As a result of iterative pilot testing, we determined a cylindrical virtual area 6 m in diameter and 3 m in height would be a good fit for our experiment. Boxes became dimly lit as their distance increased from the player and stopped being visible when they were further than 4.
B The target, a blue ball, seen after approaching the box. During each trial, sixteen boxes were randomly placed within this area, with eight of the boxes containing a blue ball see Figure 1. The remaining eight boxes served as decoys. In our navigational search task, participants started each trial from the center of the cylinder. A trial ended when participants found all eight balls or the trial ran for 5 min.
We chose to limit the trial length to reduce motion sickness. Participants were explicitly told that the criteria for efficiency were the number of balls collected, the total distance traveled, and the number of revisits. Since it was possible to complete the game by collecting all the balls before 5 min, we also recorded the completion time. To check if there was a ball inside a box, participants needed to approach it from its front side, indicated by an additional banner Figure 1B.
To prevent the accidental collection of the balls, the user needed to keep the box open for one second. As colliding with the boxes and any subsequent physics simulation would disorient the user and even induce motion sickness, we switched off collision detection for the boxes and the user could pass through them.
However, to prevent participants from peeking into the boxes from the other sides, the ball became visible only when a box was approached from the front side. Hand-based controllers are still the most common interfaces for navigation in VR, especially when physical walking is not feasible.
To choose among the hand-based controllers for the experiment, we compared the Vive controller that came with the headset and a gamepad. Through our pilot testing, we learned that the participants use their thumbs for controlling both kinds of controllers and release their thumbs to come to a halt. As a trackpad has no physical feedback that indicates the center, participants had difficulty providing proper input once they released their thumb, and as a result took time to adjust their input.
A gamepad has thumbsticks loaded with springs that force the thumbsticks to come back to their center when released. Because of this, the user can locate the center much more quickly. So, we chose to compare the HeadJoystick interface with a gamepad. Further, it adds comparability with Hashemian et al.
For both the Gamepad and HeadJoystick conditions, participants rotated the swivel chair they were sitting on to control the simulated rotations in VR. However, they translated in different manners. We chose to include only the interfaces that allow physical rotation because the importance of rotation in spatial updating has already been proved multiple times Klatzky et al.
Further, implementing physical rotations is no longer an issue, as HMDs are becoming increasingly wireless, and therefore have no cables to be entangled. For the Gamepad interface, the left control stick controlled horizontal translation velocities as illustrated in Figure 2.
Although physical rotation controlled yaw, for simplicity, we will refer to this interface as the Gamepad throughout the paper. In both cases, physical rotation T urning R ight, T urning L eft is applied.
In the HeadJoystick interface, head position determined the translation. The interface calibrated the zero-point before each use.
The distance of the head from the zero-point determined the speed of the virtual motion. To stop the motion, the user had to bring their head back to the zero-point. As a subsequent result, leaning forward and backward caused the user to move forward and backward, leaning left or right caused sideways motions, stretching their body up or slouching down created upward or downward motions, and coming back to the center stopped the motion.
In this kind of interface, many prior implementations include a small zone also known as idle, dead, or neutral zone where the physical head motion correspond to mapped virtual motion, to allow users to more easily break or be stationary. However, during the pilot testing for this study, we observed that our exponential curve relating head deflection to virtual translation speed, see Section 4. Hence, we opted to not include a zone. This also helped to reduce the amount users had to lean to travel with a faster speeds.
The velocity calculation is based on a scaled exponential function, similar to the function for a smooth translation proposed by LaViola et al. Exponential implementation creates a smooth transition. It has been successfully implemented in other 2D interfaces Hashemian and Riecke a , Nguyen-Vo et al. It has successfully been implemented in Hashemian et al. Please consult the appendix of Hashemian et al.
In this experiment, we compared the performance of the HeadJoystick and Gamepad interface. After completing the trials, we asked them to fill out a questionnaire and performed a semi-structured open-ended interview. We deployed a 2-blocked, repeated measure experimental design. All participants performed the navigational search task twice for each interface, totaling four trials and thus up to 20 min of VR exposure in total.
