But now I would like to return from this brief excursion into more ontological questions to the very pragmatic realities of researching textual norm change in virtual environments. I shall hereafter attempt to limit the horizon of my further discussion to some hard empirical data.
One claim that I have made in this connection is that:
Let us for a moment look at what I am referring to here by confronting ourselves with a couple of sequences from a log made during a session in an Internet-based multi-user dialogue called Media MOO[3]:
The first and most prevalent characteristic of this group conversation is that it is taking place by means of a written rather than a spoken language code. A second characteristic is that it involves use of an abbreviated form of written language code that seems closer to spoken language than to written language, as evidenced for instance by the following exchange:
calypso says, "are you ready to get going?"
Guest says, "sure"
Koh [Calpyso]: Aye, laddie
infomaniac says, "Yup. Let's take care of Koh's points."
A third is that the various participants seem to be entering the situation of utterance with quite different histories and degrees of knowledge about the text norms of the virtual community they are entering. In the following sequence we can see how the more routined "calypso", who is in reality one of the organisers of the virtual meeting, gives a helping hand by informing the new-comer "Guest" how to access the Introduction Poster:
Here, we need to dissect several parallelly occurring conversational threads in order to make sense of what is going on. The calypso-Guest exchange is just one such thread.
The other two are the one initiated by Koh:
and the exchange between Feldspar and BethK (see also below).
A fourth characteristic of this text is that the modes of symbolic interaction we see being evolved here are mediated by the technology of the medium they are being expressed in and constrained in various ways by the meta-codes of the programware that regulates the interactional norm systems of the virtual environment. This kind of knowledge is what is being imparted to the initiate Guest by calypso in the above example. In order to read a text that is placed in the virtual environment one needs to know that the procedure for accessing the text is to type "read info".
A fifth characteristic is that individual utterances of the various participants is identified by a varying range of pseudonyms with more or less exotic connotations: Koh, calypso, infomaniac, Feldspar etc..
To communicate something to other people in the virtual environment, one types:
say "<what one wants to say>"
which results in a message being sent to all of the form:
X says: "<what one wants to say>"
where X is one's personal pseudonym.
A sixth characteristic is that there seem to be some highly unconventional modes of interaction or behaviour:
"mahina falls into your midst".
A seventh characteristic is that certain instances of direct person to person communication (so-called "whispering") are indexed by means of square brackets enclosing the recipient's pseudonym. The Feldspar-BethK interchange on censorship is one example of this.
An eighth characteristic is that there are a number of indexical references to other text, discourse and institutional cultures tied to the life-worlds of the various participants, most of whom seem to come from the United States. Some examples of these:
infomaniac says, "Yup. Let's take care of Koh's points."
Koh says, "Well, I'm merely the relayer of those points..."
and
calypso says, "Ok, I just got out of Fetch. I'll bear with the poor interface"
and
Feldspar [to BethK]: Would that be MIT's suit, however? Even if I libel someone in Grand Central Station, it's not something GCS can be sued over.
A ninth characteristic is that there is a certain spontaneity and strangeness suggested by the fact that we do not know where the participants in are located geographically in the real world.
Koh says, "Can those of us on this continent make an earlier time?"
A tenth characteristic is that there is an indexical reference made to an object belonging to the virtual environment, namely an Introduction Poster.
calypso says, "has everyone had a chance to read the Introduction poster for tonight?"
Now, I do not have time here to discuss in detail all the phenomena that I have listed up here, but I merely want to point out that already in this very small snippet of interaction in a virtual environment we can find by simple observation a very large number of phenomena that more or less immediately grasp our attention in virtue of their qualititive characteristics and even strangeness and which, if we wish to do so, are available for us to investigate.
Another interesting thing about this log too, is that it is neither a pre- or post-performance nor a pre-or post-transcript in Roland Posner's sense (in press) but rather a transcript (or even a performance?) produced by a community of interpreters while they are right in the middle of the process of negotiating and developing the textual norms of the virtual environment that they are involved in.
So let us continue looking at this session log. We carry on where the previous snippet ended, and go on to perform the recommended act of reading the Introduction Poster referred to by calypso, one of the organisers of the meeting:
In this last sequence I appear, albeit briefly in the form of an indexical reference by Koh (while speaking to Beth) to a previous e-mail message I had sent to one of the organisers of the session.
Koh [Beth]: Pat from Norway says even moving it up four or five hours would make a big differece
This gave me the rather strange subjective experience of being able to see how I had influenced the course of that particular meeting without actually being there (even virtually as a participant in the virtual environment).
Although this is not the type of experience which is unique for those doing research into virtual environments of this kind (the same kind of thing can happen when one listens to tape recordings or watches video recordings of conversations), it is nonetheless interesting because the discourse is represented orthographically in the transcript by the people discussing the topic at the same time as they were having the meeting. Transcriptions made from sound- or videotapes of interactions of various kinds are always mediated by the transcriber and by the codifications and technologies of representation inherent in the system of transcription used. What we have here is clearly a sample of natural language situated in its situation of utterance (Benveniste 1966) at the time of its utterance by its utterers. Since its situation of utterance is within the mediated horizon of the technology that facilitates the constitution of the virtual environment being studied, it is authentic in the sense that it demonstrates a high degree of immediacy and reveals how negotiation and constitution of text-norms within this mediated horizon of expectation and expression potential occurs in situ.
