This looks like something I should keep an eye on:

Emerging Communication: Studies on New Technology and Practices in Communication

The latest monography is on presence and communication, and from what I can see it’s a book I should have in my bookshelf. How strange that I haven’t stumbled upon this before considering the name. (Also, it turns out that Waterworth is one of the contributors.)

At the seminar that I attended today, the speaker, John Waterworth, presented his model of presence, in which he defined presence as îthe perceptual illusion of being in an external physical environmentî. He spent quite some time discussing the difference between perception and conception, and argued that only through what he had defined as perceptive media (e.g. photographs and cinema) or through proprioceptive media (e.g. immersive VR) can a person experience presence. This would mean, then, that a person reading a novel (which he categorized as conceptual media) would not be able to feel presence. This sounded quite controversial to me, and afterwards I had a chance to speak to him about it. In my view, the sense of being in a place can be experienced also when reading a novel or when participating in a text-based computer game. Different types of media can cause the users/readers/viewers/players to experience different senses of presenceÖ Also, an important issue in my own research concerns interpersonal interaction and communication as causes of presence (sometimes referred to as ìsocial presenceî or ìco-presenceî), which was not touched upon during todayís seminar. But perhaps thatís a different type of sensation than the one that was being discussed here. (One of Waterworth’s points was that there is no general agreement among scholars as to how presence should be defined.) Anyway, this got me thinking about the definition of presence which I have been using so far: ìPresence is the perceptual illusion of nonmediationî (from Lombard and Ditton). Does this definition imply that I exclude what Waterworth had defined as ìconceptual mediaî in my view on what can cause a sense of presence? Considering Lombard and Ditton’s definition of “perceptual”, I’m not so sure I do: “The term “perceptual” indicates that this phenomenon involves continuous (real time) responses of the human sensory, cognitive, and affective processing systems to objects and entities in a person’s environment.” I definitely need to look deeper into this matter Ö Perhaps I could ask Stephanie ñ from what I read in her research blog she is also trying to come to grips with perception and conception. The extended abstract from the seminar can be found here.

Interesting seminar at the Informatics department here at Ume University tomorrow: John Waterworth: ” The Three Layers of Presence: Making Sense of the Sense of Presence, in the World and in Media”

Last night, a Swedish television program about computer games, îKontrollî, had an interesting discussion on the impact and future of text-based games. In an interview, the creator of the first online role playing game (MUD1) claimed that text-based games have the highest potential of all types of games in providing an immersive experience. I am interested in the immersive abilities of text as compared to graphics, and believe that text can create a great sense of presence even though the sensory input is quite limited (read Lombard & Ditton or Galbi for accounts of the importance of sensory input in the creation of a sense of presence). After the interview, the panel discussed the dangers of online role playing games (referring to graphical ones), which in their view were the far most addictive games ñ both because of the excitement about role playing and creating your online identity, and because of the social aspect, added by the multi-user feature. Being afraid of missing out on something seemed to be an important aspect in not wanting to leave the computer. The host of the discussion concluded by asking the panellists about their views on the future of text-based games. Although uncertain, they seemed to believe that a new text-based role playing game would have difficulties in competing with graphical games. Personally, I can see that this might be the case. After getting used to being served with visual stimuli it is probable that taking part in a text-based adventure will feel like too big an effort. However, those who have been playing text-based games will probably be able to overlook this ìlackî in sensory stimuli since they are familiar with the specific media conventions. Also, as mentioned above, text does still seem to have a great immersive power. The program is supposed to be available on this web page for at least a week after itís been broadcasted, but itís not been posted yet. It is in Swedish, but the interview with the MUD creator is in English. It all ends with a performance by Powerplay performing music from Nintendo games (worth watching).

I keep finding conferences and workshops that look interesting, and wish that I could spend all of my time visiting these… Here are my most recent finds:

Challanges for Research about Online Communities, Ph.D.-workshop at Comwell, Roskilde, 25-26 May 2004 (the last day of registration is TODAY, so I need to make a quick decision on this one).

Participating there could easily be combined with a visit to the New Media Conference in Bergen, which starts the day after (May 27-28).

