One place where meaning-making phenomena of this kind may be studied dynamically is in text-based multi-user object-oriented environments [MOO's] such as Media-MOO[3] which is being developed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology[4] and Diversity University MOO at Marist College[5], as well as many other such educational and research environments sited at various locations around the world[6. ] MOO's are basically object-oriented distributed database systems that facilitate on-line written language communication in textually created virtual environments between multiple users who are logged in simultaneously from anywhere in the world. What is novel about these environments, which are similar in many ways to the multiple communication channels available to users of IRC [Internet Relay Chat ] and other kinds of multi-user communication media such as more conventional telephone, video-telephone and teleconferencing systems[7] , is that participants "meet" one another in a virtual "space" which contextualises their written interactions by means of written language texts that use spatio-visual metaphors and other kinds of lexico-grammatical devices to describe the surroundings and objects which "furnish" and comprise the virtual environment.
To give a brief taste of how such environments manifest themselves for the end-user, here is a snippet of a session I had recently with Ulf Kastner, one of the "architects" on the Diversity University staff while I was in the process of making some preparations to bring some students to a series of on-line seminars I would be holding in the MOO-environment. Ulf was in the USA, and I was at home in Norway, logged on via a portable computer with a modem. The session began in this way [after I had passed through the initial logon screen which is included in the longer transcript from this particular session in Appendix III] to the main entry point [The Student Union Center]:
- Student Union Center
- --------------------
- You are standing in the Student Union of Diversity University. There is an
- old red couch in the corner, usually occupied by sleeping students. Several
- halls lead from the room, and large glass doors on the southern wall lead
- outside.
- Warning: Anything said in this room is subject to being logged for research
- purposes. Research is vital to the continued survival of DU so we hope you will
- understand.
- Exits include: [west] to Learning Hall [1-2], [south] to LSU Street [200 block],
- [east] to Underground corridor [SU <-> Admin], [north] to Entertainment Hall,
- [northeast] to Student Union Elevator, [northwest] to Universities Room, [Up] to
- Help Desk, [southeast] to S.U. robot-testing room
- JasonG [Pessimistic Philosopher/musician/Physicist] is standing here.
- You see Test Survey, DU Directory, EVENTS [9 notes], Yellow Pages!, Aquarium,
- Diversity Survey, Help Desk Sign [hd], MOOList, DU Places of Interest [POI], and
- *DU AIDS Memorial Quilt Poster* here.
- Last connected Mon Oct 9 13:59:10 1995 EDT from anvpc.avh.unit.no
- *********** ATTENTION: There are new news items to read! ***********
- *************** Type 'news' for more info. *********************
- There is new activity on the following lists:
- *General [#1017] 200 new messages
- @go icde
- I see no "icde" here.
- [from Ulf's Office [working]] Ulf waves to you.
- @go icde
- I see no "icde" here.
- page ulf hello, where has icde gone?
- Somewhere in Ulf's Office [working], Ulf listens up as you talk to him.
- @join ulf
- Looks like Ulf's Office [working]..
- Empty. Gray walls, linoleum floor and a lightbulb hanging from the ceiling.
- You see a note and raum lying in a corner of the room.
- Ulf [steelworker] is sitting on the linoleum floor. You are standing amidst the
- emptyness.
- From here you can go: [north] to a test of newbie facilities
- [out] to Administrators' Hall [1-2]
- You join Ulf in Ulf's Office.
- You say, "hello"
- Ulf bows to you.
- You say, "did you get my page"
- Ulf says, "it should now be referred to with `conference center'"
- patcop smiles and bows
- Ulf decided to rename the public room handle for it after he was done refurnishing.
- Ulf says, "let's go there right away..."
- Ulf says, "ok?"
- You say, "fine, so I write @go conferance center"
- Ulf says, "or simple> @go conf or something, yes"
- Ulf gets on his feet.
- Ulf disolves into a mass of ones and zeros and vanishes.
