Since the ubiquity of email, I write more than I talk. As voice chat gets going in SL, I’m curious how that’s going to affect communication. With text chat and IM, I truncate my speech and my thinking is naturally truncated too. I have had a deep conversation IMing in SL and it went well. When I’m in group settings with lots of people texting I notice the way the conversation moves, how and what participants text. The context isn’t conducive to long-winded messages but to short responsive, overlapping conversations. Our language has and will continue to change as we use it in new contexts. Emoticons and common abbreviations such as BRB (Be right back) or TY(Thank you) are two examples. Another is the ability to follow a chat with overlapping conversations.
But communication has other dimensions as well, such as our avatar’s body language and proximity to other avatars. I was recently being bumped and pushed repeatedly by a guy while I was dancing. I thought he was a noob (new resident) and learning how to control his avatar. It was odd. I IMed him to ask him to stop but he didn’t. He IMed me and said he didn’t like how I was dancing. I retorted equally agressively and he continued pushing me until he pushed me into the water. My system crashed before I could report the abuse.
I was in my male identity. The dance animation I was using, I’d got from from one of the female avi’s there. My interpretation is that my dancing style was too feminine for him. His Avi was very masculine, my male avi is not. I IMed him because IMing is private and I didn’t want to make the incident public at the time. Had I been chatting the interaction, things might have gone differently. Others would have been a part of our conversation; they would have “witnessed” it more clearly. It’s difficult to say to what degree others had noticed his abusive behavior.