Before we go on to look more closely at some characteristics of conversations in object-oriented distributed environments, first a few words on the notion of textual environments as contexts for conversation.
Meetings in object-oriented environments will take place in textual spaces such as the one reproduced below which purports to represent Piazza Maggiore at the heart of the medieval city of Bologna in Italy. A visitor entering this virtual space is greeted by the following text:
You are at Bologna.
You are standing in the centre of an expansive and beautiful piazza right in the very heart of Bologna. It is called Piazza Maggiore - the Grand Piazza. Straight ahead of you you can see the immense cathedral of San Petronio. Bologna is a medieval city in the very center of Northern Italy. Some people call it the Red City. Is it because the dominant colour of many of the walls of the houses there are painted in different shades of red...?
Nobody else is here.
Obvious exits:
Norway [to Patrick's Office], southwest [to Via Ca' Selvatica], and
portale [to San Petronio].
Seen from a material viewpoint, this spatial description is a purely fictional entity. It is a small piece of text which tells its own story, either this be autonomously qua text, or collectively as part of some larger hypertext - which in this case would be the current structure of the larger object-oriented environment to which it belongs[7].
At the same time, this description also represents context in a rather broader sense, namely that which systemic functional theorists[8] generally refer to as `context of situation'. This is because the virtual Piazza Maggiore above in practice can function as a conversational space which people from all over the world can enter, meet one another and talk. Like any other multicultural real-world context of situation it possesses a dymanic potential for change and development over time as a result of what is going on, who and what are there, who is doing what to who or what, and why they are doing whatever they happen to be doing. In the case of the real world Piazza Maggiore in Bologna, one effect of the sort of cultural activities that actually go on there might be the erection of a giant stage with a wall of video screens for some public entertainment event like an open-air gospel choir evening or a silent film festival. Our virtual Piazza Maggiore might be similarly modified (albeit with a good deal less physical effort and material expense) by organizers of cultural or other kinds of activities there by simply rewriting the description text, by introducing some new objects or otherwise changing the functional characteristics of the object space. So, although it is sparsely delineated, a simple spatial description of the kind shown above attempts to model in the form of a written text at least some aspects of `non-virtual', real-world contexts.
One reason for trying to do modelling work of this kind can be to test a general hypothesis that certain characteristics of textual contexts of this kind will come to affect the flow of communication and interaction in the virtual space in ways which are not necessarily specifiable in advance. In this sense a spatial description text like the one introduced above represents an exploratory, as opposed to regulative, hypothesis for investigating pragmatic issues regarding the relationship between text (structure), discourse (process) and context (field)[9]. There are also a number of important epistmological and ontological issues which may be brought into focus in this connection, for instance regarding to the actual ontological status of the code objects that go to make up the virtual environment, of which the spatial description above is an example. It will certainly be necessary to consider objects of this kind as dynamic, not only from a material point of view - they are reprogrammable in order to `look' or `behave' differently, thus changing their basic `nature', but also from a semiotic, representational point of view - their interpretations in terms of symbolic meanings are clearly socially and culturally negotiable, but can they be said to actually exist?
Several pragmatic, epistemological and ontological considerations of this kind are implicitly tied up in some current research which is studying changes in textual and interactional norm systems arising as distributed virtual environments become a new arena for cooperative scientific writing and exchange[10]. Other studies by researchers in the social and behavioural sciences such as sociolinguistics[11], social psychology[12], sociology[13], cultural and gender studies[14], and anthropology[15], suggest that the study of emergent cultural and social norm systems in distributed virtual environments represents a unique source of comparative knowledge regarding the constitution of human cultures, social groups, personal and collective identity and gender.
Ethnographies of conversations and other transactional activities associated with the scientific writing process as they are transferred to distributed virtual environments are expected to provide new insights into the relationship between use of new communication technologies in science and changes in textual and interactional norm systems among scientific authors who use these technologies, as well as into the constitution of distributed scientific communities that are developing based on these changing norm systems. Surprisingly enough, however, little or no work has been done to date in this area by people in the more traditional communication sciences such as semiotics, linguistics, semantics, text/ discourse studies and conversational analysis (one exception to this being a recent collection of exploratory work edited by Susan Herring[16]), and it would seem that there is still considerable room for a lot of innovative and interesting research to be done in this particular field in the future.