Psychedelic Trance on the Web: Exploring Digital Parties at Second Life

Psychedelic Trance on the Web: Exploring Digital Parties at Second Life

Emília Simão, Sérgio Tenreiro de Magalhães, Armando Malheiro da Silva
Copyright: © 2015 |Pages: 23
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-8665-6.ch005
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Abstract

This chapter proposes an approach about Psychedelic Trance tribe behaviours and manifestations in digital environments, and cyber ritual dynamics beyond the virtual parties in Second Life. Many spatial communities are simultaneously digital communities, and both became complements and extensions of one another. Psychedelic Trance movements and manifestations have been happening through all kinds of physical spaces, now also extended to digital spaces. Psytrance neo-nomads are now techno-nomads, moving to, from, and through the web, redefining themselves, their practices and their gatherings. In this scenario, Psychedelic Trance branches emerges everywhere, especially in social networks and three-dimensional immersive environments like Second Life. This digital migration is not only making the tribe growing, is also enhancing boundaries and increasing the individual and collective consciousness of its members. Nevertheless, even if the Trancers became simultaneously physical and virtual natives, the digital parties do not seems to replace their outside experiences.
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Trancemigration: Through New Territories

The migration phenomenon is inherently connected to the existence of territories and to the several ways of mobility and experiences between and inside them. Referring to the EDMC’s context, some of these movements initially originated urban tribes which later gave place to neo-tribal aggregations (Maffesoli, 2006). In this type of aggregations the concepts of being and sharing are always present and actually, they are almost inseparable from the cyberspace, turned into its own new alternative territory. By territory we can perceive an inhabited area later appropriated and valued by man in a symbolic and instrumental way, where he combines dimensions and does flow different kinds of contents (Gimenez, 1999). The actual being in society way comes today from this flow spaces (Castells, 2001) and essentially, from the need that individuals have to communicate amongst them and to keep informed about their most various interests. As a result of these requests, the cyberspace became a cultural space of information and knowledge in constant development through a collective intelligence, generating cyberculture (Lévy, 1999).The fluidity between different territories is one of the important dimensions of virtual reality and the on-line communities are what define the virtual places. The analysis of on-line communities presupposes permeable and fluid realities in a growing convergence between on-line and off-line inherent from this cyber-era we are constructing (Wilson & Atkinson, 2005).

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