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Essay On Virtual World

3755 Words16 Pages

VL/RL; Gender, sexuality, identity and the hyperreality of the postmodern body in virtual worlds.

“Currently, digital media remix culture is one where "real life" (RL) and "virtual life" (VL) structures have migrated more fully from the desktop to otherly-mediated life worlds, and they occupy all states in-between. The space one occupies, for example, in the twitterverse, the term in common usage to describe the network engaged by the micro-blogging application Twitter, exemplifies such ambiguity and malleability. The term twitterverse itself underscores the conceptual pseudo-spatial dimensions it occupies. It evokes the materiality of planetary outer-space, as well as the universal expansiveness of the celestial bodies that orbit within the social media networks they engage, in infinite and intricate patterns, only partially discernible to the …show more content…

This requires us to explore the relationships between a user’s physical body in their ‘real lives’ versus the created body of a user within a ‘virtual life’. Virtual worlds provide possibility for users to create their ‘perfect selves’. Particularly, in a virtual world where identity has a very obvious (metaphorically) physical representation, social conventions surrounding the body in real life are easily transferred into the virtual world where they take on similar connotations and cultural capital. As Pierre Bourdieu writes,“The body is in the social world but the social world is in the body. (Bourdieu, p.190) In the virtual world, perhaps even more so that the real word, the body is the key marker of distinction,‘the site of intensified self management, self regulation and self mastery’ (Elliott, p.99) This can, perhaps, be seen to be linked to the distinct lack of limitations on physicality within virtual worlds. Whilst earlier

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