Ironia e ristrutturazione del participant framework: il caso degli ambienti virtuali

Eight couples of participants navigate in a collaborative virtual environment with the task of finding out some objects and a member of the research team assisting them. Episodes have been identified (20), in which a participant goes through some difficulty and refers to it ironically. The present work aims at studying what is the aftermath of irony on the social situation in which the participant is involved. The theoretical framework of conversation analysis has been adopted, according to which irony can be defined as a double contextualization of events. The analysis of the episodes suggests that irony allows participants to take on a double identity, so that their own face can be saved without threatening the interlocutors’ or neglecting the difficulty. It also shows that ‘non serious’ answers to a difficulty in the virtual reality do not amount to a break in the involvement in the virtual task, but rather the adoption of strategies typical of real social situations.