SIRM
SOCIAL IMPACTS
OF RICH MEDIA:
FROM VIDEO-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION TO COLLABORATIVE VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS
Moses A. Boudourides
Computer Technology Institute (CTI) and
University of Patras, Department of Mathematics
265 00 Patras, Greece
http://www.math.upatras.gr/~mboudour/
Richness and Presence
One of the most important themes of
communication theory concerns the range of cross-media comparisons, i.e.,
comparisons among various forms and modes of communication (Lea, 1991). Clearly
such comparisons are related to media choice, media substitution and bear
various practical implications. According to many theorists, it is attributes of
the media that drive media comparisons and influence media choice. In
particular, the two critical factors, which are in general considered to
characterize communication media, are the extent to which a medium conveys the
‘social presence’ of the participants and possesses ‘rich information’ reducing
communicational uncertainty.
The social presence theory was
developed by Short, Williams and Christie (1976) and indicates the degree to
which communicants psychologically perceive the presence of the other through
expressions of warmth, intimacy, familiarity etc. (see Rice and Love, 1987, for
a summary of studies measuring social presence in computer-mediated
communication). Clearly social presence depends on the medium. For instance, it
is minimal or almost absent in a typed document or in an e-mail; but telephones
carry voice although no visual cues; furthermore, video-mediated communication
supports transmission of both voice and some physical images. As for the
effects of the medium, Short (1974) suggested that lower social presence
resulted in greater persuasion and social influence (in contrast to the
prevailing assumptions about CMC, as remarked by Spears, Lea and Postmes,
2000).
Media richness has been developed by
Daft and Lengel (1984, 1986) and is based on the theory of organizational
information processing according to which uncertainty and equivocality
reduction is the main goal of communication. Daft and Lengel proposed four
factors determining media richness: speed of feedback, channel mode (visual,
audio or mixed), personal focus and language use. In this way, rich media
facilitate communication as long as they support feedback, multiple cues,
personal focus and language variety, while, on the opposite, lean media rely on
rules, forms and procedures. Daft and Lengel considered the following ranking
of media in order of richness: face-to-face (FTF), telephone, personal written
documents (e.g., letters, memos etc.), impersonal unaddressed documents (e.g.,
reports, bulletins, etc.) and numeric documents. Sitkin, Sutcliffe and
Barrios-Choplin (1992) expanded the media ranking to include e-mail and
videoconferencing (also adding a fifth factor of media richness: communication
target). In further extensions of this theory the role of symbolic interactions
has been emphasized so that by shifting the analysis from individuals and tasks
towards interactions they could study the social construction of communication
processes (Trevino, Daft and Lengel, 1990).
However, a number of criticisms have
been raised against these relatively narrow and deterministic theories of
social presence and media richness expressing an opposition to their
rationalist concerns for organizational efficiency and productivity (Lea,
1991). Thus, in at least what concerns e-mail, trying to keep distances away
from both positivist and interpretivist approaches, Ngwenyama and Lee (1997)
have followed the perspective of Habermas’ critical social theory, on which
they have articulated an alternative definition of media richness and implemented
a corresponding empirical study of organizational communication.
The previous approaches of media
comparisons might appear somehow awkward in the sense of that they might appear
as putting comparisons prior to proper definitions. Now the problem of media
definitions is that one has to carefully balance their dual constitution: media
are both human experiences and technological artefacts. Grounding media
definitions merely on incommensurate technologies would be futile,
inoperational and it would hinder any media comparisons. What remains is
defining media in terms of human experience and, according to Jonathan Steuer
(1995), presence is the key concept
for such a definition. In fact, presence can be thought of as the experience of
a physical environment, the sense of being in an environment. Defined so,
presence does not refer to placing someone physically at some location and
around some surroundings, but to the perception of those surroundings as
mediated by both automatic and controlled mental processes (Gibson, 1979). Said
otherwise, presence is one’s sense of being in an environment, independently if
one’s body is physically located there. According to Heeter (1992), there are
three distinct types of presence that contribute to the experience of ‘being
there’: subjective personal presence, social presence and environmental
presence. Lombard and Ditton (1997) claim that people conceptualize presence in
the following six ways: (1) as social richness, (2) as realism, (3) as
transportation, (4) as immersion, (5) as social actor within medium and (6) as
medium being a social actor.
