Social awareness: the power of digital elements in collaborative environment

Awareness is the sense of what is happening, who is around, what they are doing, what their states of emotion and whether or not they notice you. Social awareness and how they are promoted by digital elements in networked collaborative virtual environment (NCVE) is the main focus of this study. Social awareness is defined as the understanding of a contextual situation at a present time. In networked collaborative virtual environments (NCVE), awareness plays an important role for achieving an effective digital communication. For a particular virtual environment, participants should be aware of the people whom they are interacting with, their responsibilities and contributions, the collaborative activities and their progress level. This paper discusses the digital elements that are used to support awareness during virtual collaboration by exploring their characteristics and the differences in terms of their specific roles in promoting awareness. With the main focus on social awareness, eight different awareness types (presence, turn taking, emotion, identities, state, role, contextual and conversational) are presented with respect to these digital elements. The impacts of using each digital element in various applications are also identified in order to enhance the usage of these elements when they are applied to their relevant networked collaborative applications. Thus, with appropriate use of digital elements, awareness in such situation can be improved.

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