Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
theory can allow researchers and designers to guide their design and to anticipate
and measure differences on new types of social technology. Instead of using trial and
error exploration, a better understanding of what social presence is and how we can
improve it can save valuable time and money and improve the end-product in the
design of new media technologies (Lombard and Ditton
1997
).
Many studies regarding social presence are found in new forms of human-human
communication such as computer conferencing (Rourke et al.
1999
). But social
presence is also used to measure individual's perception of a particular interactive
media, be it a virtual reality environment (Heeter
1992
; Slater
2009
) or the interaction
with a social robot (Schermerhorn et al.
2008
).
In the rest of this subsection we will look at definitions of social presence and
what are its contributing factors.
Definitions
The term “presence”originally refers to two different phenomena (Wit-
mer and Singer
1998
; Biocca et al.
2001b
; Heerink et al.
2008
), telepresence and
social presence.
Telepresence can be defined “as the sense of being there”, and social presence,
“the sense of being together with another”. Telepresence is a reoccurring concept
in the area of teleoperator systems and was introduced by Minsky in 1980 (Minsky
1980
). Initially, Minsky described it as the sense of being at the location of a remote
robot that the user is operating. This concept is also often used for the feeling of
“being there” in virtual environments (Witmer and Singer
1998
; Biocca et al.
2003
).
The other phenomenon, social presence, was initially proposed by Short Williams
and Christie (Short et al.
1976
) as “the degree of salience of the other person in the
interaction and the consequent salience of the interpersonal relationships”. More
recently, Biocca argued that since we are social beings the most common purpose of
physical presence is to increase the sense of social presence (Biocca et al.
2001a
).
Biocca (
1997
) proposes a definition of social presence that is more oriented to human-
computer interaction: “the amount of social presence is the degree to which a user
feels access to the intelligence, intentions, and sensory impressions of another”.
A distinct definition by Lombard and Ditton (
1997
) defines presence as the per-
ceptual illusion of non-mediation. The term perceptual is used to indicate that the
feeling of presence towards an object or an entity, involves continuous real time
responses from the humans sensory, cognitive and affective processing systems.
Non-mediation is mentioned to indicate when the user fails to perceive the existence
of a medium, or when the user reacts as if the medium is not in their environment.
Recently, in the field of virtual environments, more specifically cave like envi-
ronments (Cruz-Neira et al.
1992
), Slater defined two distinct concepts (Slater
2009
)
that are analogous to the concept of social presence: Place illusion and Plausability
illusion. The first is about how the world is perceived and the latter about what is
perceived.
Place illusion relates to the concept of Telepresence. It is defined as the feeling of
being in the place depicted by the virtual environment, even though the user knows he
is not there. Slater argues that place illusion cannot occur in computer games when
they are played using desktop systems. However, he argues that in principle it is