Now, as in media experiences perception is mediated by a communication
technology, the result is that, experiencing a medium, one is forced to
perceive simultaneously two separate environments: the physical environment of
one’s actual presence and the environment presented through the medium. In
other words, presence refers to the natural perception of an environment and telepresence refers to the mediated
perception of an environment. So, telepresence signifies the extent to which
one feels present in a mediated environment rather than in an immediate
physical environment (Steurer, 1995). Loomis (1992) associated this phenomenon
to that of distal attribution or externalization, which refers to the
referencing our perceptions to an external space beyond the limits of the
sensory organs themselves. According to Loomis, telepresence differs from
distal attribution to the extent of how aware the user is of linkages between
the local and the remote environments: telepresence supports only the
interpretation of being somewhere else while distal attribution occurs when the
user is aware of the linkages between environments.
It is a fact that all mediated
experiences are first compared over person experiences and, in this sense,
face-to-face communication represents a model for all interactive communication
(Durlak, 1987). However, since telepresence is necessarily a mediated
experience, it will also be affected by properties of the involved medium.
Jonathan Steuer (1995) considers that telepresence is a function of both the
representational powers of technology and the individual perceiver. He
identifies two technological dimensions determining telepresence: vividness and
interactivity. Vividness refers to
the ability of a technology to produce a sensorially rich mediated environment.
Interactivity refers to the degree to
which users of a medium can influence and participate to modify in real time
the form or content of the mediated environment. Two important determinants of
vividness are sensory breadth and depth. Breadth is related to the number of
simultaneous sensor modalities of presented information. Depth is related to
the amount of information (the resolution or the bandwidth) provided within the
available modalities. Three important determinants of interactivity are speed,
range and mapping. Speed of interaction is equivalent to response time (with
real-time interaction being an upper limit). Range of interaction refers to the
number of possibilities for action at any given time. Mapping of interaction
refers to the ability of the system to map its controls to changes in the
mediated environment in a natural and predictable way. Traditional media (e.g.,
print, radio, telephone) and e-mail are relatively low in vividness (both
breadth and depth), while new media (e.g., videoconferencing, virtual reality)
are high. However, some low in vividness media can be more interactive than
other relatively high in vividness media (e.g., computer-mediated communication
vs. print, radio, television and cinema).
As the locus of telepresence is the
perceiver, it varies across individuals and depends on immediate situational
factors, ongoing personal concerns, the number of actors, the social and cultural
environment etc. Of course, telepresence should be distinguished from
unmediated ‘real’ experiences and also purely psychic phenomena (such as dreams
or hallucinations). But the experiential nature of human interaction should
enrich the discussion about communication and engagement. A good example is
given by the work of Brenda Laurel (1990; 1991). Laurel described media use in
terms of mimesis, seeing the relationship between user and technology as action
in a play, and encouraged users to develop a first-person, rather than
third-person, relationship with her or his mediated environments. Similarly,
Joan Mazur (2000) has recently urged media theorists and developers of
distributed visual and virtual environments to capitalize on insights from film
theories and cinematic techniques. In the same direction, Bennington and Gay
(2000) have drawn upon phenomenological and surrealist film theory to explore
the perceptual, expressive, intentional and interpretive dimensions of
interactive media, complementing current semiotic explorations of hypertext and
hypermedia.