- You say, "OK fine, see you there"
- @go conf
When I arrived at the main entry point I had in fact planned to go directly to the ICDE conference center that I had visited on a previous logon at Diversity University MOO, where I intended to stage the virtual meetings with my graduate students. As the sequence of events shown above, and my subsequent conversation with Ulf reveals, the virtual conference center had in fact been "rebuilt" and "renamed" since the last time I was there. My call to the system @go ICDE then resulted in an error message ["I see no "icde" here"] from the system to me. What I then did was to seek some help from Ulf who had already made his presence felt by waving to me from his virtual office. To initiate my query I used the paging function which allows communication with other people even if they are not in the same room to ask a question ["page ulf hello, where has icde gone?"] before I joined Ulf with the help of the @join function in his office. After some social niceties [bowing and smiling etc.] we went together to the conference center and continued our discussion there [see Appendix 3 for some more of the discussion].
The potential of such distributed multi-user dialogues is large, but I do not have time to discuss this issue in depth here. The functionality (in terms of the communicative functions and discourse norms facilitated by the system) is as yet fairly elementary, and there are still some problems with the representation of other languages than English, since the virtual discourse is mediated as text by means of the restricted ASCII set of characters which do not allow the use of conventional diacritic markers as in French and Spanish, and extended ASCII-set characters such as [æ], [ø] and [å] in Norwegian. The most important aspect of such environments, and the one which I find especially interesting in the present context is the fact that all communication in the virtual environment may be logged in real time, as I did above. This gives unique possibilities for more profound research into the question of how (scientific) knowledge at many levels of complexity is socioculturally constituted and instantiated. There is no need for transcription in a MOO, which often causes problems when one is working from audio or video tape-recordings of interactions, since the participants themselves actualise everything that they say or do as written texts as they interact in real time through writing their utterances and actions to one another in the virtual environment. The fact that participants can also take part in constructing and designing the virtual physical environment while they are simultaneously interacting with one another in the self-same environment that they are creating means that one avoids to some extent the problem of the context of situation being experienced as "artificial", something can be a considerable methodological problem in conventional experimental studies designed and carried out within such fields of science as sociology, pedagogy and psychology. Since this is a new, emerging area of human culture with rapidly changing norm-systems, the researcher too will be at the same time both participant in, and observer of (also of his or her own processes of interactional and textual norm development and change) the the processes of constitution of the virtual culture [see Coppock 1994[b], 1995[a], 1995[b]].
In this paper I have tried to show how the authority of the traditional paper encyclopaedia as reference work based on the notions of completeness and up-to-dateness in relation to some set of "canonical" knowledge base is challenged by the dynamicity of the evolution and representation of knowledge in emerging network-based interpretative communities in the digital virtual environments being made accessible by means of the Internet. With increasing degrees of integration of the above-mentioned MOO-environments with other, more asynchronic kinds of networked discussion forums such as UseNet News and e-mail discussion groups and with the global hypermedia environment offered by the World-Wide-Web, the multimedia encyclopaedia will probably be transcended as we come closer and closer to a globalized and truly "open work", where we will be able to retrieve, study and interpret new knowledge as it is in the process of developing. The borderlines between the sphere of so-called canonical knowledge and more peripheral areas of culture where new knowledge is still emerging will become less and less clear. For this to be a fully functional environment for end users, however, more sophisticated navigational, information filtering and participational devices and systems fwill need to be developed. Attempts to transfer conventional models of authoritative encyclopaedic works to the Internet may fail because there is still too little knowledge about how knowledge is socioculturally constituted in such environments, and about how human interactions in dynamic open systems of language (and other semiotic systems) function to disambiguate and clarify knowledge in the process of it emerging. Research into the constitution, representation and disambiguation of knowledge in distributed virtual environments can provide important new insights into the dynamics of the evolution of these and other areas of human culture, and change the ways in which we think about the authority of knowledge, and how it is constituted, represented and communicated. Recently, the Hubble telescope gave us images showing us the birth of a new star over time. These images have already been made accessible all over the world via the Internet. In the longer term it is conceivable that the question of the up-to-dateness, comparability, openness and closedness of encyclopaedic works will gradually become a non-issue, as we gain more and more direct access to material representations of the dynamic processes of meaning-making in the environment, and among ourselves, as they are going on.
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