Paper ideas 

Surveillance, power

mods for managing and surveilling your guild in WoW

these virtual worlds are in some ways models of the panoptic society. movements are logged. data gets shared with researchers.

at cultures of virtual worlds conference, someone described buying gold farmer gold from another player. they said it was like doing a drug deal, meeting up in some far off part of the world where they didn't expect people to pass.

ALF said that if Autism Speaks was surveilling and eavesdropping, that would at least mean that AS was listening to the ALF, which would be an improvement --> surveillance as a form of audiencing. that anecdote really underscores paul's point that privacy isn't analytically useful to explain what is going on here.

I interviewed someone designing spaces for anorexics in SL and she got into really detailed explanations of how different kinds of spaces offer different kinds of seclusion and isolation. the anorexics, she said, needed more privacy than the autistics.

the disability activist group refers a lot to queer and feminist discourses, so the idea of rooms of one's own, for example, might be in action as a resource guiding the kinds of space they seek.

spatiotemporal rhythms also in play as one of my informants described avoiding a coworker by avoiding the places she thought the coworker would be during the times she'd be there.

this is such a total mess...there is no argument. just a bunch of stuff to work through. silvia, try adding some of your thoughts and stories from wow here.

together alone: imagined connections

second life, venice places where you can be present with others without necessarily interacting. dance parties are a very popular activity in second life. venice people wander in anonymous connectedness. how is the experience of being part of a public, where you don't know the many you're "connected" with, distinct from the experience of being in a community, where you imagine you do kind of know the people? this is thorny because community is such a messy thing. but if we pull out this imagined community and think about that, does that expalin some of what we see going on with people's sociality? how is designing for imagined community different than designing for community more "generically?"

to dos here would be that at least one person read imagined communities by ben anderson

venice, sl, wow

temporality in SL, WoW

how do temporalities get synchronized? dominated? in what kinds of interactions can we see temporality coming into play as a clarifying concept? once we establish the kinds of places where we can see temporality really mattering, then can we ask what the role of the tool's specific designs are in mediating those temporal experiences and conflicts?