Video-Mediated Communication (VMC)
Video-mediated communication (VMC)
or videoconferencing is a synchronous (real-time) communication system
simultaneously transmitting both video and audio. By the advent of information
and communication technologies, this transmission is transacted between
computers and through computer networks. Because of the computer involvement,
sometimes VMC is referred to as ‘desktop videoconferencing’ or ‘computer-mediated
visual communication.’ In fact, thanks to the emergence of the new digital
technologies, video, sound, text, graphics, animation and other multimedia can
be computationally manipulated and transmitted across high bandwidth computer
networks. Even at viable network bandwidth, improved compression algorithms,
more efficient network protocol standards and faster computers are soon
expected to provide affordable VMC systems of acceptable quality. For instance,
the introduction of multicast media transmission over the TCP/IP protocol
(Eriksson, 1994) and over high-speed computer networks as ATM is expected to
bring more video and multimedia facilities to the Internet users.
The first VMC system appeared in the
mid-1960’s: AT&T’s PicturePhone (Falk, 1973). However, PicturePhone failed
to gain commercial success and up to now videoconferencing is far from been
considered as been massively used in comparison to other and older
communication technologies. According to Hubert Knoblauch, until 1999 only
about ten thousand video-phones have been sold world-wide and there are no
indications of increase (Knoblauch, 1999). In general, high costs in computing
and network infrastructures together with uncertainty over the benefits of
collaborative multimedia are attributed as significant barriers to an extensive
adoption and use of VMC (Tang and Isaacs, 1993).
As a matter of fact, the first
research in the 1970’s on the effects of various media on collaborative
activity has not been encouraging for the value of video (Williams, 1997). In
their studies of problem-solving tasks in various communication modes including
typewriting, video only, voice and video, and face-to-communication, Ochsman
and Chapanis (1974) found that video has no significant effects over audio on
communication times or behavior. Conrath and co-workers (1977) in their
evaluation of four different telemedicine systems (audio only, audio plus black
and white still frame images, audio plus full-motion black and white video,
audio plus full-color video) found no significant differences in diagnostic
accuracy and the effectiveness of patient management. However, when they
surveyed the patients’ attitudes about the four systems, they found a
preference towards the more sensory rich modes. In a more recent study, Gale
(1990) compared three ways of computer supported collaborative work: sharing
data only (in a whiteboard), sharing data and audio, and sharing data, audio
and video. He concluded that there were no significant differences in the
quality of the output or the time to complete the tasks. But he did find that
collaborators’ perceptions of productivity increased with bandwidth and, so, he
suggested that higher bandwidth media would enable groups to perform more
social activities.
By an ethnomethodological
perspective and using conversation analysis, Heath and Luff (1991; 1992a;
1992b) have studied the transformations of visual conduct caused by video
technology. Comparing to the ways by which talk is managed and regulated in
face-to-face conversation, they found a relative impotence of gesture and an
ineffectiveness of gaze in VMC systems. Similarly, but from a different
methodological perspective, Sellen (1992) and O’Conaill, Whittaker and Wilbur
(1993) have investigated the impact of video on verbal conduct. Leaving aside
the human communicational aspects of mediated interaction, Gaver (1992)
concentrated on the “affordances” of the video technology. Focusing on the
two-dimensionality of video images and the discontinuity of movement in video
space, he drew a number of implications on the ways and the properties of the
medium that afford actions to individuals or not.
In short, the majority of the VMC
studies (cf. Finn, Sellen and Wilbur, 1997) concentrates on a comparison
between face-to-face (FTF) and video-mediated communication and almost all of
them agree to that even high-quality VMC cannot replicate FTF communication.
VMC has been accused of restricting conversational coordination and
interaction, depriving spontaneity although satisfactorily supporting the
transmission of social cues and affective information (depending on the used
technological system). Due to limited access to global visual conduct including
the environment of the communicants, their peripheral perceptions of
co-participants and their conversational routines, VMC promotes communicative
asymmetries more than FTF or telephone calls (Heath, Luff and Sellen, 1997).
Beyond all these and even if new technological achievements could overpass all
these hang-ups, it would remain unsolved the serious problem of the video
intrusion into the private space of individuals leading to a number of
perplexing ethical and legal issues (Mackay, 1995).
