i) Lack of physical co-presence
Generally speaking, when we now go over to discussing what have been referred to here as `participant embodiment status issues', and their effects on conversations and conversational norm systems, we are considering written interactions which are being mediated by means of artificial (non-`intelligent') agent objects (also sometimes referred to as `proxies'). Proxies like the Joe, CT_PeteH, JayC, Gustavo, sle, and Donald characters that figure in the conversational transcript above, are themselves virtual objects: small pieces of computer code which provide their owners with a virtual `identity' that they can manipulate and interact with other objects through in the virtual environment.
Real world participants are then in one sense `disembodied' while interacting through a proxy in this way, but they are of course also at the same time `embodied', since they are physiologically, cognitively and emotionally immersed in the phenomenologies and animate forms of their own bodies, wherever they may be in the real world.The key point here is however that they are not, and cannot be, physically co-present for one another in the virtual environment. Their embodied physicality is mutually inaccessible to each another - seeing[27], touching, feeling the warmth or odours of the bodies of other participants is not possible. The only `physical' information interlocutors have access to about each other is a text: the way a person has chosen to present him- or herself through the description of the agent object they `own'.
Participants `log on into', `jack into, `enter', or `put on' the virtual identity engendered by their agent proxy each time they connect to the virtual environment. And indeed, many frequent visitors to object-oriented virtual environments of this kind do tend to refer to the phenomenal experience of doing so in precisely these kinds of terms. The proxy character, and words and actions `spoken' or `emoted' by this character, are all that other participants have to relate to while they are `together'. This particular type of disembodiment situation opens up for various kinds of role-playing and identity swapping activities, and there is quite a number of mainly anecdotal reports of comic or otherwise effects of such role-playing and identity swapping actitvities i distributed virtual environments of this type, with gender-change experimentation being one of the most common[28].
Experiences using distributed virtual environments for distance education experiments at university level in Norway in the course of the last four years[29] have shown that the disembodiment experience inherent in the use of this medium of communication can have some rather unexpected effects on student - teacher and individual - group role perceptions and relations that appear to actually carry over into real-world situations afterwards. These effects can be both positive and negative, and some of the more positive effects which also persist in real world situations over time have been observed after even quite short periods of group interactions in virtual environments. These effects seem especially marked for quieter students who for various reasons are shy or anxious about communicating in larger groups, or with authority figures in face-to-face situations. Individual students have reported experiencing a kind of `liberating' effect when they no longer feel bound to relating to others from `within' a physical body which can be seen or heard to blush or stammer by everyone present. Some similar anxiety-reducing effects in communicating with supervisors who are generally considered to be authority figures have also been reported by university teachers in Norway who have used electronic mail to carry out supervision, counselling and other follow-up activities with trainee teachers who are placed in external schools during teaching practice periods.
At this point it is important to point out that more or less all research done so far in this particular area has been largely based on qualitatitive methodologies, and to some extent anecdotal materials, and is thus, at least as far as we are aware, not only unreplicated, but also ureplicable. There remain therefore a large number of important questions which are still unanswered, and which will require much more systematic and detailed research in order to establish the validity and reliability of these kind of more generalized impressions which have been gathered so far.
ii) Lack of mutual eye contact and gaze
Basically, what is goeing on between participants during conversations in object-oriented distributed environments is the same as what is goeing on during telephone, television or even video-telephone conversations where two or more participants are involved, namely talk. One of the main differences is or course that in distributed object-oriented virtual environments interlocutors are relating to and reacting to what is being `said' in writing by other particpiants' proxy characters, rather than to their voices in an earpiece, or their video images on a screen.
Note, however, that in none of these conversational settings mentioned above will it be possible for participants to directly engage the gaze of another participant in the same way as they can in face-to-face conversations. This fact affects not only the general process of conversation but also some of the more specific forms that these interactions take. Here it will not be possible to go into any great detail about every single type of effect which this lack of mutual gaze may have on conversational norms, so we shall restrict ourselves here to making some rather general observations, especially regarding situations where two or more interlocutors actively take part in conversations, and where co-regulation of multi-party talk is thus an important issue.