The order of the interfaces was counter-balanced to account for the order effects and maturation effects. The overall procedure is illustrated in Figure 3. After reading and signing the informed consent form, participants filled out a pre-experiment questionnaire before starting the experiment, asking about their age, gender and previous experience with video games and HMDs.
Then, they were guided through the tasks and tried out both interfaces before the actual experiment started. They started with one of the two interfaces. They performed two trials with the first interface. After completing the second trial, they filled out the SSQ again. The questionnaires were strategically placed between each trial to provide a short break between the trials. They repeated the same procedure including two trials with the interface they had not used in the first two trials.
Further, to assess motion sickness issues, we asked them to estimate their current state of motion sickness before and after each trial. They rated their motion sickness on a scale of 0— Before switching the interface, participants were asked to take a minimum 5 min break, including the time required to fill out the questionnaires. In addition to taking a mandatory break, participants were encouraged to take a short walk or drink water. After completing all four trials, they completed a post-study survey questionnaire detailed in Section 5.
The whole study took, on average, about 1 h to complete. Six quantitatively measured behavioral data types are summarized and plotted in Figure 4. Improved spatial updating for a given interface would be expected to increase the number of balls collected, and reduce task completion time and the number of revisits needed.
Gamepad , repetition first vs. Second trial and order of the interface assignment, group GamepadFirst vs. Figure 4A. Participants collected all eight balls in 31 out of 44 trials with HeadJoystick and 26 out of 44 trials with Gamepad.
All participants were able to collect at least six balls with HeadJoystick and at least four balls with Gamepad. Figure 4B.
Participants reached the time limit of 5 min in 13 trials when using the HeadJoystick vs. The fastest participant finished the task in 69 s with HeadJoystick and 48 s with Gamepad. Figure 4C. Participants travelled from Figures 4D,E.
Figure 4F. Only five participants two with Gamepad, three with HeadJoystick had no revisits to the target boxes before the trial completed. Some participants travelled slowly and visited only a few boxes. Others travelled quickly and visited as many boxes as possible. Since the total number of revisits depends on the total number of targets visited by the participants, we analyzed the ratio of revisited boxes to the total number of boxes visited by the participants.
We also analyzed how the number of revisits progressed as participants collected more balls. As seen in Figure 5 , as participants collected more balls and travelled more within the environment, the number of revisits increased at a different rate for HeadJoystick and Gamepad. However, the above data uses all the revisits from all the trials.
When we analyzed the data selecting only the participants who successfully collected all eight balls for both interfaces, the trend continued but the difference was less prominent.
Total target boxes revisited by the participants as they collected new balls. Light shades of dots represent the mean values per participant. Table above shows the planned contrast between the interfaces as the number of revisits accumulated with number of balls collected.
We also recorded the travel path of the trials to investigate potential behavioral difference between the interfaces during navigation.
Since putting the travel path of all the users and trials in a single graph created a dense path plot with impossible to distinguish travel instances, we show representative travel paths for Gamepad and HeadJoystick from a randomly selected participant Figure 6.
As the figure illustrates, with the Gamepad, participants restricted themselves to controlling no more than two translational DoF at a time, while with HeadJoystick, they controlled all available DoFs simultaneously. This is indicated by the straight horizontal and vertical lines with almost perpendicular turns with Gamepad front and side views, Figure 6A and curved paths with HeadJoystick in all projections Figure 6B.
Plots of almost all travel paths of individual trials showed similar trends and are submitted as a Supplementary Material for reference. Representative travel path isometric, top, front and side for A Gamepad and B HeadJoystick from a randomly selected participant. We chose to interpret the data with the time of SSQ measurement rather than the interfaces themselves because motion sickness accumulates over time.
Greenhouse-Geisser correction was applied whenever the assumption of sphericity was violated. Finally, we tested the correlation between the distance travelled and motion sickness as participants travelled significantly more with Gamepad. TABLE 1. Bonferroni correction was used for doubling the comparison. Each trial produced only minimal motion sickness on average, and the average SSQ score after the experiment was The highest SSQ scores reached by any participant was We can see from Figure 7 that for an average participant, when they used Gamepad as their first interface blue line , SSQ total and its sub-scales increased from Pre-Experiment to after using the Gamepad, and it stayed at the same level or even decreased after switching to HeadJoystick.