A plausible interpretation of the
previous rather negative evaluation of the VMC usability was given by Tang and
Isaacs (1993; Isaacs and Tang, 1994). According to these researchers, most of
the previous studies have used artificial groups working on short contrived
tasks (unrelated to their actual work) and they measured the product (e.g., decisions, solutions,
completion times) of their fabricated interactions. Isaacs and Tang argue that
the value of video would be more likely to be visible in actual work activity
of real working groups by studying the process
of interactions (perceptions of productivity, task focus, degree of
interactivity etc.) among the people in such groups. To support their claims,
they set out a number of real experiments of collaborative activity, where they
found that the video channel was used to help mediate interactions substituting
shorter, two-person meetings, longer phone calls and e-mail usage (Tang and
Isaacs, 1993). Moreover, they found that a video channel enhances the ability
to show understanding, forecast responses, give non-verbal information, improve
verbal descriptions and express attitudes (Isaacs and Tang, 1994). However,
comparing VMC to FTF, they realized a difficulty in the former to notice
peripheral cues, ‘control the floor,’ have side conversations, point to things
and manipulate real-world objects (Isaacs and Tang, 1994). Similarly, Fish,
Kraut, Root and Rice (1992; 1993) evaluated a particular VMC system (called
“Cruiser”) for its adequacy to support informal communication. They found that
this video system increased the spontaneity and frequency of communication,
supported social relationships, was capable in coping with the most complex and
equivocal communications problems and was helpful in integrating new members
into the working groups. In fact, they claimed that it was used more like a telephone
or e-mail than like physically mediated FTF communication. Such positive
evaluations of VMC are also shared by a number of studies in the edited volume
of Finn et al. (1997). There are
claims that the long-term use of high-quality video in work organizations
indeed appears to favor VMC over audio and other less rich modes of
communication.
The fact is that the communicational
space of VMC is quite different from the one of other modes of communication.
Although the video-mediated interpersonal space maintains a sense of
telepresence or copresence through the visibility of gestures and facial
expressions of communicants, it is far from reproducing the various everyday
non-verbal cues. Because of the discontinuity between the interconnected remote
spaces in VMC, the resulting extended communicational space appears distorted
and asymmetrical in many respects. To understand these distortions and
asymmetries, Harrison, Ishii and Chignell (1994) have chosen to study and to
experiment upon a framework of interpersonal space consisting of three
dimensions: interpersonal distance, angles of orientation and gaze.
·
Interpersonal
distance or proximity is one of the simplest examples
of non-verbal communication and it concerns the distance between interacting
conversants. Its study, named proxemics
after Edward Hall (1966), refers to the ways people perceive and use space as a
communicative device. For instance, Hall considers four distances and
concomitant voice levels that usually people employ: intimate, personal, social
and public distances. Of course, interpersonal distance is conditioned by
personality, personal relationships, culture and communication and produces
various psychological and behavioral effects. One such effect is persuasion,
as, for example, sales people know what it means to approach customers closer
than in other occasions. According to the studies and experiments of Grayson
and Coventry (1998), proxemic information is preserved in VMC and produces
similar effects to FTF interactions but less pronounced (since video is
conveying only visual proxemic information compared to the multimodal one of
FTF interactions).
·
Angle
of orientation determines the relative positions between
conversants and in dyadic interactions is configured according to four ways:
face-to-face, at right angles, side-by-side and back-to-back. Differences in
choices of these positions are influenced by the type of task, the status and
relationship between individuals, culture and other social factors (not to
mention spatial or environmental constraints partially occluding the view
between conversants).
·
Gaze (as a non-mutual looking) and eye contact (as a simultaneous mutual
interpersonal looking) are important attributes of visual communication. Gaze
direction regulates the conversation flow, provides feedback about what is
being discussed, communicates facial expressions and emotions, directs
attention, indicates attentiveness and shapes the enacted interpersonal
relationship (Argyle and Dean, 1965; Argyle, Ingham, Alkena and McCallin,
1973). Video gaze cues have been studied by Colston and Schiano (1995) in an
experiment, where observers rated the difficulty people had in solving
problems, based either just upon how long the person looked at each problem, or
also how long her or his gaze lingered on it before being asked to move on.
