PostnationalSodalitiesSecondLife

THE POSTNATIONAL SODALITIESOF SECOND LIFE:AN ICONOGRAPHIC APPROACHBYJONATHAN W. KINKLEYB.F.A., Art History, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2003THESISSubmitted as partial fulfillment of the requirementsfor the degree of Masters of Art Historyin the Graduate College of theUniversity of Illinois at Chicago, 2009Chicago, IllinoisThis work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 UnitedStates License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco,California, 94105, USA.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my thesis committee—Drs. Peter Hales, Patricia Kelly, and Jason Leigh— for your insights, time, and encouragement. I am in awe of your interdisciplinary talents andinspired by your leadership in the humanities and the sciences. Lastly, the critical eye of my brilliant wife, Melissa, has greatly strengthened my writing.JWK

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PREFACEMy primary interest in Second Life and other virtual worlds is the myriad questions thattheir presence demands—particularly regarding the visual—and the breadth of possible answersto these questions. If you can look like anyone or anything, what do you look like? If there are noconstraints of physics, like gravity or weather, and no limit on resources, what does the virtual built environment look like? Who are the pioneers and governors of virtual space? Who are itsarchitects?What do these spaces tell us about our future?With these questions come the inevitable judgments of virtual space by technologyevangelists, Luddites, and those in-between. To qualify my own opinion of virtual worlds and mygeneral regard for them, I borrow the term

critical utopian

from MIT’s Dr. Henry Jenkins.Jenkins writes of his position to new cultural trends, many of which incorporate technology:“I think of myself as a critical utopian. As a utopian, I want to identify possibilities within our culture that might lead toward a better, more justsociety … This approach differs dramatically from what I call critical pessimism. Critical pessimists … focus primarily on the obstacles toachieving a more democratic society … The politics of critical utopianism isfounded on a notion of empowerment; the politics of critical pessimism on a politics of victimization. One focuses on what we are doing with media, andthe other on what media is doing to us. As with previous revolutions, themedia reform movement is gaining momentum at a time when people arestarting to feel more empowered, not when they are at their weakest.”

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I share Jenkins’ foundational approach. There is no denying that all discourse is politicallycharged to a degree; its authors are not writing in a vacuum but rather in a dense societalnetwork. Although I may desire to remain as objective as am able, and try my best to draw clear,rational speculations after close analysis of my subject, my writing is still vulnerable to my ownoptimistic biases.

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Jenkins, Henry.

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide

. (New York: NewYork University Press, 2006) 247-248.

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