For an average participant using HeadJoystick as their first interface red line , not only did SSQ total and its sub-scales increase after using the HeadJoystick, it further continued increasing after switching to Gamepad. Inferential statistical analysis done below shows the same result.
Blue and red lines indicate an average participant using Gamepad and HeadJoystick as their first interface respectively. Figure 7A. Figure 7B. Figure 7C. LSMeans contrast showed for the GamepadFirst group a marginally significant increase in oculomotor issues eye strain, blurred vision, difficulty focusing, etc. Figure 7D. Figure 7E. We chose to analyze the TLX with time rather than interface as a main factor because it considers the effect of switching from HeadJoystick to Gamepad and vice versa.
TABLE 2. Figure 8A and Table 2. This equivalently means that there was no significant main effect of the interface. The blue line and red line indicate participants using Gamepad and HeadJoystick respectively, for their first trial. Figure 8B. The analysis did not show a main effect of time or group. However, there was a significant interaction between time and group.
However, when the participants switched from Gamepad to HeadJoystick they found the mental demand to be significantly reduced, whereas in the group that switched to Gamepad from HeadJoystick, the mental demand ratings went significantly up for the second interface. Figure 8C. The analysis showed a main effect of time as well as group. Figure 8D As with the physical demand, there was a main effect on time as well as group. In particular, the group that switched from HeadJoystick to Gamepad reported lower time pressure registering a marginally significant interaction; i.
Figure 8F. Die Geldleistung von erziehungskritik. Wafer jeweiligen vectrex controller Produktbewertungen werden aus verschiedenen hervorquellen wie z. Produktkategorien werden bei erziehungskritik. Stimmt genau, bitte Wort richten Weibsbild uns. Rogation zeigen Perle auch, ob es um einen bereits bestehenden oder um einen neuen vectrex controller Vergleich geht. Dieses Angebot von erziehungskritik.
Various companies like bHaptics have been working on bringing this kind of sensory feedback to VR gaming through specialized suits, but building it into a chair seems much more practical, relatively speaking.
Regardless of the game platform, users would of course be able to turn on the RGB lighting accents. This is a gaming chair after all. And it has a built-in microphone and speaker that actually amplifies your voice to make the wearer easier to hear and understand.
It is radically different from a notion of the correctness of certain forms of knowledge that are held to be observable or fundamentally true. Further, commonsensical is understood to be distinct to commonsense in that it implies a form of equal validity in verisimilitude in a body of knowledge whilst maintaining a degree of critical difference from the position of the observer.
The adoption of such a position situates the study as an analysis of particular aspects and beliefs of mainstream culture of certain societies of western culture. The hand mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam mill society with the industrial capitalist, the details and conditions of technological development within Marxs thought remain contentious. Elster proposes: Marx believed, paradoxically, both that technical change was the central fact in all world history and that it was a phenomenon uniquely characterising capitalism.
The use of a technology is specifically tied up with material relations, relations that can only exist within a capitalist framework.
However this seems contradictory to the central nature of history which is essentially progressive. Elster contends that while such a contradiction is a problem; the conceptual status of social relations and of science, therefore, is somewhat ambiguous , it is not insurmountable and that any theory seeking to offer an overarching theory of social change will contain contradictions and problems.
They are composed of symbols from the ASCII character set available on most English language computer keyboards and are most often representations of a face viewed by tilting ones head to the left side.
Common examples include : smiling, : frowning, and ; winking. Most accounts of emoticons identify SE Fahlman as the inventor of emoticons or smileys who contends that they were invented on the 19th September, Open Portals or Closed Gates? Bibliography Barlow, J.
Bechar-Israeli, H. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication. Beck, U. Bolter, D. Convergence 8,2, Chandler, D.
