Practices to Display Social Presence: A Study in a Shared Mediated Environment

The current study belongs to a series of studies promoted by the EU funded project "PASION", which focuses on augmenting social presence. The underlying assumptions to this series is that participants' interventions in the shared environment represent a way to exhibit their being socially present in that environment. Therefore, the practices organizing these interventions define "when", "why" and "how" social presence become relevant in the group. In the study presented here, participants navigate in a shared, non immersive virtual world, and can contact each other dyadically via instant messaging. Their task as a team consists of finding as many treasures as possible in the virtual world. Chat logs and video recordings of the activity on the screen are collected, and subsequently analyzed with the approach of Conversation Analysis. The results show the way in which social presence is addressed in the chat openings, the occasions in which t...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: PSYCHNOLOGY
• Authors: Fabiola Scarpetta
• Keywords: Current Study, PSYCHNOLOGY 2008, Social Presence, Virtual World