Liveness and Presence in Emerging Communication Technologies

COMM 7470
Spring 2004
David Zemmels

Liveness and Presence in Emerging Communication Technologies

Abstract

In our contemporary electronically mediatized culture, the ontological distinction between live performance and mediated events is no longer clear-cut.  With the rise of Internet usage and the increasing prevalence of imagery and video, webcams, chat rooms, and other services available through the World Wide Web (WWW), the binary opposition between ‘live’ and ‘recorded’ is even less obvious.  I argue first that there is perhaps a better metaphorical concept available to comprehend different types of ‘liveness’ in technologically mediated forms of communication: chronotopes, to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s term for a spatio-temporal location or scenario.  Further, another term, ‘presence,’ seems to overlap ‘liveness’ in definition and usage to a degree and may be useful in continuing the conversation, since the definitions of what constitutes ‘liveness’ and ‘presence’ have much in common, specifically a perceptual spatio-temporal relationship of Baktin’s chronotopes in terms of a sense of relative intimacy and immediacy.  Finally, I will argue that modern usage of one particular form of emerging communication technologies, the World Wide Web (WWW), offers a greater sense of intimacy and immediacy, of ‘liveness’ and ‘presence’ to a degree not previously available in the history of human communication.

Introduction

In our contemporary electronically mediatized culture, the ontological distinction between live performance and mediated events is no longer clear-cut.  In "Liveness: Performance in the Mediatized Culture," Philip Auslander presents a very useful discussion of what constitutes ‘liveness’ in an attempt to problematize the assumptions of live performance as privileged in some way over electronic representational mediums, such as television.  However, he does not extend his discussions about ‘liveness’ into newer forms of mediated electronic entertainment and communication.

With the rise of Internet usage and the increasing prevalence of imagery and video, webcams, chat rooms, and other services available through the World Wide Web (WWW), the binary opposition between live and recorded is even less obvious. In other words, the interactiveness of new entertainment technologies has further problemitized the character, form and meaning of ‘live’.

I argue first that there is perhaps a better metaphorical concept available to comprehend different types of ‘liveness’ in technologically mediated forms of communication. Auslander defines ‘liveness’ in terms of intimacy and immediacy of the perceptual experience.  There is a temporal and spatial relationship implied by the two concepts. Liveness, then, describes new chronotopes, to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s term for a spatio-temporal location or scenario.

Further, a review of the literature presented another term, ‘presence,’ which seems to overlap ‘liveness’ in definition and usage to a degree. However, the term ‘presence’ originally arose in the nomenclature of mediated experience to describe the aesthetic quality of human interactive experiences in virtual reality environments.  This term is useful in continuing the conversation where Auslander left off, since the definitions of what constitutes ‘liveness’ and ‘presence’ have much in common, specifically a perceptual spatio-temporal relationship of Baktin’s chronotopes in terms of a sense of relative intimacy and immediacy.

Finally, I will argue that modern usage of one particular form of emerging communication technologies, the World Wide Web (WWW), which possesses distinct characteristics of ‘liveness’ and therefore threatens to usurp the cultural dominance of television, just as Auslander argues that television usurped the cultural dominance of live performance. The Web offers a greater sense of intimacy and immediacy, of ‘liveness’ and ‘presence’ to a degree not previously available in the history of human communication.  Internet users can participate in chat rooms, obtain current stock quotes, view up-to-the-minute news reports, see the wave conditions on Hawaiian beaches through an Internet camera, and many other activities almost at the touch of a button and in real-time as the events unfold.  The sense of 'connectiveness' can be more immediate and intimate than anything that has come before.

Dematerialization of Liveness

Live performance was first challenged for cultural dominance by the invention of the camera, followed by the invention of Philo Farnsworth, who conceived the idea of electronic television — the moment of inspiration coming, according to legend, while he was tilling a potato field back and forth with a horse-drawn harrow and realized that an electron beam could scan images the same way, line by line, just as you read a book¹.  This analogy of electronic representation to reading of text is interesting and addressed later on.

In his book Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, Philip Auslander contends that live performance such as theater and technologically mediated entertainment mediums such as television, compete for the sense of ‘been there.’  I would like to pursue this idea from a temporal-spatial point of view, their chronotopes, to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s term for a spatio-temporal location or scenario.