CMC Magazine. Feenberg, A. Oxford University Press, Oxford, Fernback, J. Virtual Culture. Sage, London, Gauntlett, D. Edward Arnold, London, Polity, Cambridge, Basic Books, New York, Questions of Cultural Identity. Hall, A. Journal of Mental Health Counselling. Hargittai, E. Channelling Content on the World Wide Web. Jaffe, M. Paper presented at 45th annual conference of the International Communication Association.
Latour, B. Social Problems 35,3, June, Postman, N. Vintage, New York, Reid, E. Cybersociety: Computer Mediated Communication and Community.
Sage, Thousand Oaks, Rheingold, H. Wesley Publishing, Reading, MA, Walther, J. Watson, N. Net Fan Community. Virtual Culture, Identity and Communication in Cybersociety. Wellman, B. Communities in Cyberspace. Winner, L. Perichoresis and Praxis in Usenet. Debbie Herring Abstract The Usenet group uk. A two year ethnographic study of the group by a long-standing member of the community, analysed and explored from the perspective of contextual theology, suggests ways that religious community may be envisioned for computer mediated environments.
Several important themes have emerged, of which two are highlighted in this paper. First, the nature of the community existence of the group may be usefully conceptualised as perichoretic: that is, members of the community relate to one another by mutual interpenetration on an intellectual level.
Imaginative reconstruction of a persona from text based communication, undertaken as part of the corporate life of self-identified community with a shared framework of values, results in a culture where individuals identify themselves with others by recognition, even where there is no direct interpersonal communication.
Some unexpected findings of the phenomenon of lurking are especially illustrative in this regard. Second, the analysis of the religious life of the community showed forms of behaviour which could be described in terms of both faith and action praxis. Close scrutiny of the groups communication showed that there were elements of their written communication, and concepts behind the written communication, whose effects were practical rather than just intellectual. Furthermore, these were not confined to practical outcomes, but were manifest in practical behaviours in the context.
Four modes of praxis were identified. These findings are presented by drawing heavily on the groups own discussions so that the authentic voice of the community may be heard.
The researchers conclusions are corroborated from the results of a comprehensive questionnaire, which included responses to open ended questions exploring the communitys introspection. The insights into being a religious community in cyberspace resulting from this major, long-term study, form a base-line for future research. Key Words: Usenet, uk. Christian, interpersonal communication, community, cyberspace. Introduction Visions of Humanity is not a new concept in theology.
What is man, that thou art mindful of him? It is a question that has echoed again and again through the history of the church in catechisms,1 theologies and hymns. So theologians have a head start in asking, if not in answering how humanity is envisioned, and how it ought to be envisioned. When a theologian explores the interface between cyberspace studies and theology, there is often an uncanny feeling of dj vu.
Religion has offered a lot of possible answers to the question what is a human being? This paper will confine itself to considering Christian responses, but it should be noted that other religions and philosophies of life have engaged equally with the subject, sometimes with very different outcomes.
The creation narratives of the Hebrew Scriptures say that humankind was made in the image of God. Theologians discuss endlessly exactly what this means in terms of biology and anthropology, but there is little disagreement that humanity owes its distinctiveness to being the creation of God who is unique, and uniquely creative. My own research has been, not into individuals, but into the notion of community, and how individuals are part of community.
When I first started researching community in cyberspace as an undergraduate in the mid s, the main requirement was to justify the use of the word community to describe the way people relate to one another in a computer mediated environment.
The work since then of people like Steven Jones2 and Nancy Baym3 have established it as commonplace to talk about virtual community so that today, there is no need to exegete Tnnies long descriptions of gesellschaft and gemeinschaft,4 or to consider critically the imagined community of Benedict Anderson.
Theology the study of God, can be done in two ways. We can make statements about what God is, and explore what that tells us about what it is to be human.
This is the basis of traditional systematic theology. Making definitive statements about God in this way is a risky strategy, because it is based on reading the Biblical texts as being exclusively and exhaustively truth claims.
