Frequently asked questions
- What can be done to create a service with higher social presence?
- Are ‘telepresence’ and social presence the same thing?
- Does Quality of Service (QoS) influence social presence?
It should be possible to increase users’ subjective experience of
social presence during their communication by increasing the following characteristics of the service:
- Mutual attentiveness and responsiveness; e.g. knowing when a communication partner is paying attention
- Turn-taking cues; e.g. knowing when to take a turn to speak
- Feedback; e.g. knowing when we have been understood
- Informational non-verbal cues; e.g. believing we know how the other person is feeling
- Spatial presence; e.g. a perception of whether a communication partner is ‘close’
- Emotional contact; e.g. having a good impression of personal contact with the communication partner(s)
- Realism; e.g. a perception of whether a communication partner seems ‘real’
Different types of communication service and equipment may require different
design features to address the same factor.
For example, audio communication would require an explicit features to obtain information that might
otherwise be transmitted visually.
In research the term ‘telepresence’ has typically been used synonymously with the term ‘social presence’.
Whereas the term ‘social presence’ is a general concept from psychology that is applied
to telecommunications as well as other areas of human interaction, ‘telepresence’ specifically
concerns social presence with telecommunications. The term ‘telepresence’ may therefore have
the advantage of being clearly and uniquely associated with communication services.
However, the marketing and sales domains of communication services are increasingly adopting the term ‘telepresence’.
The term is being used to describe a videoconference in which there are design features of the system which attempt
to maximise the extent to which local and remote participants appear to be in the same room, sitting at the same table.
Each person experiences a life-size image of the remote attendees.
Increasingly the videoconference equipment is also deliberately and effectively placed out of sight.
Sometimes these communication services are called ‘Telepresence meetings’.
The focus of ‘Telepresence meetings’ is on maximising realism. However, it is possible that a communication service may have relatively high social presence even though it has relatively low realism. Also, people’s use of communication services are increasingly involving mixed-location situations, such as a multi-point video communication involving a mobile handset, an office-based personal computer and a dedicated conferencing room.
Today the term ‘social presence’ is more suitable for representing a concept that:
- does not only concern ‘realism’ and
- concerns people’s communication in mixed-location situations with different types of terminal equipment.
Quality of Service (QoS) can be expected to influence social presence because a certain quality of service can either help or hinder the way users interact together and perceive each other.
For example, poor resolution in video communication may reduce the extent to which people know whether
their communicating partners are paying attention and how they are understanding and other aspects of
how they are feeling. A high delay may reduce the ability of people to take turns in speaking.
Low frame-rates may prevent the image of a person as seeming ‘real’.
Poor audio quality may reduce the impression of personal contact with a communicating partner.
Research indicates that influencing social presence may not
necessarily effect the communication process and the task outcome.
The effects of a large (29”) screen and a small (3.5”) screen on
a negotiation task have been studied when social presence was measured by a user questionnaire.
The smaller screen had a negative impact on measures of social presence, but the task outcomes
and communicative processes were not significantly different (O’Malley et al., 2002).