In our present context, I have delineated the term `distributed virtual environment' to stand for at its most general level a technologically sustained, maintained and mediated social field, where a plurality of non co-present actors `meet' through the mediation of their respective agent-objects in order to act, interact and negotiate with one another. So defined, the distributed virtual environment of necessity will involve a plurality of forms of communication, interaction and resource management, not only within the mediated world of the distributed virtual environment itself, but also locally and globally in the real world.
The various actors, groups of actors and institutions who choose to participate in the creation, development and management of the distributed virtual environment thus defined, are distributed, since they do not need to be, co-present at any one physical location as they are interact with one another. The sense actors develop of being members in a wider community is not only intersubjectively, ideationally and textually instantiated and construed, but also, in a rather special sense, materially instantiated. This is introduced in order to account for media-specific constraints on actor-agent and agent-agent interaction, communication and meaning negotiation by the texture of the material technologies and infrastructures which maintain the virtual environment and allow communication to go on there. The more effectively and transparently such material instantiation is realized, the more optimal are the conditions for communication and negotiation of meaning in the distributed virtual environment. Quite apart from this material technological side of things, both the emergent intersubjective sense of community as well as the developing `texture' of the virtual environment itself depend on a plurality of negotiation activities on the part of actors, groups of actors and institutions, who, due to the distributed nature of the environment, will seldom or even never meet face-to-face, communicating mainly through agent-objects of varying degrees of autonomy and independence. This means that the social semiotics of agent-agent communication will be of increasing interest as time goes on and more and more actors direct their agents to enter the field.
Contributions on the part of actors to the development of the virtual environment may have to do with the creation, development, exchange and management of interpersonal, informational or material resources, `internally', which is to say more or less exclusively having to do with the virtual environment itself, and `externally', relating to local-global issues in real world environments, which `frame' the virtual environment by contributing cultural, social and capital resources for its further development. The emergent community depends therefore for its existence and continuing development on global coordination of a wide range of local initiatives originating in a plurality of physical, technological, socio-cultural and interpersonal realities, while existing as a `social fact' only within the broader intersubjectivity of the collective of minds of locally positioned actor-participants. For those actors who consider themselves, and are considered by others, `ratified participants'[53] in the emergent virtual community, the distributed environment represents an augmentation of their everyday socio-cultural environment, one in which they have elected to invest a part of their energies, resources and social capital.
At the present time we are seeing a steadily increasing migration of systems of cultural and social norms for communication, negotiation and exchange of information, goods and services from real world into the global-local distributed virtual environment, and vice-versa. During this migration process, various aspects of these cultural norm systems and practices are changing, amongst other things as a direct result of the new potential for communication and exchange being opened up, and also due to a growing awareness of some of the specific mediation constraints inherent in the technologies involved in facilitating such processes. The technologies are thus evolving and changing too, being pushed along on their way, at least to some extent, by the articulated needs and desires of `cybermigrants'. The degree to which the direction of change is moving from expressed migrant needs towards more functional augmented forms of communication, as opposed to the other way round, with the characteritics inherent in the technology determining the communicative practices and norm systems of user-migrants, has to do primarily with to what extent members of migrant populations are capable of expressing their perceived needs in ways understandable by technologists, and also to what extent technologists are capable of being sensitive and responsive to the needs and desires of these migrant populations. Developing distributed virtual environments are thus an important arena for the negotiation of such issues, which touch more than just a little on questions of human rights and ethics, and also on the maximization of human resources in the longer run of things, since building the conditions for a felicitous mutual participation in their further development on the part of both migrants and technologists will in itself a highly valuable and qualifying experience in this particular respect for all parties involved.
This growing sense of migration and belonging to a new and growing dimension of the general sphere of human life and culture which at one and the same time is both parasitic on, and yet in discernible and indiscernible ways distinct from, our contingent experiences of everyday life and reality, is actualized in our increasing use of special terms to characterize this particular dimension of human experience - cyber-culture, net culture, net-language and the like. The global distributed virtual environment is becoming an arena of rapid and intense cultural, social and personal activity, development and change, and this is precisely why I believe Peirce's notion of continuity to be of great value as a conceptual tool for understanding these changes, since it provides us with a way of comprehending this ongoing blending (or `welding' to use Peirce's term) of the virtual and the real, and how this is opening up for new kinds of local participation in the negotiation of meaning, and with it, of new global systems of norms and values, on the part of a plurality of actors from all over the world.
[53] Goffman 1981