Users tend to prefer face-to-face interactions for collaboration in many cases. Second Life is interesting because it emulates a real-world experience in a virtual setting, which could potentially transfer some of the benefits of FtF environments into CMC environments.
As discussed in lecture, Second Life mimics some notion of “place” in the virtual world. In the “Place and Time” chapter, Boellstorff notes that people tend to characterize a place as that “which you could look around” in and has a “simultaneous presence of more than one person” (Boellstorff 92). Taken together, this means that group awareness naturally arises in SL. If people are collaborating, it’s easy to see what others are up to. This would also make each person feel more accountable for his or her actions, because others can readily attribute actions to an individual. Both the increased awareness and increased accountability would be beneficial to group collaboration.
However, SL fails to deliver all the advantages of face-to-face collaboration to the virtual world. First, the ability to customize your name and the look of your avatar means that you can control ALL impression formation. This gives trust building in SL no advantage compared to any other CMC medium. Other people are less likely to trust you since you have total control over your presentation, and once they do trust you it is easier for you to break that trust in SL than in real life. In particular, trust is both more delayed and fragile (as defined by Bos, et. al.) relative to FtF.
SL also introduces breaks in perceived time and communication that could be problematic for collaboration. Users can go afk arbitrarily and there is a lot of lag on SL. As Boellstorff points out in the SL reading, the term afk has been used even when users are not actually away from their computer but are temporarily distracted with something else (Boellstorff 108). These types of distractions would happen very infrequently in a FtF meeting, but seem to occur all the time in a virtual world like SL. In certain situations, users might be able to spin this into an advantage by lying that they were afk or were experiencing lag in order to have plausible deniability. But this reduces accountability and could be detrimental to group productivity in the long run.
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Wow, even though that trust issue is one that's fairly obvious when you think about it, I never stopped to realize it in the sense of impression formation. I did mention in my post that it's hard to know for certain the person behind the avatar is really who they should be (such as for business meetings), but now that you mention it, it's also pretty hard to judge how competent they are when they can conceal just about anything. Like you might not want to make some deal with someone if you knew they were a jerk, but they can hide that in a medium such as Second Life.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your points about the advantages of simulating FtF encounters in Second Life. As I also discussed in my post, I think this makes Second Life a unique place for collaboration.
ReplyDeleteI also think you raise good points about the customization abilities of Second Life. Since users can choose to look however they want, and can even choose to not look human at all, impression formation becomes an entirely different thing than people are used to and the unique appearances of avatars can definitely get in the way of communication.