Creativity, Ownership, and Collaboration in the Digital Age

As World Wide Web transforms into Web 2.0 in the era of media convergence and becomes a full-fledged computing platform serving Web applications to end users, users' online activities become distinctly performative in nature, in that they perform activities that allow them to form electronic texts by mobilizing the resources offered by online works. Second Life, as an open-source platform that integrates not just building and scripting tools, but also external platforms into its structure, is a rapidly growing massively multiplayer online game (MMOG); one such example of a Web 2.0 application that presents a unique environment for content creation and the formation of stories. This game, I argue, elicits multi-platform narratives which display variegated textualities spread across diverse media connected via the Internet and produced exclusively by its users. It thus challenges our established notions of text, narrative, and reading. Its textual world of Second Life, while not a narrative in and of itself, embodies an acute level of narrativity whose texts and stories are formed according to how its users (or " residents ") mobilize Second Life's resources as a work. The open-source nature of Second Life, as we will see, renders textual poaching an indispensable tool both for content creation and the construction of stories. While this is true for all residents, my research primarily focuses on hackers, griefers, and goons whose activities poach the textual space of the metaverse on various levels. The open-source environment provided by Second Life, which allows it to be built by its users,