For many readers of this present volume, one of the central notions introduced in the title above, namely that of a `distributed virtual environment', may not be immediately transparent, and if we are to go on and discuss what is involved in making ethnographies of conversation in such environments a brief initial explanation is probably needed.[1]
In our present context the term `distributed virtual environment' will be defined in its most general sense as any technologically mediated environment which facilitates, while simultaneously depending upon for its existence, human communication, interaction and resource-management within the virtual environment, and which facilitates similar communication, interaction and resource-management processes both locally and globally in non-virtual environments.
In practice this means that individuals and groups located geographically more or less anywhere in the world are able to log on via their respective computer networks into a shared interactional space - a distributed virtual environment - allowing them to communicate and cooperate at a distance with others with similar access to the same virtual environment.
Those individuals, groups and institutions who take part in the creation, management and development of the virtual environment are themselves distributed since they are geographically distant from one another and are not physically co-present at any one location while they are interacting with one another. Any sense these actors have of being members of an emerging virtual community is primarily intersubjectively instantiated and construed. It is, however, also materially instantiated due to mediational aspects of the technology used to maintain the environment and to communicate there. The emergent virtual community and its environment depend on contributions from individuals and groups who, due to geographical distance, may seldom or never meet one another face-to-face. Contributions may be both communication- and action-oriented, and relate to the creation, management and exchange of information and material resources not only `internally', i.e. `within' the distributed virtual environment, but also locally and globally in real world environments `external' to it.
A locally nourished, globally facilitated community of this kind is both distributed and virtual since it depends for its existence on the coordination of a number of local initiatives with their origins in different physical, socio-cultural and technological domains, while at the same time existing `factually' only in the individual and collective minds of participants. For those who consider themselves, and who are considered by others, to use Goffman's term: `ratified participants'[2], in the emergent virtual community, the distributed environment represents a distinct and unique form of technologically mediated socio-cultural environment. This is one of the main reasons why making ethnographies of conversations which have their origins in distributed virtual environments is an appropriate way of understanding the underlying structures, functions and socio-cultural norm systems operative in these environments.