The dominance of live performance, such as theatre, was first challenged by the invention of the photographic camera. The subsequent production of motion pictures initially integrated the practices of theatre in terms of acting, scenery, etc. but quickly diverged to form its own vocabulary of presentation.  The ability to take the camera to a location, rather than representing the location on a stage, as theatre must, was quickly realized.  Therefore, in terms of the production of presentation, the distinctions between live performance and cinematic performance were fairly clear almost from the beginning.

In terms of presentation to the spectator, the finished films are shown is a similar spatial relationship to the audience as live performance.   The spectators sat in the theatre with everyone looking in the same direction, toward the proscenium arch, which in the case of film presentation, was filled with a movie screen rather than scenery and actors.  As Auslander says, “Early cinema took over and reformed a theatrical vocabulary and also rapidly usurped the theatre’s cultural position as the dominant form of entertainment.”

Despite the fact that the cinema usurped the physical space of the live performance, as well as its cultural position, it was never viewed as a serious contender in the temporal sense. Films were clearly perceived as representing the past as present.  There was never any sense or expectation of ‘liveness’, only the recorded archive of past events. From an epistemological point of view, theatre and film should have been seen as similar experiences, for theatre is really the re-articulation of the past as real-time events, like a recording. Despite this, cinematic experience remains generally distinct from any discussion of “live” experience, despite its spatial and epistemological similarities to theatre.

Both forms of these forms of entertainment, theatre and cinema, were quickly pushed aside by television in the cultural economy.  Unlike film, television did not compete with live performance in any spatial sense.  Television was viewed in the home, not a theatre.  People did not have to get dressed up and have to drive or walk anywhere to enjoy this new form of entertainment.  And like film, television’s point of view was that of the camera.  In this sense, television and film should have been viewed an ontologically similar. Yet, “As a camera-bound medium, television might well have striven to be cinematic; in fact, it strove to be theatrical.” However, “Unlike film, but like theatre, a television broadcast is characterized as a performance in the present” (Auslander, 1999: 15). As a result,

(T)he televisual was understood, from television’s earliest appearances, as an ontology of liveness more akin to the ontology of theatre than that of film. Television’s essence was seen in its ability to transmit events as they occur, not in the filmic capacity to record events for later viewing.  (Auslander, 1999: 12)

This temporal distinction “enabled television to colonize liveness, the one aspect of theatrical presentation that film could not replicate.”

The fact that television can “go live” at any moment to convey the sight and sound at a distance in a way no other medium can remains a crucial part of the televisual imagery even though the way of using the medium is now the exception rather than the rule. (Auslander, 1999: 13)

To summarize this argument: while the televisual experience is spatially distinct from the objects it is representing, it is perceived (correctly or not) as temporally similar to the live experience, to ‘being there.’  The ease of access to the televisual experience, its ability to bring events from the outside into the viewer’s home, allowed it to displace theatre and film as the dominant cultural discourse.  This is an important distinction as I discuss the Internet later on.

Auslander has already dismissed the ontological notion that live performance is ‘pure’ or privileged as a distinction between ‘live’ and ‘mediated’ performances.  As Auslander successfully argues, “ Live performance now often incorporates mediatization such that the live event itself is a product of media technologies” (Auslander, 1999: 24) and, in cases from sporting events to Broadway theatre, “audiences now expect live performances to resemble mediated ones. This is the result of what Auslander introduces as “the historical logic of media.”   Marshall McLuhan (1964:158) suggested how this logic is played out: “A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace.  It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.”  For Auslander, “the general response of live performance to the oppression and economic superiority of mediatized forms has been to become as much like them as possible”  (Auslander, 1999: 7).  As each new mediatized form appears, then, the older ones begin jockeying for position in their spatial-temporal relationship to the viewer, as well as becoming more similar in their presentations as well² .

Auslander successfully argues that there is no clear-cut binary distinction between live performance and recorded representations of performance.  ‘Liveness’ to Auslander is “historically conditioned and that it is a cultural construct, not an ontological condition” (Auslander/ ATHA, 2000). In other words, ‘Liveness’ is a modern cultural construction in the age of mechanical and electronic reproduction and representation.  There was no need for a distinction of ‘live’ events prior to mechanical reproduction since everything was ‘live’ and “historically, the live is actually an effect of mediatization, not the other way around” (Auslander, 1999: 51). The concept of ‘live’ could only conceived as a relationship to an opposing possibility. Perhaps the only thing the word ‘live’ really means is ‘not recorded.’

