A Player's Web of Significance

Below you can read the abstract of my paper to be presented at the 8th International Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference in Hong Kong, June 17-21, 2010.  

A PLAYER'S WEB OF SIGNIFICANCE:

A MICROETHNOGRAPHICAL STUDY ABOUT ONLINE POKER CULTURE

This paper is about a narrative of an agent in a complex web of significance or, in other words, a person in a culture. The culture in question is online poker and the agent, or the person, is my key informant who is a civil servant, a family man and a semi-professional poker player with whom I will practice participant observation and whose in-depth interviews will bring precious detail in the cultural context. I will attempt to provide a refined (or high in semantic resolution) presentation of how the player negotiates his role in the online and offline cultures, how he relates himself to the stereotypes and hegemonic discourses of poker culture and how he negotiates his virtual space in the physical world. The study is microethnographical in the sense that although it adds to a holistic description of a culture by concentrating on one person's involvement in the culture.

  

Update May 18, 2010: I had to cancel Hong Kong, so I will propose the final manuscript to be published in Next Generation edition of Fast Capitalism. This is how they describe their policy.

Fast Capitalism is an academic journal with a political intent. We publish reviewed scholarship and essays about the impact of rapid information and communication technologies on self, society and culture in the 21st century. We do not pretend an absolute objectivity; the work we publish is written from the vantages of viewpoint. Our authors examine how heretofore distinct social institutions, such as work and family, education and entertainment, have blurred to the point of near identity in an accelerated, post-Fordist stage of capitalism. [Read the rest.]