2026 Volume 28 Issue 3 Pages 277-288
In general online voice communication environments, participants are not assumed to engage in multiple conversations simultaneously. As a result, opportunities to overhear or participate in other conversations, as well as opportunities for new conversations to emerge during ongoing interaction, are limited. Although many studies have explored online dialogue environments that emulate face-to-face situations using avatars or virtual spaces, relatively little attention has been paid to the discrete network structures inherent in online dialogue environments and their potential as resources for dialogue design. The purpose of this study is to develop an online dialogue environment that enables multiplex participation across multiple dialogues and to explore the characteristics of interaction unique to dialogue environments based on graph structures. We developed an online dialogue environment called Plexa based on a model that represents the participation structure proposed by Goffman (1981) as a graph, and conducted an experimental study involving groups of three participants. The results showed that in all groups, participants within a dialogue space brought external participants into that space based on their own judgment―an interaction that is rarely observed in dialogue environments grounded in physical co-presence. These findings suggest that online dialogue environments based on graph structures can give rise to interaction patterns that are distinct from those found in face-to-face situations.
