Are You Present Now? by: Zachry Karisch Media and Society FDM Dr.

Shafer

In this new day in time known as the digital age, there are many new forms of technology being released. Video games, television, and many other variations of media have all embraced these new forms and all have one aspect in common, presence. Presence, simply put, is the perception of a subject to be completely or sufficiently submerged or immersed into an outside medium, while feeling they are part of said medium without being mediated. People are effected in different ways, comparative to the means by which the presence is occurring. These means include six different conceptualizations that alter the feeling of presence dramatically. The first means by which a person accesses presence, is through the social richness of the medium. Social richness, as presence, is the ability for the subject, inter-personally, to feel intimacy or immediacy when the medium is used to interact with others. Many means have been used to measure social richness, but only semantic differential items accurately depict a numerical value. These include impersonal-personal, unsociable-sociable, warm-cold, all bipolar items that reveal distinctive effects.

Another means a person can achieve presence, is presence as realism. This can be anywhere from the medium being a subject that is perceived to be as realistic looking as the "real world". The subject feels that he or she is walking around the landscape of a real, lifelike place that is in no way, shape, or form "real". Realism has a direct link with immersion. Immersion is the complete submergence into the medium in a way that every aspect the subject is effected by is a mediated or pre-constructed factor. For example, the holodeck is often used to describe immersion, this brings in the argument of interactivity of the medium and human perception. Every one of the five senses has to simultaneously be effected so that the subject feels they are in a completely different realm, far far away from the console or computer they happen to be using. The idea of existing somewhere far far away is another means that a subject achieves presence. Presence by means of transportation can be told using three short phrases: 1. "You are there"(Lombard and Ditton,1997), this is as easy as the subject simply conceiving or imagining any information about a medium. 2. "It is here"( Lombard and Ditton,1997), the subject perceives an object or medium to be

"brought" to their location for them to experience. 3. "We are together"( Lombard and Ditton,1997), two subjects are brought together through a medium to communicate in some form or fashion, be it a conference call or just a friendly Skype chat. The final means of conceptualization of presence is a term known as, social actor. The social actor effects presence in two distinct ways. First, is the social actor "within" the medium. Para-social relationships are likely to form within this medium, due to the subject's trust or relationship of the social actor within the medium. When the social actor is within the medium, typically the social actor is another being that the subject has come to know and recognize, but has no real time interaction. The second way the social actor effects presence is when the social actor acts "as" the medium. The medium acts as a social outlet and can perform social cues to otherwise "trick" the subject into treating the medium as a social entity. Human mimicking robots, have long been used as an example for this. The ability for a piece of technology to see and experience you as an outside medium, may it be as simple as reacting to a smile, is an uncanny thought.

Although, the six means seem different, all are able to be placed into two different distinctions. The first being that the medium can appear to be non-existent and the content and environment are seen as "real-time". The other being that the medium appears as its own social entity. If one of these two is achieved then the subject will perceive that there is "non-mediation" and will have achieved presence. Presence has all of these deciding factors and all of these different means by which it can change, but how exactly does presence effect the subject psychologically? Sure, the subject may be off in a first person shooter waging war on an "evil" nation or entity, but what if this continuous flow of non-mediated experiences somehow causes the subject to lose hold on what reality really is? Many politicians have witnessed the graphic and realistic material that video games and other medias have. This is where the debate begins, and it can separate into two paths. First being the victim's standpoint and the second being the innovator's standpoint. The victim is anyone who has been negatively effected by a non-mediated experience or anyone who has been effected by someone else who was been effected by a nonmediated experience. These new technologies are bringing

out new ideas and motives that some people have just acted negatively towards. For example, when I was young the scapegoat at the time was arcade pistol shooting games. Everyone kept commenting on how these games made kids hoodlums that would shoot a person without a second thought. Several gun related incidents have occurred over the past twenty years, each being related in some way to a form of media. Many studies have been conducted over media, all in search for an answer on how the specific media effects levels of aggression. Innovators, on the other hand, embrace the new technologies and strive to prove to the nation that the politicians have a partisan view on media and its influences. Innovators have seen the means by which the technologies in our society are emerging, and have chosen to see the new innovations as a positive direction for the nation. Presence, the perception of a subject to be completely or sufficiently submerged or immersed into an outside medium, while feeling they are part of said medium without being mediated. Do people want this feeling of presence? Will we one day be able to completely immerse ourselves into a world and forget our own? Only the future holds what is in store for the new technologies that have yet to come into our world.