Ethnography Proposal

This is very under-formulated so I’ll throw it out there and see if it plays at all. As I was discussing in my last SL post, I have lost interest in looking at SL as a model for the interest of sexual fantasy and capital gain cause it’s just too big and kinda difficult to get to the bottom of in a virtual environment. I’d prefer to incorporate the RL anyway. So as I was exploring SL sex clubs etc… I started wondering how Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and  History of Sexuality pt. 1 apply to a virtual world. In terms of socialization through the panopticon and endorsing sexual activity via supposed repression of it. (If you haven’t read these, in brief the panopticon is society self regulating through social humiliation and structural guilt and the sex activity thing is about society promoting restraint measures that actually encourage the “deviant” behavior that they are suppose to be fighting- ex. in the 90s, the DARE program, said to prevent drug use, taught a generation of 3rd graders what drugs look like, how much they cost, where to get them, and what they do… peaking many an interest where they would have otherwise known no better) I would like to see how this translates in the virtual world. Potentially, and anonymously, interview long time users of SL and get some neophytes to explore SL with the purpose of observing how RL moral/taste codes translate into SL. I’ve always thought that in a virtual world you should be a thief cause why not? I’d like to see how that plays out- transferable or is conception of self not applicable in the same metric while in SL. Thoughts?

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