This study focuses on the social interaction and communicative practices in the digital multimodal and multimedial three dimensional world Second Life (SL). In its early implementation, the world appealed to users attracted by the mottos: ”Your life. Your imagination”. ”The only rule is that there are no rules”. The world offered the residents new possibilities to create their world autonomously and in collaboration with others, using digital tools both from inside and outside the world. This boundary breaking inclusive and participatory stand is persisting in the newer version of SL. Nevertheless, today’s SL-culture puts the social aspect to the foreground and the processes of creation of the virtual world is less obvious. Furthermore, users join the world from many more countries in more recent days, compared to the beginning. Such diversity offers several possibilities for language learning.
The study explores how the theme Amor and Eros is realized in SL through communication, visual features and interactions both corporal and verbal. The loose communities and their activities in the present SL-world are sustained by themes, among which Romance is one of them. Nine in-world regions, liked by more than 50 people on the SL official web site, are chosen to study how the residents engage with one other in order to realize the theme Amor and Eros. The study aims at identifying practices and patterns in this process. The material consists of fieldnotes, screenshots, written conversations, and screen recordings, created during the immersed sessions. Furthermore in-depth interviews with avatars have been carried out in the field. The results contribute to the knowledge about how a theme engaging emotions can be a drive to sustain language learning, about how languages are used and learned, and, finally, about multimodal communication and love on-line.