Press Enter to "Say:" Using Second Life to Teach Critical Media Literacy

Citation: deWinter, J., & Vie, S. (2008). Press Enter to “Say:” Using Second Life to Teach Critical Media Literacy. Computers and Composition, 25, 313–322.

Summary: Second Life can be a useful environment for engaging students with textual dynamics like power and subjectivity. It can be a useful environment for teaching multi-modal texts.

Key Points:

• A necessary component of new media literacy is the development of critical awareness.
• Second Life can be a dynamic text to engage students in questions regarding power, ethics, intellectual property, and community.
• Points out the importance of multi-modal text production as a key part of critical media literacy. 
• "...participating in virtual online communities and cultivating player avatars are particularly fruitful activities for students' analyses and production of media in the writing classroom..."
• "...Second Life as a productive space to theorize subjectivity through the creation of players' avatars and their interactions with a virtual world commercialized by major corporations, populated by volunteer players, and immersed in hegemonic power structures."
  • The avatar becomes a means for exploring subjectivity.
  • Avatars that are different from us can be therapeutic (Turkle).
• Second Life can be an environment where people can experience subjectivity, power, and abuse.
• Second Life can require lots of computing power, bandwidth, and instructor time.