Their first results showed a linear relationship between gaze duration and
rated difficulty with lingering as an added significant factor.
Morikawa and Maesako (1998) added some more dimensions of interpersonal space, other than facial expressions, the most important being:
·
Gestures playing a significant role in communication processes as cues of body
language. According to Heath and Luff (1991; 1992a), it becomes harder to
understand gestures transmitted by video. Morikawa and Maesako (1998) indicate
that the ambiguity in the interpretation of gestures in VMC might result from
the lack of control of global and peripheral environmental information between
the remotely located conversants.
Coming back to the role of real-time video as an interpersonal
communication technology, Steve Whittaker (1996) reviewed and assessed three
distinct hypotheses about the role of video in communicational processes
(further exploring the corresponding design implications in each of them):
·
First, the non-verbal
communication hypothesis, according to which the role of video is to
supplement audio. Examining claims that the visual channel supports the
transmission of three different non-verbal types of cues, cognitive, turn-taking
and social or affective, Whittaker concluded that in them the importance of
video over audio is rather overestimated.
·
Second, the role of video for connection and opportunistic communication in the sense
that, instead of enhancing a pre-established audio connection, video can be
used to establish remote opportunistic communications, by providing information
about other participants’ availability for communication. Whittaker
distinguished three particular mechanisms of video for connection, glance, open
links and awareness applications, and discussed their utility together with
relevant design issues.
·
Third, “video-as-data”
is the hypothesis that the video image is used to transmit information about
the work objects themselves, rather than information about the participants,
creating a dynamic shared workspace and simulating a shared physical
environment. However, in the last two hypotheses there are also outstanding
social issues about privacy and access that have yet to be addressed (Nardi,
Schwarz, Kuchinsky, Leichner, Whittaker and Sclabassi, 1993; Nardi, Kuchinsky,
Whittaker, Leichner and Schwarz, 1997).
In parallel directions, Dourish, Adler, Bellotti and Henderson (1996)
have explored the long-term use of “media spaces,” i.e., collaborative, networked,
multimedia computer environments (Bly, Harrison and Irwin, 1993), starting out
from the following three positions, which differ from traditional perspectives:
·
Face-to-face communicative behavior in the real
world is not always an appropriate baseline for the evaluation of mediated
communication.
·
A set of complex and intricate communicative
behaviors, pertinent to the nature of the medium, emerges in a coevolution of
the involved people with the work practices.
·
Media spaces connect not only individuals but
the wider social groups to which they belong.
In
this way, Dourish et al. developed a
framework of four perspectives - individual,
interactional, communal and societal -
along which they analyzed the dynamics of media spaces. Their emphasis on the
societal perspective is grounded on Spears’ and Lea’s (1993) studies of the
‘social’ in computer-mediated communication. Incidentally, many of those
considering the turn to the social have been attracted to ethnomethodology
trying to resort to its resources for insights about the organization of the
work of design (Button and Dourish, 1996; Dourish and Button, 1998).
Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs)
A collaborative virtual environment
(CVE) is an artificial space where several people interact and work together
through networked computers and virtual reality systems (Benford, Bowers,
Fahlén, Mariani and Rodden, 1994a). In this sense, CVEs constitute
shared virtual worlds, i.e., computer-generated spaces whose occupants are
represented to one another in three-dimensional graphical form. The cooperative
applications supported by CVEs range from training, visualization, simulation
and design to telework, telemedicine, distance learning and entertainment.
