Operationalizing Mediated Presence: Initial Steps toward a Measure of the Construct

Operationalizing mediated presence: Initial steps toward a measure of the construct This paper reports on an exploratory project to investigate mediated presence, a construct defined as the extent to which participants in a virtual environment perceive other participants in that environment as real, immediate or salient. Development and initial testing of a prompt designed to consistently differentiate between high and low perceived presence are reported. A manipulation check on the prompt and open-ended explorations of the construct are discussed. Other factors that subjects apparently integrate with presence or confound with the construct are identified, and directions for future research are elaborated. Communication scholars have studied the effect of immediacy or salience on face-to-face communication for decades and have concluded that the degree to which communicators perceive others with whom they are communicating as immediate or engaged with them in the communication influences their perceptions of the other and their satisfaction with the communication. Scholars have used scales such as verbal immediacy (Gorham, 1988), general immediacy (Anderson, 1979), and interaction involvement (Cegala, 1984) to explore how communication behaviors influence perceptions of face-to-face immediacy or presence. The proportion of communication mediated by technology clearly is increasing and thus it is appropriate to examine the communication behaviors used in mediated communication – email, groupware, the World Wide Web and other online contexts – and address how these behaviors influence communication interaction, satisfaction, and outcomes. Scholars have argued that mediated communication (frequently referred to as computer-mediated communication or CMC) presents a radically different context for communication. Especially referring to asynchronous text-based interaction, they emphasize the absence of social cues on which communicators rely heavily in face-toface interaction: vocalics, proxemics, facial expression and gestures, and contextual cues (Sproull & Kiesler, 1991; Garton & Wellman, 1995; Walther, 1992). According to this argument, without such cues, a communicator’s ability to convey herself as immediate or real or to perceive others as involved in the interaction is reduced by having fewer available channels and therefore less data. These outcomes have been attributed to “relatively amorphous impressions” online that communicators are posited to have in mediated communication (Walther, 1993, p. 383). As a result of the absence of social cues, it has been argued, communication is likely to focus on task at the expense of the socioemotional component that face-to-face communication integrates. Lacking elements conveying social and emotional information, mediated communication increases the psychological distance between participants and thus may reduce interpersonal attraction and group cohesiveness (DeSanctis & Gallupe, 1987). In contrast to this position, it also has been argued that mediated communication can support development of robust relationships (Baym, 1995; Walther, 1993, 1994). Walther (1993), for example, argues that impressions of others online are developed in the same way as in face-to-face contexts but more slowly, since the time required for asynchronous interaction is greater. Online participants also have been shown to seek one another out for a wide range of social and emotional exchanges, including information and social support (Walther, 1997) and for entertainment and recreation (Baym, 1995). The degree to which communicators perceive others as immediate, salient, or present in an interaction plays a key role in establishing a context in which individuals attend to one another and feel comfortable sharing ideas, raising questions, collaborating, and developing trust. The higher the perceived presence of others, whether face-to-face or online, the more communicators are likely to pay attention to them, and the more they may be influenced by them. For example, perceptions of presence are particularly important in online education. Students who do not feel connected to others in the learning environment – whether students or teachers – because these others do not seem immediate, salient, or real, report lower satisfaction with the course. Dissatisfied students tend not to engage the material and frequently also fail to complete online classes. Since the attrition rate on online education is lower than in face-to-face educational environments (Carr, 2000) and since the dropout rate in organizational training is extraordinarily high, connection with the class and resulting satisfaction is a pertinent area of study. Perceptions of presence in virtual teams and groups, in organizations and educational environments, may influence the effectiveness of decisions by helping those interacting online to determine whose ideas to acknowledge or discount. Outcomes related to such processes are critical in contexts where members of a distributed group must interact to solve problems, share and integrate information, generate new ideas, and collaborate to reach decisions or take action. The increasing use of mediated communication to execute these functions, whether in virtual organizations, distributed teams and groups, or online education, reinforces the importance of better understanding how communicators perceive and establish immediacy or presence in mediated contexts. The construct of interest here, mediated presence, refers to the perception by a communicator that another person in a mediated or online environment is “real,” immediate or present. It occurs when the communicator perceives the salience and involvement of others, and reflects the feeling that the connection made with another is active, sociable, and sensitive. This definition posits mediated presence as a result of interaction between enacted communication behaviors and a medium, rather than