Today I have been doing a bit of searching in academic journals on ‘virtual’ and ‘worlds’ amongst other things (I love SAGE). I also searched for ‘online’ and ‘community’. When you organise the said books and journals in date order there is often a kind of ‘thought’ progression like this around a new media:
Discovery > technological determinism > adoption > utopianism > ethnography > observation > analysis and deconstruction > communication (lots of article-writing here!) > discourse > theory > evaluation of theory > scepticism > effects (bad effects of….) > absence of research for a while > re-discovery of the theory > celebration and elements of nostalgia > further theory > (a new form of communication comes along at this point).
There is enough history on online community (see The Well: The Epic History of the First Online Community, by Katie Hafner) to see this same kind of path. Most of the books on virtual worlds are still largely technical, but more ethnographic work is starting to appear, in the journals; virtual worlds may be the new black?
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