Recently I wrote/published a bunch of articles on conceptualization of identity in Secondlife space – and am back doing further immersive ethnographies in various virtual worlds in relation to building monetary value for social identities and in relation trans-nations, inter-nations and the local and global. Some of what I write next will both contest and extend what I have written and published in the previous phase of immersive online and offline (and offline trans- rural as well as trans- urban “deep hanging out”) ethnographies.

As usual – some of this will be co-authored and other essays will be single-authored with a clear acknowledgement of its collaborative nature. Am working in bits and pieces with multiple groups of people both within and outside the Western academy as well as both within and outside virtual worlds.

Let the layered investigations resume (continue – actually they never stopped – but now that I have my first draft of the book manuscript on Technocultural Agency finally done – I am calling it phase two as I move this work into my next two book projects being developed)!

My research journeying to where money is being exchanged through online software is taking me into various muddyings of ideology, finance and socio-economic practice – in places of work through play.

click, click, click…

Start with the fluff and move to essentials…. microtransact away… or make essential the fluff (which is a bit different from essentializing fluff…)

[there's an interweaving commentary I have that's being staged in my head on the interweaving of social entrepreneurship, microtransactions, crowdfunding and micropolitics - but you can ask me about that f2f sometime]

Virtual worlds and social networks… looking at crowdfunding, microtransactional software, RMT and so on.

Practices of money exchange have always been “virtual” so this makes me think anew about the binary we have in the internet era – between “virtual” and “real” – in the context of money.

Parallel -ly, examining historical descriptions of finance communities and parallel as well as alternative practices of production, consumption, marketing … seeing how these trajectories allow me to push at the teleology of modernity ….(that [in]visibly underpins various current day political approaches to money and transactions of value).

So reading about Money and Liberation … Micropolitics and microtransactions – money as discourse (but of course it is – I dont see that as “new”) – exchange value, after all, is based on valuing through discourse and practice – and this connects back to Virtual worlds, RMTs and Virtual Economies (at least in my writing that is forthcoming). In that sense I am taking these issues in a different direction than that taken by some researchers of gaming cultures and virtual economies.