More on the "balls schema"

Dear colleagues,
sorry for entering this discussion at this late point!

I think, that Guiseppe and others made an important point by postulating that the communication situation (and the whole "presence" experience) must be different if the user believes to be in a social communication situation. This must be a psychologically different experience to experiencing to be in a virtual environment alone. If we should give this experience the label "social presence" or not is something we should discuss. The articles by Rains & Scott (Communication Theory, 2007) and Tanis & Postmes (Computers in Human Behavior, 2007) on anonymity in media communication contain a lot of ideas that might be useful to further study social presence situations in media communication.

Mel Slater wants us to restrict the field of study to virtual reality or virtual environments phenomena as the major communication contexts we should study in the future in order to systematically explore presence. To my opinion, this is a very good advice because at this point of study it seems a good idea to do research more "economically", e.g., by identifiying major communication settings we all want to do research on so that relevant progress can be made as regards to some common results. Also, we have to keep in mind that new media phenomena are those which the EU has up to now been ready to finance. The above mentioned discussion on social presence is in line with this thinking. This does not mean, that we should exclude basic research projects and methodological studies that might be helpful to the topic of presence but were done in the context of traditional media. As long as the results are promising and transferable to presence research, we should include them.

I am not convinced that the topic of presence is dead. All the knowledge the sciences of psychology, sociology and communication can offer to study new media and any other technologically advanced environment supposed to be used by human beings has to be systematically explored in order to give the technical disciplines like engineering, computer science, architecture etc. a helping hand to understand the human user dimension of their technical innovations. We started with the topic "presence", but in my opinion this is only a first step in the right direction. A huge array of topics to research on is waiting for us in the future. And it is important research and not simply Kuhnian "puzzle solving"! Therefore, it is so hard to structure the field.

We should have a symposium with representatives from psychology, sociology and communication research (who are well prepared and ready to present their views of the field and its future in a focused way) at the next conference in Barcelona. To my opinion, it is high time to concentrate on this discussion. I wouldn't be surprised, if at the end of this meeting we are able to describe different presence phenomena under study (with different definitions leading to different research questions), so that the whole field develops a totally new structure, a natural process that I know from other fields of research (no matter, if they are interdiscipinary or stricly disciplinary) too.

Best regards,
Angela Schorr