Alternatively, one can explore what being human is, and use that to tell us about the God we believe created us in his image a phenomenological approach. This takes as its starting point people, turning traditional theology upside down, looking for pointers to what God is in humanity, rather than looking for clues to humanity in God. Ideally, theologians need to be able to look in both directions at once: to use what we know of God to inform the way we envision humankind, and to observe what humankind can teach us about God.
My research has used the methods and tools of Contextual Theology to analyse the activity of a virtual community through a two-year study and extensive survey of the Usenet group uk. The participant observation element produced the entire transcript of the groups discourse for the period in the form of around , archived newsgroup posts.
I shall discuss here two main findings which I think offer insight into the way that Christians, and those interested in Christianity, are seeing themselves and one another in an online community. It should be noted that some of the quotations from the group are taken from outside the period of study, but they do reflect views expressed during the two years of observation. Perichoresis The members of the community I was studying know one another almost exclusively through their interaction in the group.
In most cases, they have never met in real life, so the way they know one another is constrained by the limitations of the medium. Each person who reads messages to the group constructs an imaginative image of other individuals based on what they say and how they react to other people the reader also knows. This constructed image mutates as other messages, and other interactions, influence the way the reader constructs the image. A recorded saying of Jesus, on which much theology has been built, is found in John , when he says to the disciples Abide in me, as I abide in you.
Christians interpret this as Jesus incorporating humankind into the life of the Trinity of God. But quite apart from any religious connotations, this phrase describes very aptly the way that people relating to one another in virtual community have their ongoing being their existence not in some objective way, but in the imagination of others, and at the same time, hold the existence of others in their own imagination.
As far as one can tell, each contributor to the group remains the same person in real life. Over time, people change little by little, but remain recognisably the same person. But the experience of contributors to this computer mediated community is somewhat different. An initial impression, formed, perhaps on the basis of a single post or a series of messages posted on a specific topic or over a short period of time, may be completely changed by the discovery of significant new information.
For example, one poster uses a family nickname, which is often assumed to be a male name. On several occasions, others have assumed that this person is male, and the image they have constructed of this person is of a man.
Please forgive my ignorance, as in America your name isnt used yet for females. Similar situations have arisen where a recent graduate has been assumed to be young, when she is in fact in her forties with adult children:.
Poster A: I think perhaps you are taking this more personally than I had intended because you have devoted so much of your young life to this topic. Other examples include where an atheist was assumed to be a Christian, and apparent confusion over the nationality of posters. Because of the extremely wide range of approaches, views8 and personalities represented, group members may agree with one another on one topic and argue opposing cases on another.
People who disagree profoundly on one subject may unite to respond positively to a request for prayer, or in affirmative support for someone undergoing personal problems. The discovery that someone lives in the same city, or reads the same books, or gets the same results to an online personality test draws people together until a doctrinal or ethical disagreement puts them apart again. So within the boundaries of each persons perception of the community there is a constantly shifting landscape of alliances and enmities, understandings and differences, knowledge and ignorance.
The precise pattern of movement will be unique to each individual, whose perspective is based in his or her own reality, and who views the group and individuals within it from that reality.
From the point of view of theology, a model of community that adequately reflects this kind of chaotic system proved difficult. Christian models of community are, in general, based on either geographical or social proximity the church, ecclesia, koinonia or on notions of fellowship and common understanding we believe in one holy catholic church says the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed.
An alternative model suggested itself, from the vocabulary not of contextual theology, but of systematic theology, and was suggested by reviewing the theological context of Jesus statement described above. Eusebius and others dusted down a term from ancient Greek physics: the philosopher Anaxagoras, in the fifth century BC, had used the term perichoresis to describe chaotic movement in finite space.
This term, to the early church, seemed to offer a way of describing the dynamic inner life of a God who was at once One, Only, Unique Unity, and at the same time, a moving, living, shifting active relationship between Creator, Redeemer and Spirit in a word, the doctrine of Trinity. It should be explained that the doctrine of Trinity belongs more properly to systematic theology than to contextual theology.
Although not explicitly mentioned in the Bible, the notion of God being three and also being one was developed in the very earliest church.
