Visual Culture Versus Virtual Culture: When the Visual Culture is All Made by Virtual World Users

Visual culture in virtual worlds is not purely authentic or purely imaginative. When culture emerges in a visualized virtual world, where everything that can be seen is created by its users, visual culture can be diverse and complex. Users from different cultural backgrounds perceive and construct meanings that may be different from those intended by the virtual world creators and other users. The author used observation, survey, and interview as her research methodologies to analyze visual culture in a visualized virtual world where the content is created by its users.