Virtual gossip: How gossip regulates moral life in virtual worlds Vrije Universiteit Brussel University of Antwerp
This article explores to what extent the functions of interpersonal offline gossip can be mapped on to the virtual community of Second Life and its subsequent in-world and out-world interactions. A long-term hybrid ethnographic study was conducted that involved recurrent actual and virtual meetings with informants. The main objectives are, first, to look for similarities and to explain dissimilarities and, second, to gain some much-needed ...