The Science of Virtual Culture Wars
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55613/jeet.v32i1.112Abstract
Much of today’s geopolitical conflict is taking place online, carried out in significant measure by volunteers, even as governments seek to emphasize information technology cooperation. Computational social scientists have discovered multiple online environments in which to collect relevant statistical data, including Wikipedia pageviews, archives of government research grant abstracts, and behavior in massively multiplayer online war games. Three very different examples of the dynamics of collaboration and conflict provide alternative perspectives: (1) the Pirate Parties that seem to have been an overly ambitious attempt to transform democracy in the Information Age, (2) citizen science that had some success attracting volunteers to donate labor to academic research projects, but generally avoided controversial research projects in areas such as human conflict, and (3) a genre of online role-playing games that emphasized spontaneous organization of volunteer armies to develop skills and resources for victory. Without claiming to offer strict rules for success, this article considers the organizational structures and practical methodologies that might be adapted for achievement of goals by ethical social movements.
References
Adams, J., Brückner, H., & Naslund, C. (2019). Who counts as a notable sociologist on Wikipedia? Gender, race, and the “professor test.” Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World. doi.org/10.1177/2378023118823946
Altschuler, B. E. (2015). Is the Pentagon Papers Case relevant in the age of WikiLeaks? Political Science Quarterly, 130(3): 401-423
Bainbridge, W. S. (2011). The virtual future. London: Springer.
Bainbridge, W. S. (2012). Fluid democracy, In B. Hall (Ed.) No safe harbor (pp. 31-62). No place: United States Pirate Party.
Bainbridge, W. S. (2016a). Star worlds: Freedom versus control in online gameworlds. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press.
Bainbridge, W. S. (2016b) Virtual interstellar travel. In K. Bergstrom, M. Carter & D. Woodford (Eds.), Internet spaceships are serious business: An introduction to Eve Online (pp. 31-47). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Bainbridge, W. S. (2018). Computer simulation of space societies. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
Bainbridge, W. S. (2020). The social structure of online communities. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Bartle, R. A. (2004). Designing virtual worlds. (Indianapolis, IN: New Riders).
Battjes, N. H. (2011). “Piracy is not theft” go ahead, pirate Minecraft. Markus Persson will allow it. PC Games. Retrieved from pc-games.wonderhowto.com/news/piracy-is-not-theft-go-ahead-pirate-minecraft-markus-persson-will-allow-it-0126712/
Bergstrom, K., Carter, M., & Woodford, D. (Eds). (2016). Internet spaceships are serious business: an introduction to Eve Online. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press
Bowser, A., Shilton, K., Preece, J., & Warrick, E. (2017). Accounting for privacy in citizen science: ethical research in a context of openness. In CSCW ‘17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM conference on computer supported cooperative work and social compu-ting (pp. 2124-2136). New York, NY: ACM.
Bradford, J. (2020). EVE Online’s wild changes the last few days have got me hooked again. MMORPG.com, October 14, www.mmorpg.com/editorials/eve-onlines-wild-changes-the-last-few-days-have-got-me-hooked-again-2000119740
Brown, P., Zavestoski, S., McCormick, S., Linder, M., Mandelbaum, J., & Luebke, T. (2001). A gulf of difference: disputes over Gulf War-related illnesses. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 42(3), 235-257.
Carter, M. (2014). Emitexts and paratexts: Propaganda in EVE Online. Games and Culture, 10(4), 311-342.
Champion, K., McDonald, N., Bankes, Zhang, S. J., Greenstadt, R., Forte, A., Hill, B. M. (2019). A Forensic qualitative analysis of contributions to Wikipedia from anonymity seeking users, In Proceedings of the ACM on human-computer interaction 3. New York: ACM. doi.org/10.1145/3359155
Craft, J. (2016). Rebuilding an empire with Minecraft: Bringing the classics into the digital space. The Classical Journal, 111(3), 347-364.
Dawdy, S. L., & Bonni, J. (2012). Towards a general theory of piracy. Anthropological Quarterly, 85(3): 673-699.
Decker, K. S., & Eberl, J. T. (Eds.). (2005). Star Wars and philosophy: more powerful than you can possibly imagine. Chicago: Carus
Farley, H. (2017). Virtual knights and synthetic worlds: Jediism in Second Life. In C. M. Cusack & P. Kosnáč (Eds.), Fiction, invention and hyper-reality: From popular culture to religion (pp. 134-147). London: Routledge.
Fischer, D., Schwamb, M., Schawinski, K., Lintott, C., Brewer, J., Giguere, M., Lynn, S., Parrish, M., Sartori, T., Simpson, R., Arfon Smith, A., Spronck, J., Batalha, N., Rowe, J., Jenkins, J., Bryson, S., Prsa, A., Tenenbaum, P., Justin Crepp,... Zimmermann, V. (2012). Planet Hunters: the first two planet candidates identified by the public using the Kepler public archive data. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 419(4), 2900-2911.
Foote, J., Gergle, D., & Shaw, A. (2017). Starting online communities: motivations and goals of wiki founders. Proceedings of the 2017 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems. New York: ACM. Retrieved from dx.doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025639
Fredriksson, M. (2020). Information commons between enclosure and exposure. International Journal of the Commons, 14(1), 494-507.
