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Abstract
Online education research has long employed the concept of social presence to study interactions in technologically mediated spaces. Yet, a precise shared definition of social presence does not exist. This article traces how the concept of social presence has been developed and appropriated in the online and distance education literature. We do not simply focus on the historical trajectory of the concept but discuss how it is utilized to address the growing complexities of social interactions in parallel to the increasing affordances of new technologies. Our aim is to illustrate that social presence is over extended and widely stretched to correspond with the possibilities of socialization and that it has long lost its depth and breadth, and thus, its analytical strength. We argue that we should focus more on the relative salience of interpersonal relationships if we are to understand the relational aspects of being online.
Notes
1. ‘The medium is the message’ is a phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan (see McLuhan, Citation1964), meaning that the type of a communication medium creates a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived.
2. Due to space limitations, we cannot provide a full account on the community of inquiry framework here. For more information, please see (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, Citation1999; Rourke et al., Citation1999).