Week 4 article review - wendy

When I use the SL, most time I will focus on the words I or other people use during the whole interaction process, but this time Antonijevic (2008) explores the nonverbal communication in the virtual environment, which we may do naturally but ignore frequently. He divides those nonverbal cues into four types. They are predefined, user-defined, blended and missing cues. Concluding Antonijevic's detailed explanations, predefined cues are encoded by the computer that avatars will have the particular  gestures at particular time without users' instructions, such as users will find their avatars standing there hanging their heads and dropping their hands like being hypnotized if they don't move for a long time; user-defined cues are performed deliberately by users, like moving to a certain direction; blended cues are the cooperation of predefined and user-defined ones. Users can give the instruction of 'sit down', but how to sit is defined by the computer, which users cannot change; the last one missing cues "refer to nonverbal acts that cannot be executed in SL (Antonijevic, 2008).

This research is mainly focused on proxemic (the perception and use of space) and kinesic (gestures, postures and facial expressions) aspects. The researcher visited 108 publicly available SL areas and observed about one thousand users. Based on those dataset, Antonijevic found that user-defined nonverbal communication was closely related to co-occurring textual discourse but was not significantly related to the users’ physical appearance and gender. For instance,  we will move close to someone naturally if we want to talk to them. I think this kind of behavior is much like or can be said restore what we do in the real world, people will feel strange to talk to sb over a long distance both in virtual and real world. Especially, Antonijevic referred to a situation that a conversation would be interrupted if someone else went through the two talking people. I think this kind of situation is very common in real world, but in SL when having an interaction, most time we will focus on the words not the surroundings around our avatars, so the probability of interruption will be greatly reduced. However, there is no doubt that user-defined cues play an important role in communicating interactional intent and sending relational messages.

"Predefined and blended nonverbal cues are mostly stereotypical, gender and culture biased representations of nonverbal acts" (Antonijevic, 2008). These kinds of cues are set in advance based on the programmers' social and cultural cognition. Avatars mimic what most people will do in reality, such as an avatar will shift his or her head to the direction of  the passer-by automatically. In brief, nonverbal behaviors are subtle and interesting in SL, I won't notice those details without Antonijevic's research but they really play an important role in virtual world interaction. Users cannot see each other, they analyse and know a person through those user-defined, predefined or blended cues besides words.

Reference
Antonijevic, S. (2008). From text to gesture online: A microethnographic analysis of nonverbal communication in the Second Life virtual. Environment, Information, Communication & Society, 11(2), 221-238.