https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5170-9181
ABSTRACT
The following is a brief introduction to the themed issue on presence. This issue includes four articles representing a variety of methodologies. Each piece in this issue explores a norm or assumption of presence research.
Presence variables play a role in any communication context.Footnote1 In an early discussion of presence technologies such as virtual reality, 3-D films, television, and telephones, Lombard and DittonFootnote2 explained that what these types of technologies have in common is that they are, “designed to give the user a type of mediated experience that has never been possible before: one that seems truly ‘natural,’ ‘immediate,’ ‘direct,’ and ‘real,’ a mediated experience that seems very much like it is not mediated; a mediated experience that creates for the user a strong sense of presence” (p. 1). The COVID-19 pandemic brought to stark attention for many the critical nature of that sense of presence, of nonmediation, as the world worked to stay connected in fully mediated environments. The pandemic made presence a central variable of focus in many instructional, interpersonal, workplace, crisis, and health studies.
The call for this special issue on presence invited scholars to explore presence norms and assumptions of presence research. One assumption in much presence research is that more presence is always beneficial for communicative outcomes, but this is not always the case.Footnote3 Two of the articles address this issue.
Vareberg and Westerman explore textisms in the classroom. Their experiment manipulates textisms (an immediacy cue known to increase perceived immediacy [see note 3]Footnote4, which is a type of social presence see note 1). Specifically, the study manipulated the number of emojis used in an introductory email from instructors to students. Among their findings was that instructors who used only one emoji per paragraph were found to be more trustworthy and caring than instructors who used no emojis or many emojis.
Rourke et al.’s article also explores this assumption that more presence is always better, examining presence in a neurodiverse sample. This classroom experiment manipulated the presence characteristics of an avatar instructor, assessing students’ attention to detail and attention switching as moderators in their presence classroom experiences. Among the findings of this experiment was that when other-copresence was high, and a student struggled with attention switching, the perceptions of self-copresence was lower.
Together, Vareberg and Westerman and Rourke et al.’s articles work to show that more instructional presence cues are not panacea for learning. Yes, presence cues are critical in online learning environments. However, students are responding to their perceptions of those cues, not the cues themselves.Footnote5 This means that when instructors disperse an increasing number of presence cues, it is not their intention with the cues that will impact the students, but rather the students’ perspectives. Work showing that not all students respond the same way to all amounts and types of presence cues such as demonstrated in these articles is critical for improving online education.
A present research norm addressed in this special issue is the siloing of presence research by disciplines. Many disciplines study presence, often giving the concept a unique name. This renaming causes scholars to struggle to find support to guide their research from other disciplines because they lack the vocabulary to effectively search the literature under another discipline’s labeling.
Thorpe and Morreale synthesize the body of literature on instructor immediacy and online education from communication research with that of presence and teaching in education research to show the dual, overlapping perspectives. Among their identified terms for presence are mediated immediacy, psychological response to immediate behaviors, perceived immediacy, copresence, and propinquity. Thorpe and Morreale show that much of the work from these fields draws the same conclusions, and they provide practical guidance for teaching online based on the synthesis of presence and learning research from these two fields.
Finally, Watts’s article reminds scholars that although it is the norm to research presence in technology-mediated environments, presence is also a face-to-face concept. Watts ties presence to literature in storytelling and theater, identifying the critical role presence has played in performing arts long before the technological advances that brought presence research into communication studies research. Watts points out that prior to augmented and virtual reality technologies, entertainment separated the world of the story from the world of the user, but now both are merged through these technologies, providing a new avenue to study a long-studied concept. Yet, the existence of these technologies does not mean that the role of presence variables should be neglected in studies of face-to-face experiences.
Together, these four articles make an important contribution to presence research by taking a look at the literature from a broader, nonsiloed perspective than is often possible in a single study. The authors remind readers that presence variables, regardless of how they are labeled, are a part of all communication (and entertainment) experiences. As such, these fresh perspectives provide sound guidance for future research in presence.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Kelly, Stephanie E. and David K. Westerman. “18. New Technologies and Distributed Learning Systems.” Handbook of Communication and Learning 16 (2016): 455–80.
2 Matthew Lombardand Theresa Ditton. “At the Heart of it All: The Concept of Presence.” Journal of Computer-Mediated communication 3, no. 2 (1997): JCMC321.
3 Kyle R. Vareberg and David Westerman. “A little Goes a Long Way: Examining the Limits of Immediacy Cues on Students’ Perceptions of Instructor Credibility, Immediacy, Liking, and Clarity.” Review of Communication (2023): 1–18.
4 Stephanie Kelly and Hamlet Autman. “Effective Computer-Mediated Business Communication: Fostering Immediacy.” Journal of Research In Business Education 56, no. 2 (2014): 42–58.
5 Stephanie Kelly, Christopher Rice, Bryce Wyatt, Johnny Ducking, and Zachary Denton. “Teacher Immediacy and Decreased Student Quantitative Reasoning Anxiety: The Mediating Effect of Perception.” Communication Education 64, no. 2 (2015): 171–86.