Raising Your Hand on the Horseless Carriage

I went to my first SL Bar Association meeting today. It was quite decent as meetings go, but something caught my interest more than the agenda. The meeting was held in text chat, and the group apparently has a norm of emoting “raises hand” and waiting to be called on by the chair rather than just typing out – though the norm wasn’t universally followed.

Now, your cognition might not have ground to a screeching halt at that, as mine did. But, consider the venue: a text-chat meeting in Second Life.

Some time ago, a professor of mine mentioned in class that a friend of hers had looked into SL as a teaching tool and dismissed it when she found out there wasn’t a default animation for students to raise their hands. I cracked up, belly laughing, snorting – and then realized not only was my professor not joking, she didn’t get the humor herself.

So it bears explaining.

Let’s look at hand-raising. It’s a technological solution to a cognitive problem, one that’s become a custom. The cognitive problem is, humans are pretty bad at finding meaning from more than one person speaking at a time. Voice and music, voice and much ambient noise, no problem – but multiple voices, we’re just not good with.  So we adapted a technological kludge: a visual tool for ensuring only one voice gets heard at a time (and incidentally, assuring the accountability of the chooser to the chosen, but that’s a separate issue).

And hand-raising is a neat solution to that little cognitive flaw of ours. We’re raised with it, and it seems second nature.  It becomes customary for situations in which multiple people would like to speak at once.
But of course, in a virtual environment where nobody is speaking, but conversing in open chat – it’s a solution to a problem nobody is having! We can process successive lines of text quite easily – it’s called “reading,” and people learn to do it about the same time they learn that “hand raising” kludge. No matter how many people are “speaking” at once, the client renders it all as a text -the letters aren’t all superimposed over each other, but come neatly formatted and tagged by sequential speaker.

This is one of the great strengths of the medium: with our ability to process multiple simultaneous written inputs, the conversational bandwidth is vastly higher than with speech.  Add a text backchannel to a speaker, and you’ve got a beautifully rich event. And unless people are very new to the medium, or more than 40 people or so are actually text-chatting all at once, it’s really not hard to follow. It’s just reading.

So what’s with the “raises hand” thing?  Custom. People don’t think about why they use technology the way they do once it becomes familiar. And when new technologies are introduced, they go through a period of being treated as just like old technologies. It takes a while for people to understand they’re different, and to discover new uses and customs for them. Thus, automobiles started off as “horseless carriages,” a new technology “just like” a familiar old one.  Computer GUIs were “electronic desktops” complete with “file folders” and “trash cans,” just like the familiar physical office space. And virtual world meetings have “hand raising.”

Sometimes, though, the new technology’s affordances – the things it allows you do do that other technologies don’t – and the cultural expectations of old-tech users crash head on, with nary a horse to be found.  2008′s “Convergence of the Real and the Virtual,” the first academic conference held in World of Warcraft, epitomized that. Traditional academic speakers, used to deference to their credentials and their place at a physical podium, melted down when confronted by the virtual-meeting norm of backchannel open conversation and engagement with the speaker.

Whether from a traditionalist’s view or an early adopter’s view, it was the sort of trainwreck you can’t take your eyes from.  By the third day, however, everyone seemed to have adapted their cultural expectations to the affordances of the technology, and finished with a smooth and enjoyable day.

What of the SLBA’s hand-raising then?  It’s a cultural marker, to be sure: it says that the people aren’t, as James Paul Gee would put it, fluent in the “Discourse” of virtual worlds meetings.  Now, the “horseless carriage” trope serves a purpose: it smooths the adoption path. By obscuring differences and affordances, it allows noobs the opportunity to get comfortable with the technology in their own time. While it’s not a leet discourse, “horesless carriage”-ing is a technology with its own affordances.

For a group bringing new people into the virtual space, making them feel comfortable, and then socializing them into the discourse, it’s a kindess. For an organization seeking to have impact as knowledgeable participants in the Discourse of virtual worlds professionals – well, as WoW’s trade chat would have it – “lol noob!”