IMITATING THE NATION-STATE

Abstract

This exploratory research considers the implications to actual world (AW) nations and attachments of an online virtual world (OVW) which mimics so many aspects of AW nation-states. Using Lessing's interrogation of mimesis as a framing device, this paper presents the results of a quantitative investigation that examines the relationship between the competing loyalties of AW nations and the OVW of Second Life (SL). To that end, a subsample of 212 members of SL completed an online survey which measured five aspects of the national and SL attachment, including a section in which participants ranked their concern for fellow co-nationals (CNs) versus their concern for fellow Second Lifers (SLers). Analyses of the data produced four main findings. First, 45 per cent of participants ranked their concern for their fellow SLers above that of their fellow CNs. Second, those who preferred SLers were significantly less attached to their AW nations than those who preferred CNs. Third, the SLer-preferred, on average, considered SL to be like a world, while the CN-preferred were more ambivalent in this regard. Fourth, gender differences indicate that males who preferred SLers spent most of their time in the SL engaged in activities while females who preferred SLers spent most of their time in the SL engaged in communicatory socializing. Discussion of these results focuses on notions of cosmopolitanism versus nation-statehood and uses the category of gender to illustrate the implications of mimesis to the durability of the phenomenon of nation-statehood.

Keywords:

• online virtual worlds
• national attachment
• Second Life
• concern for co-nationals
• mimesis
• Lessing

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my doctoral supervisors, Professor Allan Bell, Dr Ian Goodwin and Dr Jennie Billot for their support and guidance on this project. I would like to thank the blind reviewers of this article for their very helpful suggestions. Some of the ideas expressed in this paper were initially developed from a presentation I gave at the Creating Second Lives conference in Bangor, Wales. This study has been generously funded by Professor Bell's Research Centre, The Institute for Culture, Discourse, and Communication and the New Zealand International Doctoral Research Scholarship granted by Education New Zealand. I would also like to thank Dr Susan Farruggia for her non-virtual, non-imitative support.

Notes

Or as Kort et al. (2007) so aptly refer to it as a ‘social presence technology’ (see the abstract).

See Kirkpatrick (2007) for a discussion of the importance of platform technology to contemporary Internet-related businesses.

See the SL Wiki (Unknown 2009) for a discussion of how San Francisco inspired the original regional names in the SL.

It should be noted that there is a substantive difference between the sort of male bonding that occurs in pubs and bars and at sporting events and the sort of male bonding that occurs in the SL. This difference is largely reducible to the fact that while such low-intimacy, activity-related bonding does occur between males in the SL, there is no way to know for sure that the others who are participating in this bonding are also AW males. Nevertheless, as Boellstorff (2008, p. 144) puts it, in his analysis of a particular SL virtual poker game in which the table chatter reinforced notions of heteronormativity, what mattered to the poker players was not whether or not the participants in this conversation were AW males, ‘what mattered was that “male” and “female” acted as heuristically stable referents for online selfhood’.