Summary Week 4

Interaction in virtual worlds takes place in a spatial context. The interactants respond in various ways to this context but they also discursively create various spaces in their interaction. They negotiate spatial orientation through the use of linguistic deictic elements, create co-presence and joint attention through the gestures and positioning of their avatars and they need to handle screen space as well as the physical space of their surrounding. This article discusses how the participants try to organize themselves in the virtual reality of Second Life, while situated in different locations in the physical world, and it demonstrates how the interactants rely on space for their orientation and interaction within the virtual world and how the physical world is brought into the online interaction.

The methodology that they employed for this study was to approach the data set in an explorative manner by combining participant observation with active participation (Eysenbach and Till, 2001). The first step was to identify that the ‘negotiation of space’ is a topic that is not only of academic interest but also crucially important for the newbies in the sense that they had to learn how to navigate space in Second Life or they could not have participated in class. The authors thus wondered how the newbie student residents navigated the spatial challenges that the virtual world Second Life posed them. Second, discussing their experiences and observations in light of ‘space’ in the team, allowed the author to identify five nexuses of interest in which they observe the newbies negotiating and navigating the virtual space:

(1) establishing co-presence and joint attention;

(2) negotiating a common perspective;

(3) navigating and coordinating within virtual space;

(4) coordinating the different layers of space (the quasi three-dimensional world, the screen interface, and the space of the human in the physical world); and

(5) the spatial/physical experience of the avatar.

As a last step, they identified extracts in the data where they have evidence of the negotiation of space that might serve as examples of gaining spatial literacy.

Its sample is too limited in size and scope to argue that they have witnessed the complete appropriation of spatial literacy for the interactants in the new environment, but they feel confident that they have been able to explore instances of negotiation and navigation of space that might lead to such a learning process.

Second Life is only one example of a virtual world with all its spatial and communicative affordances and complexities. We communicate both in physical life and in virtual worlds, and in many situations the boundaries are blurred and fuzzy. The newbie users of our small-scale case study had to learn to navigate in a new and complex environment, and linguists have to learn to describe more complex interactive realities.

Locker, M. A. (2015). Negotiation of space in Second Life newbie interaction. Communicating time and place on digital media, 9(1), 34-45. doi: 10.1016/j.dcm.2015.06.002