On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 9:00 AM, Andrew Herman <aherman@wlu.ca> wrote:
I am very interested in this thread but also find the subject a bit befuddling. Aren't almost all interpretive social theories of the 20th century (symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, , ethnomethdology, etc.) theories of social presence? There have been volumes upon volumes of work rooted in these traditions dealing with cmc sociality and identity. Or is the subject here a new and coherently distinctive kind of social theory that is specific to virtual environments?
I think there are several veins of research labelled presence. The folk in presence research group that Christian referred to seem to come from more of an experimental psych tradition and did a lot with VR and measurement of "being there" , now moving on to other virtual environments. This is apparently different kind of presence from "mobile presence" and im applications... Marcela