Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

Media and cultural studies scholar Axel Bruns (2008) rejects the notion ‘prosumption’ and
emphasizes the active participation and transformative agency of user activities in new media
production. Bruns coins the term ‘produsage’ (Bruns 2008) in order to explore user-generated
content in contemporary social media platforms including blogs, Wikipedia and SL. Communities
of content creators can think and act collectively, and explore creative uses of tools and resources.
Therefore, the structure of produsage communities is in constant flux. Although these notions in
Bruns’ perspective can be criticized with regard to the specific context of SL, his analysis of
collaborative content creation activities in a wider spectrum social media is useful to understand
the similarities and differences of these co-creation activities and the affordances and social
conventions of platforms. The ideas and theories of media and communication scholars about the
power relations, social control and exploitation in relation to online co-production activities affects
my framing of media meanings and power relations in SL (i.e. Bonsu and Darmody 2008). On the
other hand, several characteristics of SL distinguish it from conventional social media platforms, as
it is a social VW with affordances for real-time interaction of avatars in three-dimensional shared
places. Thus, the analysis focuses on such characteristics that create a sense of place in SL.
Research on virtual places
As I mentioned above, the analysis of SL emphasizes the framing of VWs as places, which
accommodate both experiential and semiotic experiences of individuals in computer-mediated,
multi-user, persistent virtual environments (Bartle 2004). In this perspective, digital platforms
such as SL differentiate from both the places in physical world and the two-dimensional graphical
environments of the World Wide Web, as they provide their users with a collaborative platform to
experience both synchronous and asynchronous communication in a shared three-dimensional
representation of space (Ondrejka 2005, Damer 2009). The spatial characteristics of interaction in
SL provide specific affordances for verbal and non-verbal communication (Schroeder 2011) and the
use of avatars as personal mediators (Jensen 2012). The experiential perspective to virtual places
therefore considers the representational, metaphorical and performative aspects of virtual worldmaking
(Jensen 2012) as constituents of a social semiotic analysis to uncover the meaning
potentials in SL’s places and artifacts.
Previous research studies on meaning and design in VWs have studied relevant issues such as the
phenomenology of sense of place in digitally mediated communication (Maher and Simoff 2000),
the underlying physical rules and their effects on user experience (Santos 2009), the relations
between the design of VWs and architecture (Bridges and Charitos 1997), the semiotics of religious
spaces in SL (Leone 2011), or the effects of real-world spatial metaphors on the construction of the
virtual environments (i.e. Book 2004, Prasolova-Førland 2008, Taylor 2009). Design and
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