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<p>This paper investigates why various online experiences feel similar or different to each other and to face-to-face interactions. Drawing on Alfred Schutz’s phenomenological sociology, I analyze the relationship between everyday life and the virtual domain by offering a critique of existing theoretical applications of Schutz’s framework that classify digital interactions either as extensions of everyday life or as distinct “provinces of meaning”. I show that these perspectives are incompatible due to their reliance on fundamentally different structures of the life-world. On the theoretical level, this paper proposes a unified framework to examine the (dis)continuity of online experiences with real life, emphasizing the role of spatiality and embodiment in structuring virtual sociality. Building on the concept of virtual life-worlds, I argue that virtual environments that have their own spatiality must be understood as ontologically grounded worlds analogous to physical reality. Virtual embodiment allows for independent expressive schemas that remain integrated with the everyday life-world. On the empirical level, the framework is applied to a specific digital environment that uses virtual reality (VR) technologies. Ethnographic research in VRChat, a social VR platform, illustrates how avatar-body attachment and the platform’s asymmetry—allowing varying modes of presence—fosters a continuity between VR and real-life experiences through the duplication of bodily expressive resources and the quest for realism. At the same time, VR also enables the technical purification of self-expression, creating a uniquely mediated social experience.</p>

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Why Does Social Virtual Reality Feel So Real? A Phenomenological Study of Spatiality, Embodiment, and Continuity Between Digital and Physical Realities

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2025年6月13日

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  • Maria Erofeeva

摘要

This paper investigates why various online experiences feel similar or different to each other and to face-to-face interactions. Drawing on Alfred Schutz’s phenomenological sociology, I analyze the relationship between everyday life and the virtual domain by offering a critique of existing theoretical applications of Schutz’s framework that classify digital interactions either as extensions of everyday life or as distinct “provinces of meaning”. I show that these perspectives are incompatible due to their reliance on fundamentally different structures of the life-world. On the theoretical level, this paper proposes a unified framework to examine the (dis)continuity of online experiences with real life, emphasizing the role of spatiality and embodiment in structuring virtual sociality. Building on the concept of virtual life-worlds, I argue that virtual environments that have their own spatiality must be understood as ontologically grounded worlds analogous to physical reality. Virtual embodiment allows for independent expressive schemas that remain integrated with the everyday life-world. On the empirical level, the framework is applied to a specific digital environment that uses virtual reality (VR) technologies. Ethnographic research in VRChat, a social VR platform, illustrates how avatar-body attachment and the platform’s asymmetry—allowing varying modes of presence—fosters a continuity between VR and real-life experiences through the duplication of bodily expressive resources and the quest for realism. At the same time, VR also enables the technical purification of self-expression, creating a uniquely mediated social experience.