TY  - JOUR
A1  - Kohonen-Aho, Laura
A1  - Vatanen, Anna
T1  - (Re-)Opening an encounter in the virtual world of Second Life : on types of joint presence in avatar interaction
T2  - Journal für Medienlinguistik : jfml = Journal for media linguistics
N2  - This study explores how ‘gatherings’ turn into ‘encounters’ in a virtu­al world (VW) context. Most communication technologies enable only focused encounters between distributed participants, but in VWs both gatherings and encounters can occur. We present close sequential analysis of moments when after a silent gathering, inter­action among participants in a VW is gradually resumed, and also investigate the social actions in the verbal (re-)opening turns. Our findings show that like in face-to-face situations, also in VWs partici­pants often use different types of embodied resources to achieve the transition, rather than rely on verbal means only. However, the tran­sition process in VWs has distinctive characteristics compared to the one in face-to-face situations. We discuss how participants in a VW use virtually embodied pre-beginnings to display what we call encounter-readiness, instead of displaying lack of presence by avatar stillness. The data comprise 40 episodes of video-recorded team in­teractions in a VW.
KW  - avatars
KW  - conversation analysis
KW  - co-presence
KW  - encounter
KW  - gathering
KW  - multimodal interaction
KW  - (re-)openings
KW  - participation
KW  - transition
KW  - virtual embodiment
KW  - virtual worlds
Y1  - 2021
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/65158
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-651587
SN  - 2569-6491
VL  - 4
IS  - 2
SP  - 14
EP  - 51
PB  - Institut für Deutsche Sprache
CY  - Mannheim
ER  -