Groups of institutional co-workers, such as those mentioned in the article by Violi in this volume, who use electronic mail on a daily basis to communicate in the context of their working environment are participating in the development of a distributed virtual environment. In such environments personal and institutional messages are routinely sent from one-to-many, or from many-to-one within the organization, not only from one-to-one, as is generally the case with conventional paper letters (Violi 1985).
The network infrastructure, software and communication protocols that make electronic mail exchanges technically possible constitute the technological mediation of the environment. Messages exchanged by participants, the individual and collective meanings that they attach to these, and the everyday practices and habits that develop through using this form of communication represent the socio-cultural `glue' which instantiates the socio-cultural sub-system that is the organization, as well as participants' construals of themselves as members of this organization. There is, in other words, a dynamic complex of reciprocal interdependencies between the technologies which create and maintain distributed virtual environments, and organizational systems of norms for communication and interaction which emerge as a result of members participating in various kinds of co-operative activities in these environments.
`Conversations' by means of electronic mail are considered to take place when two or more persons use this form of communication in order to discuss some specific theme over an extended period of time by exchanging messages related to this particular theme.
Electronic mail `conversations' differ in three fundamental ways from face-to-face conversations:
1. they are carried on in written, rather than in spoken language
2. they are managed non-contemporaneously rather than contemporaneously - interlocutors receive, read, compose, edit and send messages whenever it suits them
3. interlocutors are not bound to a context of situation involving temporal and physical co-presence while communicating
Similar constraints, with some additional considerations regarding use of semiotic systems other than written language, will be applicable to `conversational' activities involving World Wide Web documents in non-contemporaneous forms of communication. In the next section we shall examine this issue more closely.