Discourse communities?

I just finished writing a rather mediocre paper last night that analysed death memorial websites as fulfilling a kind of networked digital author function.

Part of my somewhat muddled argument in the paper was the idea that the narratives and practices of the people and the platform and functionalities of the net cooperate to create a specific discourse about what death means to these people and what it does to their selves as subjects.

But today I stumbled across a Terra Nova post by John Bilodeau that speaks of discourse communities. He describes them as:

Both practices and vocabularies are shared within particular social groups.

I find it most interesting that he lumps actual practice in with the notion of discourse. This is one of those areas that I find to be somewhat gray - where does sociological notions of interaction, sociality and self management butt up or overlap with the linguistic and semiotic notions of language and discourse theory? Or perhaps a more pertinent question, why does it?

If discourse is now being widened out to take into account not just a larger ensemble of what people say and believe as a result of a circulating concept, but is also now including all kinds of action and practice in it... what does this do to various concepts of self management, identity practice and power/knowledge within the social sciences? Is this a turf war or just another example of interdisciplinary muddling together of concepts? Another idea of the postmodern doing violence to the originary textual meaning?

Studying Second Life

I'm getting deeply interested in studying Second Life. I'm watching for stories and blogposts, I've signed up for Google News Alerts and yes I'm also now Sashay Talon in-world.

Discovering SL has been a bit of a renaissance mission for me. So much of what is going on in SL is what I was arguing for back in the early 90s, when I was deeply embroiled in the FirstClass vs. Lotus Notes smackdown. It's a revival of the idea of a pervasive rich community that is run by a company who encourages member content and customization.

True, Linden Lab isn't the idealistic community-serviced minded corporation Magic was back in the day. It didn't start as a Macintosh hobbyist's passion in his basement. SL is the result of a well funded business venture that seems determined to find ways to breathe new life into the old eyeballs-&-dollars "audience as commodity" business approach.

But the whole business side of SL is something that isn't getting covered much. Instead, journalists seem to be focusing once again on the hoary idea of Second Life not being life, per se. The zombie disocurse "it's digital so it's not real" is still lurching around in the media coverage around Second Life, as I read in a long feature article in this past weekend's Toronto Star.

Wouldn't it be so much better to be covering the encroachment of the out-world tropes, metaphors and business strategies into this digital Second Life world? Given how much of what is happening in SL may be strongly determing the way we all interact digitally in 5-10 years, shouldn't media coverage be truly focused on that?

I'm going to add a Second Life section to my customized Google News page and keep an eye on this. I'm also going to go Google Magic and FirstClass and see if any of the old crowd is still out there, keeping the flame alive.