In this introductory essay for the Symposium issue of the New York Law School Law Review, Noveck explores the role of law in virtual game worlds. In order to develop a foundation on which to base law, it must be acknowledged that cyber worlds are a social community and there is a delicate relationship between the game players and the game creators and owners. This relationship, when extended to ownership, remains blurry and incompletely outlined. Hence, there is growing debate over the application of the real world law to virtual worlds.

Online role-playing games steadily grew in popularity since their mainstream start in the early 1990s. The steep increase in fan base correlates with the acceptance of Internet connectivity as an essential component of the average household. In turn, game companies realized the earning potential of online multiplayer games. By investing in sophisticated game physics and functionality, popular games could lure in users for long-term play.

Virtual worlds, at their core, are social networks and communities. They have traits which mimic human interaction within real-life communities. Property is created, goods are accumulated, and currency is traded. Instead of simply studying the laws of virtual worlds, Noveck suggests study of laws in virtual worlds as a way of learning about how law functions. Virtual worlds do not have written laws which govern player interaction. In fact, they are similar to real-life law in which it is continually revised and developed by new situations and new circumstances. However, there exists a basic constitution which is rarely, if ever, touched. Recognizing this, it may be possible to simulate a fictional law system to test in virtual worlds. This represents an application of virtual worlds towards possible benefit in the real world. These trials show a modern method of applying technology in order to better serve current real-life law models.

See Book: Factories of Imagination

bloggers, crazy avocational food folks

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Gefen and Ridings, both local Philadelphia scholars, begin by recapping women's and men's sociolinguistic patterns of discourse as prior discussed in the literature. They hypothesize that women, more than men, will wish to both receive support from and give support to a virtual community in which they are participating.  In addition, they hypothesize that such support will influence women's assessment of the quality of that virtual community, and that women will more constantly than men rate their virtual community as having higher quality.  They surveyed 39 discussion boards, which they divided into men's, women's, and mixed boards.  As to be expected, women more than men were found to go to discussion boards for support. One of the interesting results they found is that the men surveyed also sought rapport and support, but did so more often in men's-only communities, presumably where an expectation of common language would be held, and did not rate them lower in quality, even though rapport-seeking can be considered as indicating inferior social status among men according to past sociolinguistic studies.  When the men did seek rapport in mixed-gender groups, it did not affect their assessment of the board's quality because there was an expectation of rapport-seeking inherent in the mixed-gender environment, since women were present and rapport-seeking is a characteristic of women's speech.  The authors admit that even as they tried to control for gender-bias in the chosen bulletin boards, that some of the communities were specifically support/rapport based (eg. cancer support) and that may have skewed the data towards women's speech and away from men's speech.

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Winter and Huff's study focuses on a 1996 survey of a women's only online bulletin board for computer scientists called SYSTERS. Although the study is 9 years old, it still brings voice to women who were previously marginalized as gender minorities in their field of work/study.  The authors discuss the issue of same-gender boards being both "havens" and "ghettos" for women online, and also provide some support for Cass Sunstein's theory that the internet allows for the consolidation of like opinions - both positive and negative, as in the case of women's forums and online sexual harassment, respectively.  Based upon their work, the authors felt that the differences between the genders in online communication was equal or magnified to that present in speech.

Shade's research, although not linguistic in nature, is useful to provide a background into women's roles in constructing the Internet.  She begins by reviewing research on gendered uses of various communications technologies, including the telephone, radio, and television. She discusses cyberactivism and feminism, as well as public policy determining women's access to the internet.  She cites a case study of women in China and internet access implementation and concludes with a discussion of whether women are merely consumers targeted by merchants or active citizens in an online sisterhood (discussions that we have held in class as well).

In this text, Coates and Cameron attempt to address in a quantitative way how sociolinguistic differences are found between men's and women's speech.  While the research does not include online communication, it does show grounded empirical studies of women in their own speech communities such as among British Black women and women in mining communities in Wales.  They go on to address gender differences in communication "style" above and beyond format, and delve into examples of gossip, tag questions, and shop talk as female or male speech.  In all cases, the authors attempt to challenge prior academic research and offer new perspectives on the task of analyzing speech on gender lines, as in the example of Swann's "Talk Control: an Illustration From the Classroom of Problems in Analyzing Male Dominance of Conversation."

This article in the NY times focuses on the communities that blogs actually can create.  The advent of the blogisphere has allowed for the creation of new communties and social networks.  This Carnival in Jersey shows that the blogisphere is bring people together who would normally never meet, talk, or know that others like them existed.  Applebome's shows that in its early stages, the blogisphere is doing something that no other media or forums have been able to do.  Make mass social networks and communities with personal relationships that surpass those created in more traditional venues.

This text consists of three sections regarding women's use of the internet.  Part One deals with the definition of gender as part of a user's identity on the net, in particular for internet gamers (Paasonen) and female professionals (Dorer)  The second part concerns how women are addresses as consumers of the internet and networks, with examples from online communities like Oprah.Com (Cooks/Paredes/Scharrer) and other women's websites (Gustafson).  Part Three gives examples of everyday uses of the internet for bringing girls and women together, and also discusses the problems and strategies inherent for lesbians online (Poster).  Finally, the fourth and last part talks about gender and new media in the contexts of the school, politics, and television viewing.  This looks to be a very interesting text from a sociological perspective which can supplement the other linguistic texts in the bibliography.