I wish you all a pleasant holiday! This< /a> is what Iíll be doing over the weekend. Plus, I will start the preparations for BlogTalk (since I believe that the proposal that Stephanie and I submitted has been accepted even if for some reason only Nilsson is listedÖ). Looking forward to going to Vienna in the summer!

In an article in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Anita Blanchard, Assistant Professor of organizational psychology at the University of North Carolina, shows how Behavior setting theories can be applied to describe interaction within online communities. Important concepts in Behavior setting theories are the notions of place and time, and Blanchard discusses what distinguishes a virtual community from a face-to-face community in these respects and presents a theory on Virtual behavior settings. In her discussion of place, Blanchard summarizes Weickís view (in Technology as equivoque: Sensemaking in new technologies) that ìsince much of the work on computers is out of sight, individuals create mental models to help them understand what is going on inside the computer. They use these mental models to understand where they “are” on the computer and may move to different parts of this model when they are interacting with their different virtual communities.î This is interesting when considering the mental processes involved in the creation of a sense of presence. In accordance with process theory (see this previous entry), Blanchard also claims that ìaccording to behavior setting theory, we should expect people to shape and constrain the text to meet their needs. One may argue that CMC users have developed ways to add back in social cues in their text communicationsÖî. Blanchard focuses on text-based communities in her investigation, and except for including a MOO, she does not discuss collaborative virtual environments with clear-cut boundaries (such as graphical 3D environments), and the communication she is describing is also completely text-based. It would be interesting to see what differences could be identified if this theory would be applied to other platforms with other environmental characteristics and other modes of communication. I also need to work out how Behavior settings theory relates to my proposed research framework based on emerging communication situations.

Even though the study of Old English does not have much in common with my thesis topic, I quite enjoy the compulsory course Iím taking on the subject. One of the reasons for my pleasure is that every Thursday now, I find myself transported to Tolkienís Middle-earth. Try to read aloud words like ëeorcanstaní, ëneorxenawangí, and ëabreo?aní, and I would be surprised if you could not imagine yourself engaged in conversation with Aragorn or one of the other characters (pronunciation disregardedÖ). This is not very surprising, considering that, as you probably all know, Tolkien was a linguist, and based much of the linguistic innovations in his books on features of Old English. I am definitely not an expert on this, but apparently there are others out there who are (examples can be found here, here, and here. Here you can translate present day English words into different Tolkien languages, a service which I imagine can come in handy on several occasions (?)). There is unbelievable much available on this topic. For those who feel that they cannot really keep up with the new computer-related vocabulary I would also like to recommend this page, in which these new terms are translated into their much more understandable (?) Old English equivalents (ëasynchronous communicationí, for instance, is replaced by the masculine noun ëunstundgymendmÊ?elcwideí). And, as a matter of fact, I do enjoy this course on a more serious level as well. I find the etymological relationships and similarities between Old English and present day Swedish and German very interesting, and I am also interested in the more general mechanisms involved in language change, since many of these can be applied to present day language development as well.

Yesterday one of my sisters found herself in a situation which can be used to illustrate how once we have adapted our communication behavior to new communication technology, we become increasingly dependent on, for instance, mobile devices: On her way to pick up a friend who was coming to visit, my sister realized that she had accidentally left her cell phone at home. Not having access to the friendís cell phone number, which she of course had not memorized since she so easily could find it in her cell phone (if my cell phone was stolen, I would have quite a lot of problems getting back to my friends again, since I NEVER bother to learn phone numbers anymore), and not knowing exactly at what time or where the friend would arrive, she experienced a (brief) moment of helplessness. Luckily (and ironically with the help of mobile technology ñ her friend, as previously mentioned, did have a cell phone, and also a mother whom my sister could call from a stationary phone to get the number of the friend), this little story had a happy ending after allÖ Ã®Five years ago, this would not have been a problem, because then we would have made up more specific plans ahead of timeî was my sisterís reflection. I think it is fascinating how quickly we learn to adapt our behavior to new conditions. I believe that the same is true for the way we communicate ñ we quite easily adapt our language and communication patterns to communicate effectively through new media (this is in line with process theory), even though different factors, concerning for instance both media-specific features and the userís previous experiences, make this adaptation process more or less smooth.