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Thursday 13th September 2007 11:47 am

Connie Flanagan: Framing the Virtual Social Contract

Leading expert in civic engagement and service learning Connie Flanagan discusses the role of youth in shaping new virtual communities.  Virtual worlds offer powerful opportunities for young people to reimagine society, our values and institutions. 

In the physical world, members of a community are bound together by social contracts that insure rights and require obligations of members.  Virtual worlds such as Second Life are described as “communities.” Our research team is interested in exploring what kind of ‘social contract’ evolves in these communities, if any. 

So far the “rules of the game” in SL are defined by the rules of a free market and the “Big Six” community standards.  These six principles (concerning intolerance, harassment, assault, disclosure, indecency, and disturbing the peace) seem like a good set to insure basic civility, free expression, and individual privacy.  But is that enough to form a community?  Beyond a marketplace, what is it people are building together?

These “Big Six” seem like a good basis for a platform that individuals can explore as a free and open space.  And our material world is sorely lacking in such spaces, especially for young people. (Indeed, many of the limitations of age and power that impede youth’s ability to shape the social contract in the physical world are leveled in virtual worlds).

But the political potential of free spaces is that they allow us to imagine what our worlds COULD be, what our institutions could look like, and what values we want to bind us together.  Virtual worlds have tremendous potential for enabling many voices to weigh in on these and other matters.  They could be a space where politics might move beyond a conversation of elites.

Forms of civil society are evolving in SL and we are eager to learn what the virtual publics imagine for this sector.  Our gut feeling from too much time in the physical/material world is that we need more than free enterprise and market values to bind us together.

We would be interested in hearing what others think.

Editor’s note: Connie Flanagan heads up the research team “Exploring the Social Contract in Virtual Worlds.” To learn more about her research click here. See posts from her colleagues here and here.