NPR has a video interviewing a researcher from Stanford who studies Second Life social phenomena, the video, "Don't Stand So Close To Me", talks about proximity and staring and how the avatars in Second Life conform to Real Life societal norms about personal space. I don't buy all the conclusions discussed in the video, a lot of it was anecdotal without any statistics to confirm them, maybe the researcher has them, but they weren't talked about in the video.
(Via The Click Heard Round The World)
Thursday, May 3, 2007
Don't Stand So Close To Me
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5 comments:
Most avatars rarely move around unless necessary, mostly due to lag or the inability to make refined movements easy. It's also pointless to move close or father from someone when they can "hear" you just fine, and you can cam around.
If anything I tend to move farther away from other avatars, so I don't bump them when I move or they move again. Bumping another avatar is a SL faux pau.
I concur with every single one of Veyron's points. You don't need to move around since cameras can do that for you, who wants to risk the lag crashing them, everyone can hear you just fine and bumping is like a reportable offense.
I've read similar stories about how supposedly male avatars will stand closer to females than other males, but from my early experiences in SL, that only seems to be the case when the guy is pulling a Hey Sexy, or a n00b who hasn't learned to look with the camera yet, but they walk right up to the face of everybody - even other males.
Most of the time I am not even looking at the person I'm talking to, anyway, since it seems like anything I do besides typing in chat will cause my avatar's head or body to face every other direction than directly at the person I was talking to, so how close I am to them wouldn't really matter.
I try not to "bump" others, but that's about it. If a male avie comes and gets too close, I do notice myself backing up - no clue why though.
Interesting vid, at least - thanks for sharing it!
i think it was an interesting vid but i agree with the others its not as bad or mind shocking as what they are tyring to make it look like. i rarely move back when someone is too close to me unless they are typing on my breast which is kind of weird and i actually try to stare at the person so that they can see that i am paying attention to them and what they are saying.
I also think this is rubbish research, It's not as if in RL I can move a camera out and about, or be in the middle of six IMs, and also have search open.
You moght not even notice where the person you are chatting to is.
Once I had some newbie with his nose between my boobs for almost 4 minutes before I noticed.
I think In RL I would be a bit quicker to notice.
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