Conferencing together in social virtual reality: Bringing agency back into affordances-based approaches in communication scholarship

Abstract

Technological advancements allow embodied and synchronous communication via social virtual reality (VR), where multiple users interact as avatars in a shared virtual space. However, the affordances of social VR and how users interact with them have been underexplored. We expand the discourse on media affordances by emphasizing user agency in strategic media choices for overcoming constraints in physical and virtual worlds. We qualitatively investigated user experiences of a social VR platform. Findings from semi-structured interviews (N = 28) revealed that media selection is determined through a dynamic relationship between platforms designed to encourage action possibilities and users strategically leveraging media affordances to overcome situational constraints of their physical environment.