Each occupant of a CVE can control her or his viewpoint and can interact
with others and with representations of data and software into a common display
space. Occupants are graphically represented through avatars, located in
positions and orientations and possessing viewpoints, which are all intended to
be seen by everybody in the system. In other words, CVEs provide ‘user
embodiment,’ i.e., the provision of users with appropriate body images so as to
represent them to others and also to themselves (Benford, Bowers,
Fahlén, Greenhalgh and Snowdon, 1995). For such a process of direct and
sufficiently rich embodiment to be effective, Benford et al. (1995) have identified a list of embodiment design issues
which should be considered by the designers of CVE systems. This list includes:
presence, location, identity, activity, availability, history of activity,
viewpoint, actionpoint, gesture, facial expression, voluntary versus
involuntary expression, degree of presence, reflecting capabilities, physical
properties, active bodies, time and change, manipulation of views of others,
representation across multiple media, autonomous and distributed body parts,
truthfulness and efficiency.
As a result, since users in a CVE are all embodied in it so that their
location and orientation can be represented, a degree of mutual awareness of
each other’s activity may arise or be easily supported. This is in contrast to
multimedia systems, in which data and communicational information are typically
displayed in separate windows. Furthermore, CVEs may provide a shared spatial environment
where people can interact by employing more communicative resources than in
other technical systems. For instance, participants can have a degree of
control over what they view in a CVE, which is not in general possible within
VMC or media spaces supported by a fixed camera and monitor system.
Accordingly, turn-taking in social interaction in a CVE does not depend on
‘floor-control’ policies usually employed in VMC. Bowers, Pycock and O’Brien
(1996) have systematically studied problems with turn-taking and participation
in CVEs through certain qualitative, interpretive methodologies of social
interaction (empirical techniques derived from conversation analysis). In
addition, they also examined how the simple polygonal shapes by means of which
users were represented are deployed in social interaction. Even when these
embodiments are implemented with very minimal shapes, it is quite surprising
that they found some familiar coordination of body movement to be observed at
the virtual space too.
Because of user embodiment within
CVEs, one would be tempted to assume that in a sense users leave the physical
world behind when entering the virtual world in order to communicate and to
collaborate with others. Quite on the contrary, the experiments of Greenhalgh
and Benford (1995) with the Massive system showed that in order to make sense
of a user’s actions in a virtual world, other users require an understanding of
actions and events within that user’s local physical environment. By a
conversation analysis of transcripts of meetings in a CVE, Bowers et al. (1996) argued that the perceived
trustworthiness of an embodiment can be influenced by real world events such as
users leaving their embodiments unoccupied when attending to real world
interactions or several users sharing a single embodiment. Similarly, using an
observational analysis of interaction in and through the virtual world,
Hindmarsh, Fraser, Heath, Benford and Greenhalgh (1998) observed: problems due
to fragmented views of embodiments in relation to shared objects; participants
compensating with spoken accounts of their actions; and difficulties in
understanding others’ perspectives.
Benford, Greenhalgh, Reynard, Brown
and Koleva (1998) have classified shared-space technologies (including VMC,
media spaces, CVEs, telepresence systems and collaborative augmented
environments) according to three dimensions: transportation, artificiality and
spatiality.
·
Transportation characterizes the sense of difference between local and remote in a
shared-space. In fact, it concerns the extent to which a group of users and
objects leave behind their local space and enter into some virtual space in
order to meet with others, versus the extent to which they remain in their
local space and the remote users and objects are brought to them. This concept
is similar to virtual reality’s immersion. However, transportation differs from
immersion in as far as it allows the possibility of introducing together remote
users and objects in the virtual environment in which a user is immersed.
·
Artificiality concerns the extent to which a space is either virtual-synthetic or
real-physical, i.e., based on the physical world. At the one extreme lies a
wholly virtual-synthetic environment and at the other a wholly real-physical
environment. For instance, VMC and telepresence applications are typical of the
physical extreme, while CVEs devoted to abstract data visualization or computer
art are examples of the synthetic extreme.
·
Spatiality concerns the level of support for fundamental physical spatial
properties such as containment, topology, distance, orientation and movement.
