Do avatars dream of electronic picket lines? The blurring of work and play in virtual environments
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to define and articulate the concept of digital protestainment, to address how technologies have enabled boundaries to become more permeable, and in which this permeability leads to the engendering of new cultures.
Design/methodology/approach
Two case studies, within Second Life and EVE Online, are examined to see how digital protestainment, through the lens of cultural borderlands, creates a hybridized culture. Recorded interviews and textual analysis of web sites are used to illustrate the concepts of play, work, and blended activities.
Findings
Within virtual environments the process of hybridization is not only increased in size, scope, form, and function. The borderlands process draws in cultural elements through a complex interchange between the online and the offline, in which hybridized cultural bits are carried out into other spaces.
Research limitations/implications
The success of the cases does not represent all digital protest examples and so this study is limited in its ability to generalize to the population of virtual protests. This study limits the realm of digital protestainment to virtual worlds but the concept could be applied to any form of virtual community.
Practical implications
Companies that host these worlds will need to become aware not only of what their audience is but also how that audience will mobilize and the likely outcomes of their mobilization. Virtual worlds offer organizational leaders a new resource for training, support, and recruitment.
Originality/value
The theoretical concept of cultural borderlands is expanded to the digital environment and introduced as a potentially new and useful tool to internet researchers.
Keywords
Citation
Blodgett, B. and Tapia, A. (2011), "Do avatars dream of electronic picket lines? The blurring of work and play in virtual environments", Information Technology & People, Vol. 24 No. 1, pp. 26-45. https://doi.org/10.1108/09593841111109404
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2011, Emerald Group Publishing Limited