About

I’m John Carter McKnight, a PhD student at Arizona State University. I’m in a new program called Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology, studying law in online communities and the use of online games and virtual worlds to encourage citizen engagement with issues of technology and social change.

This Spring I’ll be Adjunct Professor of Law at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at ASU, teaching LAW 791/EDT 791: Governance of Virtual Worlds.

I’m a former corporate finance attorney and officer/director of space exploration and advocacy nonprofit organizations. See my LinkedIn profile for details.

I’ve been “Kaseido” on the internets for a dozen years or so: the name is a bilingual pun. When I was working for The Mars Society, a space exploration advocacy group, I was also practicing kendo, Japanese fencing. A friend of mine joked that I wasn’t a “martial artist,” but a “martian artist.” “Kaseido” (literally, the Fire Star Way, the subtitle of my old LiveJournal) could be translated as “Martian Art” – or as “The Martian Way,” the title of an influential story by Isaac Asimov.

My avatar in Second Life is named Kaseido Quandry, reflecting my puzzlement at how the notions of community I developed in thinking about space settlement might be applied to online spaces. This blog  is an exploration of Kaseido’s quandaries in studying digital community.

I’m on Facebook as John Carter McKnight, on Twitter as john_carter, and in World of Warcraft on the Misha server, Horde-side, as Kaseido, among many others. It’s a good bet that any “Kaseido” on the internet is me.