Since participants cannot engage in mutual eye contact or follow the gaze of their interlocutors in an object-oriented environment, conversational regulation by mean of establishing or breaking eye contact with interlocutors, shift of gaze direction, changes in facial expression or any other small head and eye movements will not be feasible. Information about the movements of other interlocutors within the virtual space will generally be restricted to larger comings and goings, except when participants actively choose to make other kinds of `actions' explicit by `emoting' them into the conversational space (see below for more discussion of this and an example).
We have found that initially at least, this lack of mutual eye contact tends to make management of group conversations problematic, especially for novices[30]. This can amongat other things lead to difficulties in `giving each another the floor' since this kind of move must be explicitly signalled by means of a `spoken' text-utterance directed to one or more of the participants present, as in the following example:
PatrickC [to John] "your turn John"
or by means of an explicitly emoted[31] `non-verbal' cue such as in
PatrickC looks expectantly at John and waits for him to speak...
This of course makes turn-taking in general a different kind of process than in face-to-face conversations. Generally speaking, then, all kinds of regulation of turn-taking in multi-party conversation in distributed virtual environments requires som form of alternative strategies which must be made contingent on the technological constraints of the medium of communication.
Indeed, the specialized kinds of communication functions offered by distributed virtual environments are precisely designed to facilitate the use of such alternative strategies. The use of the `to' command[32] in the first example above is one system-specific way of directing an utterance to one, and only one other participant, rather than to the whole group, and it thus simulates the same kind of communicative function in the virtual environment as shifting one's gaze in order to directly address someone else in the group would perform in a face-to-face conversation.
All non-verbal cues like the one shown in the second example above, whether they are phatic, `backchannelling' or otherwise, and which are performed in the distributed environment by means of the emote function, must necessarily first be keyed in as a piece of text and then `entered' into the virtual environment by interlocutors in order to be actualised as part of the global communication situation. This means that `non-verbal communication' in a distributed virtual environment in each and every case constitutes an intentional act, at the very least involving some kind of motor activity at a keyboard on the part of the sender. This is of course not normally the case for similar non-verbal cues in face-to-face conversation, although some of these cues may of course be socially coded and intentionally produced - Charles Darwin once noted for instance that only adults sneer, while small children do not[33]. In everyday life however, it will often be those non-verbal cues which are not immediately interpretable as intentional which will attract most attention and really cause interlocutors to sit up and pay close attention to what is being said.
In the kinds of distributed virtual environments we are concerned with here the intentionality or not of such non-verbal cues is not really an issue, whereas their spontaneity, authenticity and actual meanings most definitely is. Let us for instance consider the following example:
PatrickC looks completely horrified and turns as pale as a sheet
An `utterance' of this kind will almost automatically come to acquire some kind of metacommunicational and even ironic set of meanings and connotations when it is presented and received in this way as a piece of written text. If however, a similar physio-emotional reaction on my part was to be observed as it was actually occurring by my interlocutor in the course of a face-to-face conversation, the situation would be very different indeed.
As it stands above as a piece of `disembodied' written text it may first of all conceivably be a lie, since my interlocutor is not able to actually cast a glance at at me in order to check whether the information I have chosen to provide about my assumed physiological, emotional and mental state at the time of writing is correct.
Secondly, in face-to-face conversation a physiological reaction of this kind which normally will signal strong emotional affect is almost impossible to simulate and to hide from others who are present.
Finally, the fact that it must be written down in the first place in order to be `uttered' and `observed' by my interlocutors means that it takes a certain amount of time to appear for them, and it can therefore not possibly be occuring spontaneously for the first time as it is being read by them.
What is being communicated then, is a kind of report or simulation of some presumed, already past, set of physiological states and events, which in any case is not shareable at its actual moment of origin by all those present. There is no doubt that this makes `non-verbal' cues `uttered' in this way in conversations in distributed virtual environments qualitatively and phenomenally quite different from similar types of cues which may be mutually experienced in face-to-face conversations.
What possible long-term effects this kind of potential for producing delayed selective displays of simulated emotional responses may have on the development of interpersonal relationships initiated in distributed virtual environments are by no means clear at the present time. There is however a certain amount of anecdotal evidence [34]which implies that deep interpersonal relationships which are initiated in this type of environment require quite a long period of mutual adjustment if they are actually transferred into real-world, face-to-face situations, and this too, would appear to be another important area for further research.