Gil, Y., Knight, A., Zhang, K., Zhang, L., Ratnakar, V., & Sethi, R. (2013). The democratization of semantic properties: an analysis of semantic wikis. Proceedings of the Seventh IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC). Irvine, California: IEEE. Retrieved from ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6693519
Halfaker, A., Geiger, R. S., Morgan, J. T., & Riedl, J. (2012). The rise and decline of an open collaboration system: how Wik-ipedia’s reaction to popularity is causing its decline. American Behavioral Scientist, 57(5), 664-688.
Hall, B. (Ed). (2012). No safe harbor. No place: United States Pirate Party
Hall, C. (2020). Eve Online player gets fired, starts war to ‘exterminate’ his old boss. Polygon, September 15, www.polygon.com/2020/9/15/21436851/ever-online-world-war-bee-2-interview-the-mittani-vily
Hayes, B. (2015). Computing science: Cultures of code. American Scientist, 103(1), 10-13.
Herrigel, E. (1953). Zen in the art of archery. New York, NY.: Pantheon Books
Ingdahl, W. (2011). Three planks of the Pirate Party’s platform that should matter to doctors. British Medical Journal, 343(7837), 1280-1281.
Levin, G. A., & Cragin, M. H. (2003). “The Role of Information Science in Gathering Biodiversity and Neuroscience Data.” Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 30(1), 18-21.
Lewis, J. R. (Ed). (2009). Scientology. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lintott, C., Schawinski, K., Bamford, S., Slosar, A., Land, K., Thomas, D., Edmondson, E., Masters, K., Nichol, R., Raddick, J., Szalay, A., Andreescu, D., Murray, P., & Vandenberg, J. (2011). Galaxy Zoo 1: Data release of morphological classifications for nearly 900 000 galaxies. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 410(1), 166-178.
Lyden, J. C. (2012). Whose film is it, anyway? canonicity and authority in “Star Wars” fandom. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 80(3), 775-786.
Mayer, B., Brown, P., & Linder, M. (2002). Moving further upstream: from toxics reduction to the precautionary principle. Public Health Reports, 117(6), 574-586.
McCarthy, M. T. (2015). Toward a free information movement. Sociological Forum, 30(2), 439-458.
McCormick, S., Brown, P., & Zavestoski, S. (2003). The personal is scientific, the scientific is political: the public paradigm of the environmental breast cancer movement. Sociological Forum, 18(4), 545-576.
McDowell, J. C. (2007). The gospel according to Star Wars: faith, hope and the Force. Louisville, Kentucky: John Knox Pres
McFarlane, B. L. (1994). Specialization and motivations of birdwatchers. Wildlife Society Bulletin, 22(3), 361-370.
Nguyen, S. H., Sun, Q., & Williams, D. (2021). How do we make the virtual world a better place? Social discrimination in online gaming, sense of community, and well-being. Telematics and Informatics, 66(101747). doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2021.101747
Ransbotham, S., & Kane, G. C. (2011). Membership turnover and collaboration success in online communities: explaining rises and falls from grace in Wikipedia. MIS Quarterly, 35(3), 613-627.
Royce, B. (2022). Star Wars Galaxies Legends added apartments to Bespin to celebrate its sixth year as a rogue server. Mas-sively Overpowered. Retrieved from mas-sivelyop.com/2022/03/01/star-wars-galaxies-legends-added-apartments-to-bespin-to-celebrate-its-sixth-year-as-a-rogue-servering/
Shipman, F. M., & Marshall, C. C. (2020) Ownership, privacy, and control in the wake of Cambridge Analytica: the relation-ship between attitudes and awareness. In CHI ‘20: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI conference on human factors in computing sys-tems. Retrieved from dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3313831.3376662
Tassi, P. (2011). Minecraft’s notch: “piracy is not theft.” Forbes. Retrieved from www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2011/03/04/minecrafts-notch-piracy-is-not-theft/
TeBlunthuis, N., Shaw, A., & Hill, B. M. (2018). Revisiting “the rise and decline” in a population of peer production projects. Proceedings of the 2018 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems. New York, NY: ACM
Tonn, B., & Feldman, D. (1995). Non-spatial government. Futures 27, 11-36.
Waites, R. (2011). V for Vendetta masks: Who’s behind them? BBC News Magazine. Retrieved from www.bbc.com/news/magazine-15359735
Westbrook, D. A. (2019). Among the Scientologists: History, theology, and praxis. New York, NY: Oxford University Press
Williams, A., Miller, B.-A., & Kitchen, M. (2017). Jediism and the Temple of the Jedi Order. In C. M. Cusack & P. Kosnáč (Eds.), Fiction, invention and hyper-reality: From popular culture to religion (pp. 119-133). London: Routledge.
Wong, W. H., & Brown, P. A. (2013). E-Bandits in global activism: WikiLeaks, Anonymous, and the politics of no one. Per-spectives on Politics, 11(4), 1015-1033.
Yee, N. 2014. The Proteus paradox. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Yee, N., J. N. Bailenson, and N. Ducheneaut. 2009. The Proteus effect: Implications of transformed digital self-representation on online and offline behavior. Communication Research, 36(2), 285–312.
Zavestoski, S., Brown, P., Linder, M., McCormick, S., & Mayer, B. (2002). Science, policy, activism, and war: defining the health of Gulf War veterans. Science, Technology, and Human Values, 27(2),171-205.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2022 William Sims Bainbridge
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC-BY 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) after publication, while providing bibliographic details that credit JEET (See The Effect of Open Access).
How to Cite
