Blended information behaviour in Second Life

Abstract

The aims of this paper are to provide insight into the information behaviour (IB) of people seeking information related to activities carried out in the virtual world (VW) Second Life (SL) and to identify whether IB models derived from contexts other than VWs are also applicable to SL. Ninety-one interviews, each describing an incident when the interviewee needed information for an SL activity, were carried out in SL itself. Data was analysed using existing research models of IB and inductively. It was established that models of IB derived in real-world settings are also applicable in VWs, and the models are enriched with new SL examples. Information encountering emerged as a dominant mode of information discovery, but behaviours such as browsing, monitoring, purposive search and verifying were also identified. Seven categories of need and four major categories of outcome emerged from inductive analysis of the data. A wide variety of sources were used by the participants and a new term, blended IB, is proposed to describe this varied IB. This study contributes insights into the everyday and practice-based IB of academics and professionals that is lacking in the literature. It can also provide guidance for those supporting information-seeking across new digital channels.