In Avatars and Cultural Creole Daniel Lende writes about cybercultures, and how they represent a problem for anthropologists:

To sum up my argument, on-line cultures seriously question anthropologists because gamers create “culture” based on interaction with people through a video screen. This view points to culture as something other than the physical setting and bounded domains often associated with original views of culture. It also points to culture as something other than ideas, schemas, or symbols—the “what the native needs to know” view. People do not get involved in on-line play or in creating an avatar because of an overarching system of symbols; developers recognize a more immediate suite of factors that drive involvement (see my first post on Video Games and Interaction). Finally, this view highlights culture as something different from political economy, power and ideology. These three are important, and play an important part in the making and maintenance of online cultures. But these are not what drive the “shared” aspect of online or virtual experience. There is no “class” or “gender” that is dictating who people are as they begin to share in the online experience—something that many people in Second Life find liberating.

Of course, a first response to that position is that "culture" is not really being created de novo, but based on existing cultural assumptions. Daniel acknowledges that:

But the larger point here is the parallel with creoles created by second-generation kids. We just do it. Certainly in doing “culture” we draw on the ways we’ve already been enculturated, as the commentary on the WoW video clip show. Nonetheless, the central point is that we spontaneously recreate our own enculturation in new places. And we, or at least the developers, recognize that we need it—the cultural backstory—to have the necessary depth, that level of engagement, with a particular online world.

This is an interesting way of looking at culture, though I'm not sure that it is all that different from interpretive anthropology with its system of symbols [more on that later]. But it did remind me of my own apprehensions with moving to the US. Growing up in India, and feeling a bit of a misfit, one of my concerns with moving here was whether I would be able to live the way I wanted to. This had little to do with the material concerns of life - where I would live, what I would drive and so on - and everything to do with how people would react. Would I be able to dress like I wanted, to ask certain kinds of questions, to adopt certain attitudes in public without being penalised? In other words, I was comparing "how things are done at home" with "how things are done over there". This still is an issue for my mother, because whenever she asks about "America" (the country, not my life here), her questions are almost always about what people do. At the same time, she still makes remarks about American culture as if it were a thing. So, culture according to her is people doing particular things (the process) with a particular attitude (the object). All this time of course, she fails to separate the things done from the artifacts they are done with - the sexuality from the clothes, the food from the morals and so on. All in good symbolist anthropological tradition.

The question Lende poses is, can one still "do culture" when the things one does culture with aren't physically there? To attempt an answer to that question, let's head back to Second Life.

Ages ago, when Second Life was newly out, along with lacklustre competitors like There I was in an online communities course at school, and, naturally interested in SL. Not having had experience with MMORPGs or other online worlds, I had no frame of reference for SL, other than that it was 3d, and it wasn't a game. When I logged in for the first time, I realised that I really had no idea what to do. Based on the tour and the default automated introduction, I knew what I could do - fly, change my appearance, talk with people, make things and give them behaviours - none of which helped me decide how to behave once I was in there. Unlike first person shooter games, where one instantly knows what to - shoot everything that moves, dodge things coming at you, and pick up stuff to use it - here was an environment whose experience was interactionally similar (it was 3d, one navigated the same way) but which had very little with which guide your actions. So I was completely non-plussed, and could only wander about intemperately, talking to people to people at random, and generally accomplishing nothing. Everything seemed arbitrarily arranged. For reasons unrelated to this post, I dropped out sometime later,  but the initial shock of disablement remained. Of course, anthropologists & ethnographers will recognise my reaction as that of the participant observer entering a new milieu, incapacitated by his lack of emic knowledge.

What is important here is to note that my incapacitation occurred in specific ways - I was helpless in a different way than I would have been when, say, participating in the coronation of the Japanese emperor. The design of the Second Life environment determined how I learned how to be in it. Now this design itself has some culturally specific features: take, for instance, the ability to fly. In Second Life, everybody can fly: it is not an earned feature, and you do not have to hack the environment in order to do so. Why select the ability to fly - which is clearly not a 'real' ability - as opposed to any other imaginable superpower, say invisibility? After all, 'lurking' is a perfectly normal mode of participation on online communities, but in Second Life, you cannot lurk without being noticed.

John Hodgman (yes, of "I'm a PC" fame) speculates on flying vs. invisibility in Act One of this This American Life podcast. In it, he asks a random sampling of people which superpower they'd rather have: flying or invisibility. One of the things he finds is that people have a hard time deciding - they oscillate, making arguments for and against. Some people attach value judgements to invisibility: perversion, sneakiness, guile, shame, and to flight: mythic, heroic, easygoing.

Can you be invisible in Second Life? Yes. At the time of writing, a brief search on the internet revealed 3 ways to be invisible: hiding below the land while leaving the camera above ground, wearing avatar-sized objects with transparent textures (called 'invisible prims'), and hacking the Second Life client. One can also come close to invisibility by shrinking one's avatar down to a sufficiently small size.

This design choice has consequences for Second Lifers; anecdotal evidence suggests so: one person recoiled after trying the experience, another does it for fun, and yet another proposes privacy mechanisms that strictly disavow in-world avatar invisibility. All of these people are clearly associating some value with invisibility, just as John's interviewees in the podcast.

Is this an instance of culture creation? Clearly, if culture consists of how you do things, the affordances of Second Life will create a different set of interactions between people as compared to Real Life. But if the consequences of those interactions are just like the consequences of the same interaction in real life, then this is more like re-creation: people react adversely to invisibility in SL because they react adversely to invisibility in real life. So, maybe, at least as far as invisibility goes, Second Life is cognitively isomorphic to Real Life - analogous occurrences engender analogous reactions. Or maybe people are just bringing their cultural assumptions into Second Life, because the virtual world looks and operates a lot like the real one.

There are cultural behaviours that are specific to cyber-worlds: socialisation mechanisms, patois and shorthand languages, norms and learned behaviours. Cybercultures are cultures - they have real meaning to the participants, represent the result of investments in time and other resources, and arise through interaction. At the same time, cybercultures seem to be linked in very straightforward ways to their participants' "original" cultures. Lende himself quotes two examples: a post on inequality & "virtual" terrorism, and another on a World of Warcraft funeral massacre. Both these instances represent fairly straightforward translations between the virtual and the real.

Which doesn't neatly fit into the 'how can one do culture without being surrounded by it?' problem. Perhaps the distinction between the virtual and the real worlds should not be made in terms of their physicality, but in terms of the economics and affordances of the two systems? Maybe this is where cognitive anthropological perspectives become useful - if we can determine the connection between the design of a virtual environment and the cultural responses specific to it, maybe we can understand how culture is done. But then, you could as easily do the same for real-world cultures.

This is where I get confused as to what this is all about.