The next step of course is to begin to try and make sense of what really is happening here. What is important to remember here too, is that the transcripts I have used as examples here in this paper remove us by at least one step from the mediated horizon of this particular life-world, since the transcripts are just such a freezing of natural language processes in time and space that I referred to earlier. Participating in, and observing these processes as they happen is a qualitatively different experience that will obviously give other kinds of insights into the nature of the process of text-norm constitution than my explication here is able to do. Research into the constitution of text-norm systems must in other words happen completely within the horizon of the virtual environment. This will require more active involvement from semioticians in these kinds of environments. The flow of the developing semiosis in distributed virtual environments of this kind is in many ways unique. We can tap the ongoing evolution and ontogenesis of natural language and textual norms as they occur, albeit at a very primitive level as yet. The consequences for fields of research such as cognitive science and artificial intelligence ought to be readily apparent.
Some preliminary reflections are probably necessary at this point in the light of what I have just said. We are seeing as I have already said, an enormous increase in the use of these kinds of distributed environments in various fields of science, and many interesting pioneer projects are already underway. I have for several years been considerably involved in the use of various kinds of virtual environments in my everyday work and research activities. I use e-mail almost every single day both for personal communication with people I already know well, and also in order to orient myself to what is going on in various other fields of research that I am interested in. I have been an active participant in a number of electronic mailing lists on a range of different topics, and though I have reduced my level of personal engagement somewhat the last few years due to time constraints, I still follow and take part in discussions on at least four such lists on a regular basis. I have experimented with writing html documents that can be linked into World Wide Web, taken part in many experimental meetings and events that have taken place in Multi User Dialogs, and I have begun to develop an elementary virtual environment myself which I have tried out with some of my colleagues and students.
All these experiences have given me a number of reservations. One is with regard to the present potential of these kinds of communication medium for developing the kind of interpersonally oriented sociocultural environment necessary that seems necessary for the evolution and promulgation of really good scientific writing. One of the most problematic aspects of this seems to me to be the difficulty of establishing and developing deep interpersonal relationships with others purely by means of electronic media of this kind. We do not for example seem able to gain the sudden shock of recognition of the 'other as other', since this necessitates the meeting of two gazes, and this cannot happen in a text-based virtual environment. Even with video-based communication, such as that one can experience by use of ISDN video-telephone systems, true eye-contact is not possible (Coppock 1994). That can only happen when we meet other people face-to-face. We can however quite easily initiate contacts with other people in this way, and we can even make life in the virtual environment relatively pleasant or unpleasant for others through the ways in which we interpret and try to influence the development of the text norms of the virtual environment. We can experiment virtually with other ways of interacting with other people than those we have been socialised into in the real world. But a deeper understanding of how experiences in virtual environments affect behaviour and understanding in the real world seems still in some way to evade us, so the need for more systematic research by semioticians into the quality of "life" and the semiotic expression potential of these environments and their relationship to the real world is pressing.
So, to sum up. There is a very clear need for adoptation of a phenomenologically oreinted semiotic approach in order to understand and explicate the evolution and development of (and thus the processes of change inherent in) collaborative working communities in distributed virtual environments. I can also see that researching the growth and development of such environments will pose a series of very new and exciting challenges for semiotics. One practical problem researchers may face is that of access; one needs relatively advanced equipment and connectivity that makes it possible for researchers interested in studying these phenomena to immerse themselves in, and to participate in developing virtual environments. There are too, some basic ethical problems that need to be faced in connection with any kind of ethnologically grounded research as psychologists, anthropologists and ethnologists already have demonstrated very well. Another practical problem that has to be considered is the relative primitiveness of the interfaces available today. Merely using a simple (or even an advanced) computer keyboard as an interface for instance restricts and constrains the production and flow of signs in the virtual environment in a number of subtle ways, and thus also the subjective immersion experience in virtual environments accessed by means of this kind of interfacing device. The next step might be to investigate how semiosis in distributed virtual environments is facilitated and constrained by means of speech-to-text technology, by sound and video interfaces and by virtual reality equipment such as 3D headsets, sensor-equipped computer gloves with force feedback and even full body suits as interfacing devices. There will be many different kinds of expressive potential made available, and at the same time, many new kinds of constraints imposed by the medium that will affect the flow of signs in important ways and which will need to be taken seriously if the qualitative value of the experience is to be optimized. As Umberto Eco said in a conversation we had recently (Coppock 1995(b)): "The kind of interface I would really like to see is one which may be moved by my mind!". Such interfaces are obviously still a very long way off at the present time!
A positive aspect of researching how textual norms develop and change in virtual environments is clearly that of participating actively in a fringe area of research right at the forefront of our own evolutionary trajectory. Here is a chance for the field of semiotics and semioticians to contribute to the development of more holistic and integrated theories and research practices that can lead to the improvement and enhancement of communication technologies which someday may come play a vital role in the constitution of completely new forms of global democracy and scientific understanding.