible for a truly diverse group of people unified by something online to be a culture/race? Not sure if I just have a more relaxed notion of what race/culture due to my background…Half Chinese, half American, lived all my life in Hong Kong till I came to college, first language English, raised Jewish in an Asian household, grown tired of hearding the question “What are you?” Probably getting off track now, and since I couldn’t resist taking it on myself to answer from the Schaap reading “What would be your ultimate online gaming experience – your dream game?” here I go:
I would want an online database that had recorded a bunch of peoples dreams including the environments they took place in. Users would be able to revisit their own dreamworlds as well as others, being able to experience them with all 5 senses in a more awake state of consciousness. I’m sort of thinking like that movie with Jennifer Lopez called “The Cell”…minus the possibility of someone hacking into your mind and the consequence of misfortune/death in there being actualized in the “real world”.