realvirtuality.dk

Me and Twix Twine

This blog is written by Dina, in the role of a researcher, studying viral marketing, as well as user driven innovation in virtual worlds, together with her avatar Twix Twine, responsible for communicating with fellow avatars within Second life.

THE AVATAR NAME
Twix Twine accepted her avatar name as a gesture to the ethnographer Victor Turner that (borrowing the terms from Arnold van Gennep) uses the concepts of Betwixt and Between.
Turner gained notoriety by exploring Van Gennep’s threefold structure of rites of passage and expanding theories on the liminal phase. Van Gennep’s structure consisted of a pre-liminal phase (separation), a liminal phase (transition), and a post-liminal phase (reincorporation). Turner noted that in liminality, the transitional state between two phases, individuals were “betwixt and between”: they did not belong to the society that they previously were a part of and they were not yet reincorporated into that society. Liminality is a limbo, an ambiguous period characterized by humility, seclusion, tests and ambiguity.

LIMBO BETWEEN WORLDS
This limbo is also worth for me as a researcher to explorer. I see interactions in SL, not as purely in-world interaction, but instead as a constant limbo between worlds in which sometimes and for some purposes SL qualities are acquired in order make a living in RL, and for some purposes RL skills are acquired in order to make sense of and take advantage of the options in-world. Instead of taking distinctions between these worlds as my starting point, my interest is to look into the situations in which the worlds meet and intersect. I am interested in skills, knowledge, values, brands etc. as these are crossing the boundaries between worlds.
Betwixt and between describes the state of “neither,” “nor” or “both “. The state where ordinarily clear distinctions are questioned and challenged.
Twix Twine and the researcher find these concepts inspiring. They make visible distinctions between RL and SL as negotiable categories.

Victor Turner, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage”, in The Forest of Symbols (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967).
Van Gennep, Arnold. “The Rites of Passage”. University of Chicago Press, 1960.

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