Abstract
The highest level of science and technology convergence is globalization, as Internet, transnational corporations, and a uniform scientific culture encircle the Earth. Some social scientists have doubted that unification is possible, and predict that our world will continue to be a dangerous clash of civilizations. That is the scenario embodied by the most influential massively multiplayer online game, World of Warcraft. Thirteen societies have combined in two opposed factions, the Alliance and the Horde, but each faction contains hostility and disagreement between societies, as well as examples of close cooperation. This concluding chapter explores nationalism and assimilation using three avatars, two based on a pair of sociologists who interacted often throughout their lives, Daniel Bell (1919–2011) and Seymour Martin Lipset (1922–2006), and an innovative television personality whose work was intelligent psychodrama masquerading as popular comedy, Ernie Kovacs (1919–1962). Lipset’s theories of democracy, and Bell’s theories of post-industrial society, are relevant, but so also are the difficult paths these two men took from growing up in the New York subculture of Jewish immigrants, to becoming members of the same radical Socialist movement, to becoming in Lipset’s case a Neoconservative, and in both cases, anti-Marxists with love of Israel and loyalty to the United States. The motto of Ernie Kovacs, graven on his tombstone, is “nothing in moderation.” Of Hungarian descent, he was a critic of social pretension and an avant-garde artist who was exceedingly inventive in his surrealist use of television as a virtual world. Thus the three avatars explore World of Warcraft in different ways that offer insights about the American nation that created this premier online gameworld. Is America a “melting pot” dominated by convergence, or a “wild frontier” dominated by divergence?
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Huntington, S. P. (1996). The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Bainbridge, W. S. (2010). The Warcraft civilization. Cambridge: MIT Press; (Ed.). (2010). Online worlds: Convergence of the real and the virtual. London: Springer.
Foa, R., & Meaney, T. (2011, February 10). The last word. The Utopian, www.the-utopian.org/post/3217295807/the-last-word; King, W. F. (2004). Neoconservative and ‘Trotskyism’. American Communist History, 3(2): 247–266.
Lipset, S. M. (1960). Political man: The social bases of politics. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.
Lipset, S. M. (1959). Democracy and working-class authoritarianism. American Sociological Review, 24(4), 482–501.
Napier, J. L., & Jost, J. T. (2008). The ‘antidemocratic personality’ revisited: A cross-national investigation of working-class authoritarianism. Journal of Social Issues, 64(3), 595–617.
Lipset, S. M. (1963). The first new nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective. New York: Basic Books; American exceptionalism. (1996). New York: W. W. Norton.
Bell, D. (1973). The coming of post-industrial society: A venture in social forecasting. New York: Basic Books.
White, H. C. (1970). Chains of opportunity: System models of mobility in organizations. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Bainbridge, W. S. (1997). Sociology (pp. 189–190). Hauppauge, New York: Barron’s.
Lipset, S. M. (1963). The value patterns of democracy: A case study in comparative analysis. American Sociological Review, 28(4), 515–531.
Jalali, R., & Lipset, S. M. (1992–1993). Racial and ethnic conflicts: A global perspective. Political Science Quarterly, 107(4): 585–606.
Lipset, S. M. (1996). Steady work: An academic memoir. Annual Review of Sociology, 22, 6.
Lipset, S. M. (1994). The social requisites of democracy revisited: 1993 presidential address. American Sociological Review, 59(1), 1–22.
Weber, M. (1930). The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. London: G. Allen and Unwin.
Parsons, T. (1964). Evolutionary universals in society. American Sociological Review, 29, 339–357.
Parsons, T., & Shils, E. A. (Eds.). (1951). Toward a general theory of action. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Metzen, C. (2002). Of blood and honor. In Warcraft archive (pp. 545–613). New York: Pocket Books.
Roth, G. (1965). Political critiques of Max Weber: Some implications for political sociology. American Sociological Review, 30(2), 213–223.
Bell, D. (Ed.). (1963). The Radical Right. Garden City, New York: Doubleday; Lipset, S. M., & Raab, E. (1970). The politics of unreason. New York: Harper and Row.