There was and remains much discussion about how both the three-ness and the one-ness of God can be held together in the same idea, and for the first four centuries of the church, who was a heretic and who was a saint were often determined by how correctly the doctrine of trinity was explained. The church fathers used Greek terminology to describe aspects of the Trinity, because the main language of the early church was Greek.
Perichoresis means literally moving or dancing around peri means around, and choreo is the root of our word choreography. The Latin fathers translated this word as Circumincessio walking around, which is altogether more pedestrian!
Augustine, in De Trinitate, described it as a trinity of persons mutually interrelated, and a unity of equal essence. The contemporary theologian Jrgen Moltmann says this of the doctrine of Trinity:.
If on the basis of salvation history and the experience of salvation, we have to recognise the unity of the Triune God in the perichoretic at-oneness of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, then this does not correspond to the solitary human subject in relationship to himself [] The perichoretic at-oneness of the Triune God corresponds to the experience of the community of Christ, the community which the Spirit unites through respect, affection and love.
The shifting, churning, apparently random movement of relationships in this virtual community is well described as chaotic movement in finite cyber space, after Anaxagoras. Dancing around, sometimes together, sometimes apart, but always within the community, is a most apt metaphor for the inner life of the group.
At the same time, there is an appropriateness about the connotations of dynamic life in community which the Christian use of the term suggests. Data from the questionnaire added unexpected support for the use of this model.
It has long been known that some people read newsgroups but do not contribute. These people are described as lurkers. Although their presence is assumed, it has been difficult to demonstrate that such people exist, and in what numbers.
When the questionnaire for this project was being written, it was unreasonable optimism that led to the inclusion of lurker as a self-description option for respondents. But as it turned out, 22 of the respondents described themselves as lurkers, and an incidental finding from another question showed that ukrc posters lurk in considerable numbers on other groups as well.
But it was lurkers responses to other questions that provided a surprise. Four lurkers ticked the box it has become part of my life, and two agreed it has become an important part of my life. Several of them offered to respond by email or telephone to further questions.
People who were otherwise silent and unnoticed in the community took the time and trouble to complete a long questionnaire for a community member, and were willing to follow that up if asked; and more than a quarter of them were claiming that this community was part of their life! I believe that this is strong support for a model of community that is based on subjective, dynamic relationships with envisioned others: a vision of humanity where the object is actualised in the imagination of the subject.
The idea of mutually indwelling relationships between self and others, dancing around chaotically but remaining in community, has for years been used by Christians to describe the inner life of God. Community in cyberspace reflects this profoundest concept of community that Christianity has discovered. At the risk of enraging those systematic theologians who prefer to reserve all religious language for their own use, it is entirely appropriate to liberate the term perichoresis into secular language for the use of those exploring new forms of community, acknowledging that Christian theology has done us all a service by preserving it as a model of community which resonates so richly with contemporary experience.
Praxis If the notion of perichoresis owes everything to systematic theology, the concept of praxis owes more to contextual theology. For them, it was not enough to merely allow belief to inform practice: Christian living should be about doing faith in every human activity. The choice of the word praxis was intended to ground this approach to faith in the language of classical theology, where orthodoxy right belief and orthopraxy right action are complementary values in Christian life.
All contextual theologies are more concerned with community practice than with details of doctrinal agreement, and liberation theologies especially privilege praxis above belief as the sign of authentic Christian expression. It would be odd indeed to find an exploration in contextual theology without a focus on praxis, and so one of the aims of this research into community online was to determine the praxis of the community. The obvious finding is that a text only, computer mediated community, whose mode of existence is perichoretic rather than physical is not concerned with praxis.
This finding, though superficially true, does not do justice to the rich community life of the group, and there was a niggling suspicion that praxis might identifiable if it were only possible to extrapolate the concept of praxis into a virtual environment. The question was how to separate out text that corresponds to thought, views and beliefs from text that might correspond to action.
The breakthrough came unexpectedly. A regular poster lets call him Mr X posted the following message:. On the whole, no. At the risk of offending my Catholic friends, I have observed that where the Catholic church is the majority denomination, you do find a lot more of what we Protestants would regard as superstition.
