This dissertation is a study of social interaction in virtual worlds and virtual world design. A virtual world is a synchronous, multi-user system that offers a persistent spatial environment for iconically represented participants. Together, these form an example of social interaction design. I have applied an arena perspective on my object of study, meaning that I focus on these socio-technical systems as places. I have investigated the persistent qualities of social interaction in virtual worlds. What I have found is that virtual worlds are as real as the physical world. They are filled with real people interacting with each other evoking real emotions and leading to real consequences. There are no fixed boundaries between the virtual and physical arenas that make up a participant’s lifeworld. I have found that participants in virtual worlds are not anonymous and bodiless actors on a level playing field. Participants construct everything needed to create social structures such as identities and status symbols. The qualities of social interaction in virtual worlds cannot be measured against physical interaction. Doing so conceals the qualities of virtual interaction. Through the concepts of levity and proximity, I offer an alternative measure that better captures the unique properties of the medium. Levity is related to the use of avatars and the displacement into a virtual context and manifests itself as a kind of lightness in the way participants approach the interaction. Proximity is my term for the transformation of social distances that takes place in virtual worlds. While participants perceive that they are in the same place despite being physically separated, the technology can also create barriers separating participants from their physical surroundings. The gap between the participant and her avatar is also of social significance. As a theoretical foundation for design, I have used Michael Heim’s writings and practices as a base for a phenomenologically grounded approach, which provides an alternative to the dominating perspectives of architecture and engineering. Based on an explorative design project and the earlier mentioned findings regarding social interaction, I have formulated a model for virtual world design called interacture. This model takes the interaction between participants as the fundamental building material and the starting point of the design process. From there, layers of function and structure are added, all the time balancing the design between fantasy and realism. I have explored the possibilities of using ethnographic studies as the foundation for a participant centered design approach. I have aimed for an inside view of my object of study both as an ethnographer and as a designer. One outcome of this approach is that I have come to understand virtual worlds not just as places but also as processes where the experience of participating can change drastically over time as the participant reaches new stages in the process. In conclusion, the method of integrating ethnography with design and the understanding of social interaction as the fundamental building material is woven into a general approach to the study and design of socio-technical systems called social interaction design.

The general purpose of this thesis is to understand how participation in the activity of education relates to communication and tools. This purpose unfolds by drawing on possible conceivable consequences. In the fulfilment of this purpose communication, education, participation, and tools are analytically linked by a common denominator: human action. The commentary text expounds on these links, while the four included papers illustrate how these links operate in educational settings. The general purpose serves to frame a narrower purpose: a discussion of participation through computer-mediated communication in online settings of Swedish higher education. The theoretical departure derives from a transactional approach that embraces human action as an inseparable aspect of a dynamic whole, here defined as the activity of education. This activity is discussed in terms of its cultural, ecological, historical, and social aspects. This theoretical departure embraces ideas largely taken from ecological, pragmatic and sociocultural perspectives of human action. The papers include analyses of, variously, empirical material taken from interviews with students, online exchanges of utterances, syllabuses, and study-guides. Two of the papers are literature reviews. The findings indicate that participation in education is a complex boundless phenomenon that is best understood as a dynamic whole. In this whole, participation in education is culturally, ecologically, historically, and socially transformed by actions, agents, communication, tools, and the setting. In this thesis, concepts such as computermediated communication, communicative genres, dialogical intersections, and educational settings are utilised to reach a dynamic understanding. The dynamics of these findings, therefore, are a challenge to all dualistic conceptualisations of education, such as those building on the idea of learners operating in learning environments. Particularly, these findings challenge operationalisations of education that rely on computer-mediated communication and which build on the idea of so-called online learning environments. A more coherent understanding of participation in education is possible if educational research and design builds on a non-dualistic conceptualisation that includes the idea of participation being performed in a boundless activity.

