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Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2001 08:32:06 -0600

From: Caroline Haythornthwaite

Subject: telepresence & presence

The concept of “telepresence” is still there, but its name seems to have been shortened into “presence” — here’s a link for references on the subject …

http://nimbus.ocis.temple.edu/~mlombard/Presence/bibliogr.htm

and for the recent conference on presence …

http://www.temple.edu/presence2001/

There’s also another twist on its meaning coming up. Last Friday’s (Mar 23rd) Wall St. Journal has an article “Talk is Cheap: AOL’s Buddy lists spark race to harness the power of ‘presence’” — by presence they don’t mean the individual’s perceptions of ”
being there” as we might expect, but knowing about the presence of others. The
importance of others in the presence mix is something my co-author Alvan Bregman and I have been looking at in considering user’s concerns about “being” in an online environment (recent HICSS paper is here:

http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/~haythorn/HICSS01_radicals.html).

It seems to me that perhaps one interesting avenue for looking at the trance-like state induced by media is the way in which more than one person enters that domain together — e.g., in game playing MUDs where individuals assume roles in relation to other
s. Their trance could not happen without cues from others.

/Caroline H.

Caroline Haythornthwaite (haythorn@uiuc.edu)
Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science
Coordinator, Undergraduate Program in Information Studies
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 501 East Daniel St., Champaign IL 61820
phone: (217) 244-7453 fax: (217) 244-3302

http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/~haythorn/