as a characteristic of a medium, as had been argued early on by Short, Williams, and Christie (1976), Culnan and Markus (1987), Hiltz, Johnson and Turoff (1986), and Steinfield (1986). That is, mediated presence acknowledges both the role of the behaviors communicators enact and the role of the medium in enabling and constraining communication. The emphasis in this study is on text-based asynchronous communication, whether as email or in threaded discussions, bulletin boards, and the like. Although technological improvements and expanded bandwidth unquestionably will provide communicators with more social cues, text-based interactions will continue to play an important role in mediated communication as a result of their penetration and low cost. Two behavior-oriented constructs that have been used to help describe and explain face-to-face interpersonal communication are immediacy (Anderson, 1979) and interaction involvement (Cegala, 1984). Immediacy refers to behaviors that reduce psychological and physical distance, while interaction involvement addresses how attentive, perceptive and responsive individuals tend to be while communicating. Both of these constructs appear to share characteristics with mediated presence. The construct of immediacy originated in social psychology to refer to behaviors that help overcome psychological and physical distance between individuals (Mehrabian, 1967). Anderson (1979), who investigated immediacy in instructional settings, focused on nonverbal signals such as head nods, eye contact, vocal expressiveness and close proximity as behaviors that expressed liking. Gorham (1988) later argued that perceptions of immediacy are reflected not only by nonverbal behavior but also by an individual’s verbal behaviors, such as addressing another by name, using personal examples, and soliciting personal views or opinions. Immediacy is related to presence in that both focus on the salience of individuals in communication. Interaction involvement addresses “the extent to which an individual participates with another in conversation (Cegala, Savage, Brunner & Conrad, 1982, p. 229). The work of Cegala and others identifies three components of participation: attentiveness, perceptiveness, and responsiveness. Attentiveness reflects the extent to which an individual is aware of stimuli in his immediate environment. Perceptiveness refers to the extent to which an individual knows the meanings others assign to his behavior and the meanings he ought to assign to others’ behaviors. Responsiveness is “the tendency to react mentally to one’s social circumstances and adapt by knowing what to say and when to say it” (Cegala et al., 1982, p. 233). Those low in interaction involvement often appear detached or inattentive and are generally viewed as less competent communicators. Applying the literature in interpersonal, face-to-face communication to mediated environments and arguing that language and verbal communication may convey relational messages in addition to task messages, Walther and Burgoon (1992) identified a number of verbal/textual cues of relationship communication they argued are present in computer-mediated communication. Immediacy/affection Verbal immediacy (Wiener & Mehrabian, 1968) incorporates grammatical and lexical measures that indicate affection, inclusion and involvement. Walther and Burgoon note that research in immediacy indicates that verbal or text components not only convey immediacy but may compensate from reductions in immediacy associated with other channels (Argyle & Cook, 1976; Wiener & Mehrabian, 1968). Similarity/depth This variable represents the degree to which a communicator stresses similarities or the relative familiarity or superficiality of a relationship. As relationships develop, partners’ communication becomes more similar and smooth (Knapp, 1984). Depth, the degree of knowledge about personal information, also may increase, as is evidenced through self-disclosure. Therefore, self-disclosure is an example of similarity and depth in the relationship. Composure/Relaxation-arousal These dimensions are indicated through language intensity, intentional misspellings, use of punctuation, capitalization, or relational icons (emoticons). They represent the degree to which participants express calm and relaxation. Many relationships becomes more relaxed as they develop (Knapp, 1984), with uncertainty being reduced when participants gain interpersonal knowledge. Arousal may be related to a communicator’s familiarity with a medium (Walther & Burgoon, 1992). Formality/informality This dimension is evident through forms of address communicators use, lexical surrogates such as “hmmmmm” or “yuck,” and by overall use of formal expressions. Research has tended to indicate that mediated communication is more formal in general than face-to-face communication, particularly in being largely written (Gibson & Hodgetts, 1986). However, the lack of turn-taking in virtual teams and groups may enhance informality (Siegel, 1986). Dominance/equality This dimension is evidenced through proportion of group participation, manipulation of glow-managing cues, relational control grammatical constructions (such as imperatives), and compliance seeking. As face-to-face groups develop, members may assert dominance once they have a sense of others’ potential contributions (Walther & Burgoon, 1992). In mediated contexts, because of the lack of social context cues, there may be more dominating messages early in a relationship. Receptivity/trust Self-disclosure is a key expression of this dimension. Non-competitive strategies that show rapport, openness, and the need to be trusted are other indicators of this dimension. This framework was used as a basis to identify communication behaviors associated with establishing and perceiving mediated presence in the study reported here. The next section describes this study and findings from it. The last section of the paper reflects on implications of the findings and proposes additional investigations.