Where the situation is otherwise, these things are toned down, doubtless in deference to the majority opinion. Such a post was very much contrary to the normal intercourse of the group, which usually extends respect to those from all religious traditions. Another regular poster, Mrs Y, replied:. The outcry was immediate and heated.
Although the majority of the group agreed that what Mr X had posted was unpleasant and showed unacceptable prejudice, Mrs Ys misrepresentation of his views to portray him as racist was intolerable. Usenet posts are normally publicly archived, and this misrepresentation would make permanent a slur on his character. Some people agreed that such a parody of his views would have been entirely acceptable if she had made clear that it were a parody by annotation or comment, but as a straight ascription to him of views he had not expressed, a great wrong had been done.
This incident showed where a line might be drawn to separate thoughts, views and opinions from actions. The content of posts, the text and its meaning, were not action.
But making a post in a particular way could be construed as action. With this in mind, a survey of other posts produced plenty of evidence of purposeful posting made to achieve specific effects.
Once these were identified, four very clear elements of praxis emerged. First, posts that are purposefully welcoming and set out to draw in those who might otherwise be seen as marginal to the community show a praxis of inclusion. It is a sad fact that newcomers to many Usenet groups are treated poorly by regular contributors. If a new poster asks a question that has been previously answered, or makes a comment that challenges widely held views on a group, the common response is a process known as flaming: numerous aggressive, offensive and belittling messages are posted in order to remind the newbie that he or she has no status in the group.
In contrast, new posters to ukrc are generally welcomed, offered virtual jelly babies and invited politely to conform to the conventions of the group if they have not already done so Welcome out of the lurking shadows S, join the fun, pull up a chair and have one of these jellybabies that Neil left when he went on holiday. Although many groups mention and acknowledge the presence of lurkers in their midst, few take into account the effect posts may have on lurkers.
In contrast, members of uk. At least a rebuttal shows that we dont all think like that. People who have lurked and then make it known that they have done so when they post for the first time are welcomed not as newcomers, but as familiar members of the community. Second, there is a determined culture of engaging with people as individuals.
Most posters use their real names and offer identifying information which is remembered and referred by others. This produces what I have called a praxis of personal connection. Posters consciously and deliberately deal with one another as individuals, rather than treating the group as an interactive broadcast medium.
There is also recognition that each individual has personal connections outside the group and in real life:. BTW, Im not [] trying to prove anything here about the RC church; your own church is also the source, for you, of your interpretation of Scripture.
The third kind of praxis identified is a praxis of common purpose. Most posters value greatly the diversity that is evident in the community. People of several religions and none, and those of a wide variety of denominations within Christianity, post to the group and read it, indicating that they share a view that discussion of the Christian faith in the UK, and general discussion between UK Christians, is a purposeful way to spend leisure time.
No-one is excluded from the community on the grounds of faith or lack thereof, and membership is not limited or withheld on the grounds of belief. To converse in a moderated environment with people from a wide range of traditions. All of which are considered to be of equal value. Finally, there is a praxis of expression.
Members of the community are committed to putting their beliefs and opinions into the public domain by expressing them in this UK-Christianity orientated community. The decision to post a message to the group is a decision to express views, thoughts or ideas in words that will be read as text by members of the group, and by anybody who choose to explore the archives kept by Google. Conclusions The two themes described above are drawn from the findings of a long term, in-depth exploration of one particular community in cyberspace.
First, the nature of the community existence of the group may be usefully conceptualised as perichoretic: that is, members of the community relate to one another by dynamic mutual interpenetration on an intellectual level.
But these are not the only findings, and it should be emphasised that in any case, they form part of a much larger evaluation of a single computer mediated community. It would be misleading to suggest that their application is well established or conclusive outside one very specific context. So I conclude by suggesting that these concepts might usefully be explored in other virtual communities, and especially in other forms of computer mediated activity and interaction.
Inter-disciplinary collaboration using language and ideas derived from all areas of study may help us and future generations of cyberculture explorers to find ways to understand and communicate the experience of life online.
Notes 1 eg.
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