Touching virtual trauma: Performative empathics in Second Life

摘要

Trauma has entered the virtual domain of Second Life. Unsanctioned memorials to 9/11 and re-imaginings of a digitized Guantanamo Bay are but some of the more recent installations of traumatic memory to be found in this relatively new online territory. This article seeks to understand how Second Life participates in an affective economy of performative empathy through remediating the traumas of 'those' who have suffered 'elsewhere'. In contemplating one particular online Holocaust museum - the US Holocaust Museum's Kristallnacht in Second Life, it examines how Second Life participates in the circulation of a range of 'wound culture' affects in problematic ways.