COPRESENCE AS ‘BEING WITH’

Abstract

This article examines the issue of ‘ubiquitous connectivity’ on the Internet. The Internet, combined with the wireless technologies, is said to have made it possible for ‘anyone to contact anyone else anywhere at anytime’, but such ubiquity of connectivity has failed to materialize in actual human contact. Drawing on Goffman and Giddens's theories of human interaction, the authors make a distinction between co-location, which is a spatial relationship among individuals, and copresence, a social relationship. While co-location puts people within range of each other, copresence renders people mutually accessible for contact. However, the establishment of copresence is normatively regulated in society, which demarcates different regions of space for different types of activity. Social contact takes place in a domain where copresence is affected not only by the regionality of contact but also by the power relations that underlie personal affinity and social engagement. It is concluded that so long as there are social barriers that separate people into different groups of interests and different positions in the hierarchy of fame and power, there will be fragmentations in the online world that make the ubiquity of social connectivity impossible.

Keywords:

• Copresence
• Internet
• online communication
• social network
• ubiquitous connectivity

Acknowledgements

This is a revision of a paper presented at the American Sociological Association's annual meeting, August, 2007, New York. The author would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Notes

1 Boase et al. (2006) and Kayahara and Wellman (2006) also find that people also use the Internet to access persons outside of their central social networks when seeking information about important decisions. Such activities have their corollaries in the offline world of telephone and interpersonal contacts.

2 The work of Bernard, Killworth and their collaborators shows that network size depends upon the definition of the relationships; networks of acquaintances may be 10 or more times the size of those with whom we have consistent contact. See, for example, Bernard et al (1990; 1991, 2008).

3 To be fair, Chayko's publisher confounded the two types of connection, Chayko does not.

4 A reviewer brought to our attention Harrison and Dourish's (1996) work on ‘space’ and ‘place’ in computer-supported collaborations. Put simply, their view of space is that it provides an ‘opportunity’ for interaction and place is a space ‘invested with understandings of behavioral appropriateness, cultural expectations, and so forth. …Place, not space, frames appropriate behavior.’ (1996: 4). Harrison and Dourish focus on the cultural understandings that frame relationships. As we describe below, copresence is about a mutuality of awareness and expectations – including but not limited to the appropriate and cultural – between persons.