Making efriends and influencing people in Second Life

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Making e-friends and influencing people in Second
Life

• Aleks Krotoski
• University of Surrey
• SPERI

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Game Goal-oriented Play Eventual outcome
Not a game Second Life Play Non-directed
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What Ill talk about

• Interpersonal relationships in cyberspace
• How I measure relationships in Second Life
• How relationships are defined

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Before I get ahead of myself

• The differences between online and offline
• Anonymity
• Physical appearance
• Physical proximity
• Greater transience (more weak ties)
• Absence of social cues
• So how can we expect community to grow?

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Online community I

• In traditional definitions of community,
  thered be no such thing in cyberspace
• Tied to place
• To misquote AOL ads, how can you fall for someone
  youve never met?
• But we know thats not true
• Chatrooms, forums, MySpace, Craigs List, London
  Memorial
• These virtual worlds are the places which the
  online communities are tied to

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Online Communities I (cont)

• Transient and formal communities
• London Memorial in the virtual world Second Life
• Between 12-1pm on 7 July 2005, over 150 Second
  Life residents visited. It was open for 7 days
  and racked up thousands of visitors
• Fewer than 10 claimed any British ties
• Makers motivations were altruistic and purely
  community-driven

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Online community II

• Form for the same reasons offline communities do
• Make friends, provide motivation, offer support,
  meet like-minded others
• Whatever role trust plays in offline communities,
  it plays in online communities because these
  interactions are human-bound
• What we know about online relationships
• Proximity and frequency of contact
• Similarity
• Self-presentation
• Reciprocity self-disclosure
• Consistency
• Perpetuity dont mess with the orc if youve
  already POd the governor.

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Trust in virtual communities I were all in it
together

• Returning to Anonymity
• Perceived similarity (levelling the playing
  field)
• No social cues, so lots of uncertainty
• Expectations of openness and honesty engenders a
  culture of mutual sharing
• Relevant Social Psychological dimension of trust
• Similarity of goals and values
• Expectations of future interaction

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Trust in virtual worlds III Rep (cont)

• Trust is based upon
• past experience
• which is either based upon functional goals or
  pre-existing social relationships
• or some kind of disinterested third party (e.g.,
  Craigs List or MySpace)
• And speaking of social networking applications,
  the same principles work in-world too
• Finally, you must comply
• A non-official policing force in a space where an
  official police is absent
• The emphasis is on friendship and dedication to
  the group
• Rejection is cruel

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How measure friendships? Social Network Analysis
studies social relationships as a series of
interconnected webs. focuses on
inter-relationships rather than individuals
attributes
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Asking personal questions

• Surveys
• Who do you know?
• Who do you communicate with?
• Who do you trust?
• Define your relationship
• Whos trustworthy? (Poortinga Pidgeon, 2003
  Cvetkovich (1999) Renn Levine, 1991)
• Whos credible? (Renn Levine, 1991)
• Who do you compare yourself with? (Lennox
  Wolfe, 1984)
• Whos the most prototypical?

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"who the hell does she think she is?"
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Results

• N (respondents) 33
• N (total network) 650

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Picking apart communication network closeness

• But what does it mean in Second Life if someone
  in this community is rated close or distant?

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Results Single explanatory variable (General
Communication)

• The greatest prediction comes from general trust
  followed by credibility, which is not surprising,
  as this is proposed in Sherifs (1981) contact
  hypothesis.

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Single explanatory variable General Trust SNC
categories

• Effect of interpersonal closeness on mode of
  communication (e.g., Garton et al, 1997)
• Offline communication contributes the most to the
  estimate of General Trust. Online public
  communication contributes the least.

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In Sum

• Closeness has implications for influence and
  persuasion, even in the virtual environment
• Virtual communities operate in very similar ways
  to other communities both on and offline
• They bring together distributed individuals based
  on common experience, motivations and reputation
• This is particularly true for virtual world
  participants because of the explicit social
  design of the software
• Trust varies according to communication medium
• Trust is paramount

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• Thank you!
• Aleks Krotoski (Mynci Gorky)
• A.Krotoski_at_surrey.ac.uk