At the one extreme lies the notion of place, as a containing context for users,
and at the other the notion of space, as a context providing a consistent,
navigable and shared spatial frame of reference. Thus, in minimal
videoconferencing (single camera per group of communicants, no shared data
space), the only perceived space which is independent of communicants is the
place where they and their cameras are located. Although one can be seen to
move within the video image, other remote communicants cannot interpret this
with respect to their own frame of reference. Now, by creating a shared drawing
surface between two video views, the spatiality of videoconferencing is extended
to allow some movements and gestures of the communicants to be visible within a
shared space. So, at the other end, in fully spatial shared-spaces,
communicants can explore a common spatial environment, independently moving
their own viewpoints, while at the same time being aware of the viewpoints of
others through their avatars.
Furthermore, Benford, Greenhalgh and Loyd (1997a) have managed to extend
their spatial model by introducing a framework for supporting crowds of
participants in CVEs. By an explicit crowd mechanism, they have accommodated
the circumstances of formation and activation of different kinds of crowd with
different effects of mutual awareness and communication. In a previous study,
Benford, Bowers, Fahlén and Greenhalgh (1994b) had described
realizations of a spatial model of interaction supporting people’s social
skills in crowded CVEs. Whereas much previous user interface design work was
concentrated on people’s spatial skills (e.g., their ability to spatially
classify and navigate), these researchers focused on the social spatial skills,
i.e., how people use space to manage interaction with one another. After
Anthony Giddens (1984), it is fully understood how space constitutes a key
resource for establishing and enabling actions. Similarly, Benford et al. (1994b) claim that space also
enables different modes of participation in, and awareness of, actions. In
particular, it provides peripheral awareness of the presence and actions of
others, allowing people to ‘see at a glance’ what is happening. In addition,
space enables people to negotiate access to common resources, as we see them
using their body positions, orientations, gaze direction etc. in order to
control turn-taking, queuing, jostling, even scrumming and to join or leave
from a conversation group (for instance, the ‘social dance’ taking place at
cocktail parties).
At this point we are going to discuss the critical conceptual
differences between ‘space’ and ‘place.’ According to Steve Harrison and Paul
Dourish (1996), although spatial metaphors are the prevailing ones to support
interaction, it is actually a notion of place that frames interactive behavior.
In fact, these authors argue that the critical property which designers are
seeking (and they call it ‘appropriate behavioral framing’) is not rooted in
the properties of space at all. They claim that, in contrast to space, place is
the desired notion, as a set of common and shared cultural understanding about
behavior and action (in their motto: “space is the opportunity; place is the
understood reality”). What they mean is that a place is a valued space, which
is invested with understandings of behavioral appropriateness, cultural
expectations etc. (“we are located in ‘space,’ but we act in ‘place’”) and, as
an example of the cultural content of virtual places, they refer to concerns
about privacy in media spaces. In other words, a place is generally a space
with something added (social meaning, convention, cultural understandings about
role, function, nature etc.). They remind the term ‘locales’ adopted by Anthony
Giddens (1984) to capture a similar sense of behavioral framing and
constituting the meaningful content of interaction. Furthermore, Harrison and
Dourish investigate two complex forms of places: (i) space-less places (as the
USENET newsgroups or the Internet mailing lists and social navigation through
information collections on the basis of information derived from the activity
of others, which is a placeful navigation without physical space) and (ii)
hybrid physical/virtual spaces, which technology can create and in which new
‘cyborg’ places can emerge.
Returning now to their previous classification, through that scheme,
Benford, Greenhalgh, Reynard, Brown and Koleva (1998) managed to establish
general relationships between physical and shared-spaces and even to think
about hybrid approaches combining different kinds of spaces. These hybrid
spaces represent forms of mixed reality as being shared spaces that combine the
physical and the synthetic, the local and the remote. Moreover, driven by the
concerns of supporting new forms of awareness and communication between
occupants of many distributed spaces, they have explored a particular style of
mixed reality by creating transparent boundaries between the physical and the
synthetic. Thus, instead of being superimposed in a single display (as previous
approaches were doing), two spaces are placed adjacent to one another and then
stitched together by creating a ‘window’ between them. Such a construction of a
transparent physical-synthetic boundary is based on a combination of projecting
graphics into the physical space and texturing video into the virtual space. In
more details, the moving synthetic space (with the avatars within it) is
transmitted across the network, rendered and then projected into the physical
space. At the same time, a live video image of the physical space is
transmitted across the network and then displayed in a synthetic space through
a process of dynamically texture mapping the incoming frames so that it appears
as an integrated part of the virtual environment. Furthermore, Benford et al. (1998) identified some general
properties of these mixed-reality boundaries, including their degree of
transparency, the possibilities for interaction with and through them, and the
location of multiple boundaries within a single space. As an application,
Benford, Snowdon, Brown, Reynard and Ingham (1997b) have presented some new
forms of interface to the World-Wide Web based on the construction of some
innovative mixed-reality boundaries on the Internet.
