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Sampling Strategy II:
Digital Non-Place
Tamagochi
People Knowing, 2010
Instructors: Ben Hooker, Sean Donahue
In collaboration with
Dee Kim
By choosing a non-place within the digital space, challenge was to gather data by analyzing two chosen spaces to surface the unseen, unspoken, and unknown that lies within the mundane places.
We wanted to explore the idea of death in digital space and found out an internet cemetery which allows the Tamagotchi to be buried when it dies. The language used in this digital space shows the strong attachment users feel toward their pet Tamagotchi. Sometimes the attachment to the virtual animal is so strong that they become extremely depressed when it dies. These users deal with the death of a virtual animal in a similar manner to that of a human.
We collected quotes from the users of Tamagotchi internet cemetery, presented them as if they were for a living creature hiding the fact that it was about Tamagotchi, and observed how viewers perceived the messages. Many people didn't notice the subject until 'R.I.P Tamagotchi' was revealed at the very end.
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(view video in full screen)
If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place. The hypothesis advanced here is that supermodernity produces non-places, meaning spaces which are not themselves anthropological places and which, unlike Baudelairean modernity, do not integrate the earlier places: instead these are listed, classified, promoted to the status of 'places of memory', and assigned to a circumscribed and specific position.
-- from Non-Place, Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity by Marc Auge
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