a-res.info

Back in the 1970s, towards the end of the research flurry where communication systems were being heavily studied by both the British Post Office and the US Government, Short and colleagues (1977) made referrence to an idea they termed social presence. Their theory was that all forms of communication varied in the degree to which they made participating individuals feel as if they were together. They considered it a "cognitive synthesis" of a communication medium's ability to convey a variety of different social and psychological cues.

Since the 70s the study of presence has changed somewhat. Rather than the study of 'social presence' per se, we see the concept extended into the domains of presence and co-presence. Whereas co-presence has come to mean much the same as social-presence did, presence refers to the extent that one feels actually located within a certain environment, real or otherwise. These can be further combined  to form what Ralph Schroeder (2006) refers to as connected presence, the feeling of being there together.

Second Life operates on all of these levels, we experience both a feeling of presence and a feeling of co-presence. The feelings of connectedness we get with other avatars is the extent to which we feel co-presence - our feeling of actually being in-world, a measure of our presence.

Yet to some extent the feelings of presence and co-presence are ambiguous, the definitions I gave above are misleadingly clear cut. For example, when I'm in Second Life, am I feeling co-presence in relation to the user or the avatar itself? It's clear that many users opt to divulge little about their actual identities, sometimes to the point at which their avatar is no more them then an actor is the character they portray. Under such circumstances am I still feeling the same kind of co-presence as I do with a person who is being themselves? Presence too is mediated by many factors, with one person's experience of presence not necesarily being the same as someone else's. As I'll discuss in future posts, both presence and co-presence can be affected by a multitude of things, some technical but many more not. Social factors are just as important, so too are factors relating to behaviour, neurology, attention, and experience. As a result even text-based environments can provide deep immersive experiences as Towell and Towell (1997) noted when they reported that 69% of the 207 MUD users they studied claimed to experience feelings of presence.

When it comes to creating a reliable feeling of presence or co-presence, it's not a case of simply - the better the technology, the better the presence. Short and colleagues definition of social presence as "a quality of the medium of itself" no longer stands. Just reflect for a second on the different ways people use Second Life. There are those who don't take it seriously, who see it as they do any other game, whereas there are those who've created rich social networks, complete with its own codes of conduct, for whom Second Life is just as important as their lives in the physical world. Although the technology arguably provides the baseline presence experience, it's ultimately down to the individual's psyche to push it that extra mile.

References

• Schroeder, R. (2006). Being there together and the future of connected presence. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 15, 438-454.
• Short, J., Williams, E., & Christie, B. (1977). The social psychology of telecommunications. John Wiley and Sons.
• Towell, J., & Towell, E. (1997). Presence in text-based networked virtual environments. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 6, 590–595.

(Hopefully) Related posts:

1. Do you Collaborate in Second Life? Interviewees Needed As part of my ongo­ing PhD pro­ject, I’m look­ing to inter­view around a dozen or so people about how they use Second Life to...