Coming back now to the issue of the social character of virtual
environments, two interesting questions are whether and in which sense they can
be perceived as a social space and regarded as constituting social systems.
Phillip Jeffrey and Gloria Mark (1998) observed two virtual worlds to
investigate how social norms involved with personal and group space, privacy,
crowding and territoriality affect people during interaction and navigation.
What they found is pretty similar to what is observed in physical environments:
for instance, people were disturbed when their personal and group spaces were
violated and when spaces were crowded. Privacy was also a major concern and it
was indicated through positioning and other signals. So, their interpretation
is that virtual environments are, indeed, perceived by people as a social
space. As for the second question, Barbara Becker and Gloria Mark (1998; 1999)
claim that one criterion of social systems is the presence of social
conventions, which serve as a basis for common communication. In fact, they
assume that social conventions and rules are a fundamental precondition for the
stability, efficiency and inner coherence of a social system (cf. Giddens,
1990). In particular, in social philosophy, social conventions have been
described as normative rules of conduct, based on implicit ethical imperatives
(cf. Habermas, 1987). Thus, social rules are the underlying preconditions of
communication, because the way people communicate is embedded in social
practice and specific life styles, determined by implicit social conventions.
Therefore, regarding virtual environments as specific forms of social systems,
Becker and Mark undertake an exploration of the implicit and explicit social conventions
in order to understand the particular social practice within these
environments. By an ethnomethodological analysis of three different online
environments, Becker and Mark (1998; 1999) have tried to identify a number of
social conventions rooted in the studied virtual environments. Furthermore,
they examined the role of technology in shaping such behavioral conventions.
They found two alternative hypotheses for this role: (1) that technology
creates a sense of social presence that influences behavior and (2) that people
use the available functionality that requires the least cognitive effort in
order to achieve their goals.
Turning to an investigation of the
social conditions of work in CVEs, Fitzpatrick, Kaplan, Mansfield and Tolone
(1995; 1996), through a case study of a group of systems administrators, have
explored the differences between collaborative work when it is carried out in
the virtual and in the physical domain. These researchers have based their
framework to ground an understanding of collaborative work upon Anselm Strauss’
symbolic interactionist school and in particular his theory of social worlds
(Strauss, 1978; Clarke, 1991) and his theory of action (Strauss, 1993). In this
sociological context, a social world is an interactive unit defined by a group
of people sharing a commitment to collective action and, so, requiring the
coordination of separate perspectives and the sharing of resources. Although
not necessarily conforming to geographical or organizational boundaries, social
worlds are constrained instead by the limits of effective communication.
Moreover, people can belong to multiple social worlds simultaneously. A locale
or place signifies the site and means that a particular social world has mapped
itself to, in order to carry out its collective tasks. In Fitzpatrick’s et al. case study, the virtual medium
provides a site and means to support other components of social world
interactions. The various social worlds interacting in and through the virtual
environment map their interest or focus to parts of the system, which become
locales for their world. Thus, Fitzpatrick et
al. (1995) suggest a new interpretation of spatial metaphors for the design
and construction of collaborative systems based on locales and on centres rather
than boundaries. In this way, they try to give a different meaning to space,
not any longer as a simulation of the physical or a structuring of the
interface but as a deep construction of the nature of work based on membership
and participation to social worlds.
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