Bell, D. (1958). Ten theories in search of reality: The prediction of soviet behavior in the social sciences. World Politics, 10(3): 327–365; One road from Marx: On the vision of socialism, and the fate of workers’ control, in socialist thought. (1959). World Politics, 11(4): 491–512.
Bell, D. (1976). The cultural contradictions of capitalism. New York: Basic Books.
Bainbridge, W. S. (2010). The Warcraft civilization (p. 65). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Bainbridge, W. S. (2010). The Warcraft civilization. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press; pp. 109, 30.
Glock, C. Y., & Stark, R. (1966). Christian Beliefs and Anti-Semitism. New York: Harper and Row; Edelstein, A. (1982). An unacknowledged harmony: Philo-Semitism and the Survival of European Jewry. Westport: Greenwood Press.
Owen, M., Sims, K., Branger, J., Walker, F., Hughes, H. S., & Schmidt, K. (2012). World of Warcraft Mists of Pandaria Official Strategy Guide (p. 141). Indianapolis: Brady Games.
Owen, M., Sims, K., Branger, J., Walker, F., Hughes, H. S., & Schmidt, K. (2012). World of Warcraft Mists of Pandaria Official Strategy Guide (p. 105). Indianapolis: Brady Games.
www.wowwiki.com/Kezan. Accessed 27 Dec 2014.
Hechter, M. (1978). Group formation and the cultural division of labor. American Journal of Sociology, 84(2), 293–318.
Kovacs, E. (1957). Zoomar. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.
Bainbridge, W. S. (2015). The meaning and value of spaceflight (p. 189). London: Springer.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernie_Kovacs. Accessed 16 Mar 2014.
Adams, E., & Windeler, R. (1990). Sing a pretty song. New York: William Morrow.
Nader, R. (1965). Unsafe at any speed: The designed-in dangers of the American automobile. New York: Grossman.
www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=587. Accessed 16 Mar 2014.
www.wowhead.com/quest=29408. Accessed 16 Mar 2014.
www.liveauctionworld.com/Gearshift-s-Mechano-Almanac-Ernie-Kovacs_i9212665. Accessed 16 Mar 2014.
Roco, M. C., Bainbridge, W. S., Tonn, B., & Whitesides, G. (Ed.). (2013). Convergence of knowledge, technology and society (p. xxxix). Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer.
Cioffi-Revilla, C. (2016). Socio-ecological systems. In W. S. Bainbridge, & M. C. Roco (Eds.), Handbook of science and technology convergence (pp. 669–690). Switzerland: Springer.
Feldman, D. (2016). Polycentric governance. In W. S. Bainbridge, & M. C. Roco (Eds.), Handbook of science and technology convergence (pp. 877–890). Switzerland: Springer
Scott, N. R., Chen, H., & Schoen, R. (2016). Sustainable global food supply. In W. S. Bainbridge, & M. C. Roco (Eds.), Handbook of science and technology convergence (pp. 651–668). Switzerland: Springer; Renn, O. (2016). Global risk assessment. In W. S. Bainbridge & M. C. Roco (Eds.), Handbook of science and technology convergence (pp. 573–590). Switzerland: Springer; Tonn, B., Rose, E., & Hawkins, B. (2016). Whole-earth monitoring. In W. S. Bainbridge, & M. C. Roco (Eds.), Handbook of science and technology convergence (pp. 691–710). Switzerland: Springer.
Bainbridge, W. S. (2016). Science and technology globalization. In W. S. Bainbridge, & M. C. Roco (Eds.), Handbook of science and technology convergence (pp. 621–634). Switzerland: Springer.
Bainbridge, W. S. (2016). Demographic transition theory. In W. S. Bainbridge, & M. C. Roco (Eds.), Handbook of science and technology convergence (pp. 559–572). Switzerland: Springer.
Pass, J., & Harrison, A. (2016). Astrosociology (social science of space exploration). In W. S. Bainbridge, & M. C. Roco (Eds.), Handbook of science and technology convergence (pp. 545–558). Switzerland: Springer.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bainbridge, W.S. (2016). Alienation and Assimilation in a Warcraft World. In: Virtual Sociocultural Convergence. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33020-4_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33020-4_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-33019-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-33020-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)