The Ability of Place

Abstract

In this article I explore the relationship between digital place and disability through an ethnographic study of disability experience in the virtual world Second Life. I discuss how forms of landscape and interface shape disability experience, how building relates to “being-inworld” in digital place, and how proximity and collaboration relate to disability embodiment in a virtual context. “Participant building” on a virtual island created for this research, “Ethnographia,” complements participant observation and other methods to investigate these questions of digital place. Through these lines of analysis, I develop a notion of “digital topography” to illuminate the implications of digital place for disability and human experience more generally. This allows for differentiating digital places from digital media and thus forging conceptual frameworks that reflect how the internet is not a unitary entity. It also allows for considering digital emplacement as related to, but distinct from, digital embodimen...