Kultivate Arts

Tom Boellstorff: digital ethnographer extraordinaire – and the focus of World Makers #31

It is directly because of Tom Boellstorff‘s influence that I have tended to cease referring to what goes on the physical world as “real life” and use the term “physical world” instead – as regular readers here may have noticed. As Tom once pointed out to me, such are the complexities of our digital activities and interactions, they are in fact no less “real” than almost everything we do in the “real” world.

I mention this because Tom is the subject of Episode #31 of the Drax Files World Makers, and within it, he excellently expands upon this idea. Around half-way through the segment, he focuses down onto the issue of the artificial divide that is consciously established in the mind when one employs the term “real world” to differentiate between physical world interaction and…