Liveness as Chronotope

I have shown that ‘liveness’ is socially constructed and not fixed where live performance verses television is concerned.  But to extend the definition into digitally mediated experience, I wish to borrow the metaphorical concept of chronotope in defining ‘liveness’ in modern communication discourses.

In his essay, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel”, M. M. Baktin “gives the name chronotope (literally, “time space”) to the intrinsic connectiveness of temporal spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (Baktin, 1981: 84).  While Baktin confines his use of the chronotope to “a formally constitutive category of literature,” he recognizes that the concept is also applicable “in other areas of culture.”  Indeed, it is thought that he borrowed the term from a biology lecture he attended. 

Baktin argues, “the chronotope as a formally constitutive category determines to a significant degree the image of man in literature…The image of man is always intrinsically chronotopic” (Baktin, 1981: 85).  I contend the image of wo/man in digitally mediated experience is intrinsically chronotopic as well, through the “connectiveness of temporal spatial relationships” in mediated cultural space.

Auslander offers the concepts of immediacy and intimacy as the essential properties of television as a medium. The television broadcast, like theatre but unlike film, “is characterized as a performance in the present” (Auslander, 1999: 15). Television is, therefore, perceived as ‘immediate’ and this characteristic was recognized and taken advantage of early in television’s existence³ .

Auslander goes on to say “Television’s intimacy was seen as a function of its immediacy – the close proximity of the viewer to event that it enables…” (Auslander, 1999: 16).  He is referring to the fact that the viewer is sitting close to the television as well as close to the action, since the camera can provide a front-row seat to televised events.

The relative ‘liveness’ of mediated experiences, then, is one of the aesthetic relationship of the body to the presentational source in time and space: the relationship in terms of immediacy and intimacy. Looking at any form of mediated experience by examining its characteristics of immediacy and intimacy is useful. These are really the two aspects of Baktin’s chronotope metaphor, since immediacy is really a temporal reference, and intimacy is a spatial relationship. 

I am reminded of theatrical concepts of ‘aesthetic distance’ and ‘suspension of disbelief’, which are common theatrical terms used to describe the emotional involvement of the spectator in the presentation and the ability to forget that the event is a representation of past or fictional events, and then accept them as happening in the present.  These terms can also be thought of as describing the quality of immediacy and intimacy in performance.  Indeed, we see the term ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ in Appendix A, which summarizes the factors involved in creating a quality sense of presence as defined below. This lends further value to immediacy and intimacy as descriptors of mediated experience.

This metaphorical conceptualization of the ‘liveness’ as chronotope is useful in moving beyond the concept of live performance - as physically co-present bodies - as the fundamental meaning that remains true for all times and places; “The very idea of what constitutes liveness clearly is not fixed and stable, but mutable and open to historical redefinition” (Auslander / ATHE, 2000).

The Ontology of Presence

A concept has emerged several times in the preceding paragraphs, that of being ‘present’ or ‘presence’.  The term in this context implies a relative proximity to an event and is defined thus (American Heritage, 2000):

pres·ence (pr zns) n.

1. The state or fact of being present; current existence or occurrence.

2. Immediate proximity in time or space.

Interestingly, these definitions directly relate to factors in the previous discussion of immediacy and intimacy in technologically mediated experiences.

Upon review of the literature, the term presence does appear in the context of emerging communication technologies and may be useful here.  The term is used in the context of technologically mediated environments, and seems to have originally arisen in discussions about the aesthetic quality of human interactive experiences in virtual reality environments.  Indeed, MIT has been publishing a journal called Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments that is “for serious investigators of teleoperators and virtual environments” since 1992.

There is a rich body of scholarly research in ‘telepresence’ and other related terms with reference to virtual reality environments.  Kwan Min Lee (2004) published a very useful article, “Presence, Explicated,” which identified several terms that s/he postulates are actually all referring to the same phenomenon. Lee writes, “Presence if often referred to as telepresence, virtual presence, or mediated presence” (p. 28).  Lee culled these terms from the review of the literature of such diverse disciplines as business, communication, computer science, industrial engineering, education, psychology, and sociology. 

            Presence in the context of virtual reality has been defined as "the perceptual illusion of non-mediation" (Lombard, 1998) and as a “psychological state in which the virtuality of the experience is unnoticed” (Lee, 2004).  Lee (2004) argues that this second definition “does not confine the feeling of presence to mediated perceptions only,” for two reasons: 1) “attempts to strictly discriminate between mediated and nonmediated perceptions can be futile” and 2) that “confining presence to mediated situations excludes the possibility of feeling presence during nonmediated experiencing.”

