In the course of a fairly short period of time distributed virtual environments have progressed from being what essentially was a digitally mediated, monadic, `uncut' continuum presenting nothing more than a pure communicative potential, to representations of static objects - standing for things or concepts; to different forms of spatial relations between such static objects; to relations between dynamic (vector driven) non-intentional objects; to actor created, intentionally driven agent-objects and finally; to present attempts to develop sets of conditions whereby autonomous forms of complex symbolic forms of interaction will be possible between intentionally driven agent-objects.
Figure 3: The ontogenesis of communicative potential in distributed virtual environments.
If we are to take as our guiding light the notion that virtual environments of this kind someday must develop into fully functional cultural and social fields which allow communication between non co-present actors by autonomous or semi-autonomous mediating agent-objects to occur with a similar degree of efficiency to that of human communication in face-to-face social and cultural environments, this will obviously require the creation of conditions whereby the development of an infinite plurality of agent-objects, all of which are able to create, exchange, interpret and manipulate information coded in every possible semiotic modality, is a real possibility. Today, even the more advanced distributed virtual environments integrating graphical, video, audio technologies into the repertoire of developmental tools available are in practice still a very long way off from any such idealized kind of situation.
If we however try to take a more sanguine view of the situation, I believe it is certainly reasonable to claim that the more general metaphor[54] of the distributed virtual environment which I have outlined above, with its inherent potential for changing ways of thinking about, and thus also practicing, forms of local-global communication[55], cooperation and meaning-negotiation which it carries along with it, is certainly of interest since it opens up fruitful new perspectives on the plurality and continuity of human life, culture, and society, and also on how our systems of norms for communication, cooperation and meaning-negotiation change over time in interaction with technological and cultural development..
There is thus an increasing need to understand better the anthropology of everyday life[56] in the distributed virtual environment, as it increasingly is becoming populated by cybermigrants with a plurality of cultural and social positionings, and with very different kinds of understandings of exactly how and what they may contribute to the further development of the complexity of this global-local community. One way of attempting to understand and delineate the kind of social calculus inherent in the continuity of meaning negotiation permeating our everyday lives is by means of anthropological, ethnographic and other form of participatory studies of conversations and other forms of negotiation, interaction and exchange in a wide range of social and cultural contexts. A similar methodological approach is of course extendible to studies of the negotiation of meaning in distributed virtual environments too[57], but in this particular area it seems as if a great deal of work still remains to be done, especially regarding a more systematic working out and testing of the fairly loosely framed and general hypotheses generated so far by such studies.
[54] See Marcus 1997a for a useful discussion regarding the creativity and dictatorship of metaphor in relation to transdisciplinary scientific investigation, communication and cooperation. See also Marcus 1997b, 31-34 for discussion of cognitive models and cognitive metaphors as subject-object interactions
[55] See Marcus 1998a for some interesting discussions of the global-local dimension in a context of imprescision between variety and uniformity.
[56] See Hall1992 for discussion of the general theme of anthropologies of everyday life.
[57] See for instance Coppock & Violi 1999 for an overview and discussion of this theme.