- ABSTRACT – Title: Winners of the Web ( Webbens vinnare) Number of pages: 35 (including enclosures) Author: Lydia Kellam Tutor: Else Nygren Course: Media and Communication Studies C Period: Fall Semester 2006 University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Information Science Purpose: The aim of the research paper was to see Internet and the digital techniques impact on marketing communication and consuming behavior on the Web. By understanding the relationship between marketing communication and consumer behavior my intentions were to comprehend how consumer behavior on the web could be understand. The purpose of this paper is to understand how different marketing activities on the Internet are followed by consumption. Material/Method: By using focus group interviews I wanted to study how individuals act on the Internet. How different activities such as communication and participation on the web could lead to consumption on the Internet. As a method, focus group interviews capture the social interactions and participants affect each other. The social effect, in particularly, gained the results and the analysis of this paper. Main Result: Consumer on the Internet experience that commercial messages on the Web are overloaded, and use consumer powered sites an alternative. Consumer driven websites increases and so is the influence of the consumer,since users on the web reject the commercial messages, a strategy where the interaction between companies and consumer is supportive for both parties is demanded. There fore a more individual aim on the marketing communication on the Internet is required. For example commercial messages that are directed to a specific consumer, and that relate to the interactive possibilities on the Web. Keywords: Internet, New Media, Web 2.0, Marketing Communication, Computer Mediated Communication, Consumer behavior, Social Interactions, Digital marketing, Digital consumption.

In this thesis computer-mediated human interaction and human computer interaction in responsive spaces are discussed. Can such spaces be de-signed to create an affective response from the players? What are the de-sign heuristics for a space that allows for the establishment of affective dy-namics? I research the user experience of players of existing spaces built by the Topological Media Lab. In addition to that I review other relevant ex-perimental interfaces, e.g. works by Myron Krueger and my own earlier piece Riviera in order to analyze their affective dynamics. Also, I review the different applications and programming paradigms involved in authoring such spaces (e.g. Real-time systems like Max/MSP/Jitter and EyeCon) and how to apply them in compliance with the design heuristics.

Parents and children increasingly spend time living apart due to marital separation and work travel. I investigated parent--child separation in both of these contexts to find that current technologies frequently do not meet the needs of families. The telephone is easy-to-use and ubiquitous but does not provide an engaging way of communicating with children. Videochat is more emotionally expressive and has a greater potential for engagement but is difficult to set up and cannot be used by a child without the help of an adult. Both telephone and videochat fail to meet the needs of remote parenting because they focus on conversation rather than care and play activities, which are the mechanism by which parents and children build closeness. I also saw that in both types of separation the motivation to connect at times conflicted with desire to reduce disruption of the remote household. To address some of these issues, I designed a system called the ShareTable, which provides easy-to-initiate videochat with a shared tabletop activity space. After an initial lab-based evaluation confirmed the promise of this approach, I deployed the ShareTable to four households (two sets of divorced families). I collected data about the families' remote interactions before and during the deployment. Remote communication more than doubled for each of these families while using the ShareTable and I saw a marked increase in the number of communication sessions initiated by the child. The ShareTable provided benefits over previous communication systems and supported activities that are impossible with other currently available technologies. One of the biggest successes of the system was in providing an overlapped video space that families appropriated to communicate metaphorical touch and a sense of closeness. However, the ShareTable also introduced a new source of conflict for parents and challenged the families as they tried to develop practices of using the system that would be acceptable to all involved. The families' approach to these challenges as well as explicit feedback about the system informs future directions for synchronous communication systems for separated families.

This study examines the functions of phrases with the word missverstehen in any inflected form in German discussion groups. The corpus consists of about 600 different messages with a phrase containing the verb missverstehen from all kinds of discussion groups speaking the German language. The hypothesis is that those phrases do not always refer to a factual misunderstanding in the communication. There is no such thing as total understanding in communication, since people cannot fully know how other people are thinking. Instead understanding is a social construct. Misunderstanding occurs when a group member cannot interpret a message so that it correlates with what the sender has meant. This understanding contains both the discussed theme as well as the relation between the group members. Relevance occurs when interpretable information is communicated through contextualization cues. Some cues carry information about the discussed theme, others communicate face work. A misunderstanding is caused by missing contextualization cues, i. e. the message is irrelevant. The study shows how the communicators can construct a disagreement as a misunderstanding, which it in turn has an impact on face work. The phrase is then being used together with added contextualization cues in order to construct a common understanding. Thereby the communicators can influence the interaction. This is done in a sequence in the discussion group. Hence the script theory (Schank/Abelson 1977) aims to describe the phenomenon of how a phrase with the word missverstehen can be used for different purposes. One script is defined for each purpose. The difference between the scripts is being maintained by the contextualization cue that carries the information about how the relations between group members are interacted.

