In virtual environments of this kind, mediated forms of interpersonal, social and cultural positioning[52] among the plurality of participant actors is negotiated through agent-objects, created and developed by these actors, and standing for specific aspects of their interpersonal, social and cultural capital and performative repertoire. Initial positionings of this kind involve specific types of communicative behaviour on the part of actors relative to agent-objects such as `creating', `naming', `describing' and `dressing' them. Having thus constructed a positioned form of identity (however simple) for oneself, one can then go on to use this nascent social identity in order to mediate interactions with other agent-objects in the virtual environment representing actors elsewhere in the real world.
Interpersonal, ideational and textual sign utterances performed by agent-objects on the part of actors constitute mediated forms of social action, such as `saying', `paging', `e-mailing', `doing', `moving', `taking', `dropping', which at a more general level can be classified as systems of communicative functions and metafunctions. Actions of this kind on the part of actors and agent-objects represent `cuts' in the continuous topology of the virtual environment, constituting `breaks' in this continuity as they manifest themselves as textual or other signs, allowing other actors to access and participate in the generation of further interpretants of these signs.
[52] Ongstad 1995 refers to the notion of positioning in relation to semiotic genre theory in the following way "Connected to a semiotic genre theory [...] positioning refers specifically to the dynamic act of uttering in a broad semiotic sense, and is therefore related to any kind of communication. This conceptualization does not relate directly to any of the different approaches above, but it rather finds some of its inspiration in Bakhtin's (1986) late problematizations of the utterance. It points to the utterer's specific relation to aspects of the utterance, or by alluding to Peirce's categories, to Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness. During the process of uttering any utterer is forced to balance the three mutual aspects of expressivity, referentiality and addressivity by positioning. It is not a question of taking a position. The utterance is basically dynamic, and shifts in positioning are needed step by step. In every single element there is a change in the balance." For further discussion of positioning and positioning analysis see Ongstad 1995, 1996, 1997