Digital Roots

Historicizing Media and Communication Concepts of the Digital Age

Gabriele Balbi, Nelson Ribeiro, Valérie Schafer, Christian Schwarzenegger, Gabriele Balbi, Nelson Ribeiro, Valérie Schafer, Christian Schwarzenegger

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110740288
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica della storia

As media environments and communication practices evolve over time, so do theoretical concepts. This book analyzes some of the most well-known and fiercely discussed concepts of the digital age from a historical perspective, showing how many of them have pre-digital roots and how they have changed and still are constantly changing in the digital era. Written by leading authors in media and communication studies, the chapters historicize 16 concepts that have become central in the digital media literature, focusing on three main areas. The first part, Technologies and Connections, historicises concepts like network, media convergence, multimedia, interactivity and artificial intelligence. The second one is related to Agency and Politics and explores global governance, datafication, fake news, echo chambers, digital media activism. The last one, Users and Practices, is finally devoted to telepresence, digital loneliness, amateurism, user generated content, fandom and authenticity. The book aims to shed light on how concepts emerge and are co-shaped, circulated, used and reappropriated in different contexts. It argues for the need for a conceptual media and communication history that will reveal new developments without concealing continuities and it demonstrates how the analogue/digital dichotomy is often a misleading one.

Users and Practices

Telepresence

Or, We Have Always Been Ghosts, from Cicero to Computers

Jérôme Bourdon

Abstract

From the mid-1970s, new terms (social presence, telepresence, mediated presence) have been coined to refer to synchronous communications at a distance, through telecommunications or computers, with specific affordances: feeling present in a remote space, interacting with faraway humans or machines; a tradition of empirical and theoretical research was soon born. Using telepresence to refer to all those phenomena, this chapter also enlarges the meaning of the term to include previous historical forms of presence at a distance, resorting to “poor” technologies (classic broadcasting, the telegraph, newspapers, correspondence, certain forms of painting) and allowing connection with a variety of creatures, both humans and non-humans, but always, in some ways, humanized. It shows that the experience of human agents was not less rich and complex with “poor” past technologies than with contemporary “rich” ones. It emphasizes the ambivalence of the experience: telepresence has always been celebrated as bridging gaps and criticized for failing to do so, and this basic ambivalence endures across technologies and times. Finally, this chapter suggests a historical research program into various forms of presence, a general anthropological enterprise beyond our obsession with contemporary technologies.

Keywords: liveness, synchronicity, social presence, virtual reality, computer-mediated communication,

Since the 1980s, the notion of tele-presence has been conceptualized in various fields, mainly through two technologies, which do not necessarily go together: virtual reality and computer mediated communication. In the mid-1970s, telecommunications researchers had proposed a similar notion, social presence. With or without making a comparison with the digital world and connecting the past and present, some media and art historians also used expressions such as “presence at a distance,” “social presence,” “electronic presence” or simply “presence,” to discuss the power of technologies to “transport” people to different spaces and to faraway people or creatures, not necessarily including interaction. They went back to the nineteenth century (the telegraph) but also to the long tradition of 360 degrees painting, starting out in Antiquity. Others discussed, more generally, the power of images, especially religious images. Finally, the power of letters to provide a sense of presence is sometimes considered in the history of the epistolary, very early on by past correspondents themselves and more recently by researchers.

In this chapter, I will define, organize, and try to enrich the criteria used by these varied researchers to consider these specific affordances of technology of “disembedding” people from their immediate surrounding and transporting them to faraway places and in the company of faraway people, real or imaginary. For each criterion, I start out with the contemporary debate, and show how it can be historicized. In conclusion, I will refute any teleological attempt to write history as a process of movement from “less” to “more,” from low-tech to high-tech: the sense of telepresence (the intensity of the experience) is unseparatedly social and technological and no simple technological yardstick can be used to measure it, as we shall see throughout our lexical-historical promenade.

