#authoethnography

By Christine Tomlinson

To read Tom Boellstorff’s introduction to this book reviews series, head over to The Book Review as Conversation.

T. L. Taylor. 2006. Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Pp. 197. $31.95.

Adrienne Shaw. 2014. Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture. Minneapolis, MN: The University of Minnesota…

        In 21st century, we live in a digital society where technologies have greatly changed the way we do things. It is always a relief to me whenever I realize that I can find almost all I need online. There will never be the case when I am desperate for not finding the answer I am eager for, or when I am bored to death because I cannot find anything to do. Indeed, Internet opens a door for me to a new world that I can never reach out.

        During high school time in United Stats, I stayed with a host family in a quiet and tiny town where I barely saw people have the same race with me. Due to the fact that I did not have a car and host family was relatively too busy to drive me around. Most of the time, I was stuck at home. It was the darkest time when I found myself sit alone most of the time. I started to ask my local friends to hang out using all the technologies I could ever found while at night, I talked to my friends from oversea to beat my homesickness. Having my phone with me twenty-four hours a day and multiple chatting windows open on my laptop, I spent my a significant portion of my first few weeks chatting in virtual world. I have to admit that these technologies offer me a change to stay connected with friends who are thousands miles away.

As strange as it sounds, watching Japanese anime and dramas on the Internet turned into one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. I discovered an interest in Japanese media purely by chance, and naturally I had to rely on subtitles to consume the works I was watching. It dawned on me one day that I could potentially learn to speak Japanese in my free time. I pursued this thought and found myself “geeking out” on the Internet, using it as a resource that ended up forming one of my defining characteristics: speaking Japanese fluently.

Studying Japanese began as a hobby, but the plethora of resources I found on the Internet helped me immerse my life in Japanese media and culture and allowed me to create friends who shared my interest in Japan. A simple Google search of “Learn to speak Japanese online” unearthed an online forum and chat room devoted to Japanese language learners that became the cornerstone of my studies for the next few years. Our shared interest in Japan brought us all together for the purpose of practicing Japanese conversation with one another, correcting each others’ grammar, and sharing vocabulary lists. The chat room was a place to share grammar guides and other resources, allowing us “access to a huge amount of information related to [our] particular interests” (Ito 67). Our “geeking out” together in the chat room became the most powerful force that made learning Japanese a significant part of my life.

It wasn’t just breeding interest in Japan that impacted my life; we all gradually became more invested in each other and built strong friendships beyond our shared interests. These friendships allowed us to just “hang out” but also reinforced our “geeking out” -- the online community was a place for us to socialize, but throughout our social activities we also kept each other in check with our studies, because ultimately we all shared an interest in learning the language.

Eventually my Japanese studies earned me two national awards in Japanese language and cultural knowledge, and afforded me a trip to Japan where I lived with a homestay family and finally got to be truly immersed in the country I had devoted so many years of my life to studying and “geeking out” about on the internet.