This dissertation adds to the growing body of research on L2 academic discourse socialization in classroom contexts. Although the importance of students' writing in socializing them into their target discourse communities has been well documented, much less has been made of how students learn through online activities when the division between more and less knowledgeable individuals are blurred. Addressing this gap, this qualitative extended case study explored the experiences and perspectives of novice L2 graduate students in academic literacy practices that involved online writing activities. The focal participants included five first-year female graduate students from different cultural backgrounds enrolled in a graduate class during fall 2008 semester. Data sources included interviews with focal students and with the professor, class observations, field notes, questionnaires, handouts, and students' reflective essays. Anchored in language socialization theories (Duff, 1996, 2003; Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986) and the notion of community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998), this study provides an ecological perspective on these five L2 students' socialization into academic literacy activities. The findings revealed how the students negotiated competence, relations, and identities to participate legitimately as competent members of their classroom communities. This study also contributes to an understanding of the changing role of novice learners in a given academic community by analyzing how they variably exercise their agency and develop their subject positioning in academic literacy activities that are imbricated in social, cultural, and discoursal contexts. Ultimately, this study enriches the notions of academic discourse socialization by demonstrating the dialogic and transformative nature of academic literacy practices mediated by online discourses in order to highlight ever more contextual information. / text

有關表情符號的跨文化分析，現有之研究皆以亞洲國家（例如日本或韓國）和美國做比較。然而此間差異不僅包含文化上的，也包含語言使用上的不同。如此一來，在了解影響人們使用表情符號的因素時，文化背景與語言的因素混雜一體，難以區辨各別影響狀況。本研究試著控制文化的因素，將文化背景具有一定相似性，但官方語言不同的新加坡和台灣做比較。結果顯示新加坡與台灣使用者確實表現出不同的表情符號使用偏好。前者傾向使用橫式表情符號，後者則以使用直式表情符號居多。形式的不同也導致使用者在組合表情符號的眼型與口型時呈現明顯差異。此外，語言背景也會影響一個人對表情符號的認識與解讀能力。本研究發現，此現象在新加坡的受試者身上較為顯著，他們在認識與解讀台灣使用者的常用表情符號時較容易出現障礙。最後，本論文也討論了研究結果的意義以及研究者對於未來研究的建議。 / Existing literature on the cross-cultural use of emoticons often discuss how styles of emoticons vary by comparing countries such as Japan or Korea with the United States. However, these countries differ both in terms of their culture as well as the language used in the country. Thus, there remains a dilemma in distinguishing whether the effects of cultural background or language plays a greater role in determining the style of emoticons a person uses. This research explores this issue by comparing the use of emoticons between users from Singapore and Taiwan. Both countries have similar cultural background but differ in terms of their first language. By focusing on the difference of language and holding cultural background as a constant, results indicated that users from both countries do have a difference in preference for emoticons style. While the former predominantly use horizontal emoticons, the latter prefer vertical emoticons instead. Such difference has also resulted in different representation of the eyes and mouths of emoticons used by Singaporean and Taiwanese users. In addition, it has also been found that language background has an effect on a person’s ability to recognize and interpret emoticons used by natives from the other culture. This situation was more prominent among Singaporean participants as they were found to be less capable in recognizing and interpreting emoticons commonly used by their Taiwanese counterparts. The implications of these findings and recommendations for future research are discussed.

With the increased use of online communication in our everyday lives, there is a growing need to understand social influence in such settings. The current research posits that online social norms can influence readers‟ anti-social and pro-social behaviours online, specifically individual expressions of prejudice. Participants read an online article proposing an increase to international student scholarship funding, then were randomly placed in one of two normative conditions where they read Anti-Prejudiced or Pro-Prejudiced comments allegedly placed by other users. Participants then left their own comments before completing a self-report prejudice questionnaire and an implicit association test (IAT). Social norms created by the fictitious comments influenced respondents to comment with more or less bigoted sentiments aligned with the fictitious social norm. Participants reading prejudiced online comments showed increased implicit and explicit prejudice, while those reading anti-prejudiced online comments showed the reverse. Participants‟ internal and external motivations to control prejudice were also measured and hypothesised to moderate the effects of social norms on bias expressions. However, this hypothesis was unsupported with participants‟ internal and external motivations to control prejudice inconsistently moderating the effects of the social norm on their prejudice expressions. These findings suggest possible avenues for social change in online environments, and criteria to help establish more positive online social norms.

This qualitative study examined fifteen organizational members across four international technology companies to discover how they behave and manage daily interactions in a virtual environment within a geographically distributed team. Using a grounded theory methodology, an extensive analysis of the interview data was conducted. Three core themes emerged that focus on the individuals’ attempts to manage impressions in an environment that demands multicommunication. The themes of time stacking, participation predications and performance are discussed in detail using the theoretical lens of impression management. / text