ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the author’s entry into a virtual world, Second Life, to conduct a case study on presence in virtual worlds. The object of study is not the IT platform that might provide opportunities for presence, nor the human actors that might experience presence, but what happens when they come together to create an event of presence. The chapter relates how this object of study was approached and produced through a theoretical framework and methodology based on post-actor-network theory (Law 2002; Mol 2003; Latour 2005). Methods such as participant observation, interviews, and reading blogs and web texts are understood as mediations. The chapter traces how these mediations create and gather specific visibilities and how they may lead to interest, surprise, and new insights into virtual worlds as an emergent, distributed phenomenon. The concepts of assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) and imaginaries (Flichy 2007) are applied to view the notion of presence in virtual worlds in a novel way.