1 Defining Telepresence

In digital scholarship, numerous reviews of the notion of telepresence have been proposed (Biocca, Harms, and Burgoon 2003; Lee 2004; Lombard and Ditton 1997; Mantovani and Riva 1999; Mantovani and Riva 2001). Such reviews only occasionally wink at the pre-digital world. All quote Minsky’s (1980) article as a turning point, that led to the use of “presence” as an abbreviation of “telepresence.” Minsky defined “presence” as the possibility of feeling present in a distant environment and, even better, of being able to operate in such an environment. This was an ideal to be reached as much as an existing technological capability. “Can telepresence be a substitute for the real thing?” asked Minsky (1980, 46). Since then, much research has been conducted with a practical orientation in mind, addressing issues such as eliminating transportation, danger at work or facilitating e-learning.¹

I will not abbreviate “telepresence.” I will distinguish between presence per se, or physical presence (actually being in an existing space, with or without other people), and telepresence. This may sound trivial. It is not. Abbreviating “telepresence” is confusing, and this confusion is an ideological matter. The use of the abbreviation “presence” for telepresence reveals the aim of Minsky, no less a prophet of technology than a theorist: making telepresence “as good as” presence.²

1.1 Social Versus Spatial Telepresence

I also define telepresence more broadly than Minsky, who focuses on the sense of “being there,” whether one is “with” other humans or not, and who primes the possibility of operating in the distant environment (for example, performing surgery). Regardless of nuances in the lexicon used, I follow Heeter (1992) and Biocca, Harms, and Burgoon (2003) in distinguishing two forms of telepresence: social telepresence (being together with another, whether one feels transported into another space of not), and spatial telepresence (being there in another space, whether one feels the presence of others or not). Social (tele) presence was first defined in a pioneering book about telecommunications, addressing the telephone but mainly the then new and exciting videoconference: Williams and Christie (1976, 65) defined social presence as “the degree of salience of the other person in the interaction and the consequent salience of the interpersonal relationships.”

1.2 Physical Presence (Copresence) Versus Telepresence

Such definitions help charter the field but should only be considered as ideal-types. There are many grey zones and much overlapping. First, physical presence and telepresence are not always clearly contrasted, and this is crucial for the historian. There are transitional moments, where one moves from one to the next, especially when leaving or meeting someone. Goffman (1959) who had no direct interest in telecommunications called physical presence with other persons “copresence”. He uses the phrase being “within range” to characterize the situation of “being with someone” (not through technology). He noted that it depended on many physical factors: the sensory medium involved (viewing, hearing, etc.), the presence of obstructions, even the temperature of the air. But being “within range” is not easy to define precisely.

If you “dismember” the “range” according to the various sensory canals and involve the combination of technological mediation and direct sensory contact, the notion of range can be stretched endlessly. Consider a banal contemporary situation. You take a loved one to the airport. You can no longer hug, but still see and hear each other (although social conventions may prevent you from screaming “goodbye”). You can no longer talk but only see each other. As other people obstruct your visual path, you see each other less and less. Then the person passes a door. (S)he is gone! You send your first text message, you get an answer, now you have moved to a different location, let’s say above the duty-free shops where your friend told you (s)he would stop and you receive a text: “U can c me, look at the entrance of the toy shop”. You keep on sending texts and wave to each other. The friend writes, ok, I am checking in, “goodbye for good.” Yet you remain in the airport until the plane has taken off, you go to the rooftop, see the plane taking off, you are tempted to wave and feel silly (this sense of silliness also belongs to history, as we will see). You leave the airport for good. Then you look at the photo of your loved one (maybe on your smartphone screen) and kiss the smartphone (not the loved one, although you may want to delude yourself for a while). This story shows how the move from absence to presence is gradual, a mixture of various sensory accesses, belief about the chance of access, a combination of sensory access (touch, voice, view) and technological mediation (texting, looking at pictures – or reading texts – in order to perpetuate a sense of presence). This chapter was written before the coronavirus pandemics but we assume readers will immediately relate this discussion to their own experiences of having to resort to the full gamut of applications and machines, to feel as dense a sense of telepresence as possible despite the various frustrations and delays, not to mention the brutal borders of the experience (discussed below), as opposed to the gradual phasing out we just described in our imaginary experience at the airport.

The border between physical presence and telepresence is complicated even in situations of, purportedly, simple physical copresence (in Goffman’s sense of “being with someone”). Consider the peculiar distance created by the theatrical arrangement: the play, the stage, the lighting, the dresses of the actors. You are in the same space, you hear them. But reporting on the event, nobody would say (s)he was “with the actors,” except if (s)he paid a visit backstage, after the show.

This has been much discussed by theorists of performance (e.g., Dixon 2007). The performer is out of reach, to a large extent out of range, because of an arrangement that also includes social conventions (except in already trivialized avant-garde plays, performers and spectators do not cross the border between the stage and the audience space). The set, the voice, a...