This allows us to accept presence as a useful descriptor of experiences and move beyond questions of whether experiences are privileged and/or superior if unmediated, just as Aulander’s arguments did.  For that matter, all experiences can be considered mediated to some degree.  Even live experiences are often mediated by electronic amplification (Wurtzler, 1992) (Auslander, 1999), and there are arguments that even our sight and hearing is mediated by our ears and eyes before the stimulus reaches our brains. In other words, “All experiences are mediated in some way, either by sense organs or by technology” (Lee, 2004). So presence appears to be an acceptable description of experience whether it is mediated in the way Auslander defines the term ‘liveness’ or not. It is especially useful where Auslander’s discussion of ‘liveness’ ends in the face of recent emerging technologies.

However, Lee (2004) does finally make a distinction between real experience, hallucination, and virtual experience, and concludes, “Presence research is about virtual experience and has nothing to do with real experience or hallucination” (p. 37) and ultimately defines presence as “a psychological state in which virtual (para-authentic or artificial) objects are experienced as actual objects in either sensory or nonsensory ways” (P. 37).

Lee presents a good case to accept the term presence as a means of defining the quality of different levels of technologically mediated experiences. Yet despite Lee’s conclusions that the term cannot refer to ‘live’ experience, she is really only referring to the term’s use with reference to virtual technology research.  Fortunately, Lee acknowledges early in the essay, “presence has become central to theorizing about advanced human-computer interfaces such as virtual reality (VR) systems, as well as traditional media, such as television, film, and books” (Lee, 2004: 28). 

This allows the concept of presence the bridge that ties together emerging interactive technologies, older technologies such as television, and live performance, and therefore successfully incorporates Auslander’s concepts of ‘liveness’ and replaces it in this essay.  I have hopefully demonstrated that there is no longer a clear ontological distinction between live and mediated experiences such as television.  The televisual experience can be defined by the quality of presence produced by the interaction in the same way as every other mediated experience, from interactive virtual reality environments to reading novels.

The Production of Presence

            As we have seen, the concept of presence is used in mediated communication and entertainment discourses in addition to virtual reality. In a mediated culture, there are many factors that influence the sense of presence in an experience, and the concepts of ‘liveness’ can be successfully incorporated into the concept.  But how does one accomplish a sense of presence, especially a positive sense of presence as an aesthetically pleasurable experience?  How is this produced?

The literary scholar, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, in his recent book, “Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey,” defines presence in the context of a spatio-temporal reference: “What is present to us is in front of us, in reach of and tangible for our bodies” (Gumbrecht, 2004:17).  However, he continues:

If production means, literally, “to bring forth,” “to pull forth,” then the phrase “production of presence” would emphasize that the effect of tangibility that comes from the materialities of communication is also an effect in constant movement.  In other words, to speak of “the production of presence” implies that the (spatial) tangibility effect coming from the communication media is subjected, in space, to movements of greater or lesser proximity, and of greater and lesser intensity.

            Gumbrecht is proposing that the literary world examine literary works through the production of presence, or its ‘presence effect,’ as an alternative to the simple production of interpretation and meaning, or ‘meaning effect.’ What is relevant to this essay is that he is arguing that different levels of presence can be produced, depending on the situation, based on proximity and intensity of the experience. 

I suggest that what he is arguing, his ‘presence effect,’ bears striking similarities to Baktin’s metaphor of the chronotope because proximity and intensity (like Auslander’s terms immediacy and intimacy) are the critical factors for the successful production of presence: the sense of co-presence, of ‘being there’.  Producing this temporal-spatial effect, or chronotope, is independent of whether the experience is live, recorded, or virtual (a temporal-spatial combination of the two as discussed below), for by these definitions, an experience can still be “in front of us, in reach of and tangible for our bodies” in any temporal-spatial situations. I recognize that the circumstances are important.  It can be argued that the ‘live’ perhaps does not always need to work as hard to produce a sense of presence, a sense of ‘being there,’ as the mediated, but as I demonstrate below, an immediate and intimate sense of presence may not longer be possible during many live performance without the help of mediating technologies.

To help me further illustrate the production of presence as a useful universal concept for describing a chronotope, Steve Wurtzler argues in the context of modern audio recording and reinforcement techniques that there has been a complete “collapse of the discursively produced categories of live and recorded” (Wurtzler, 1992).  In his essay, “The Microphone was Turned Off,” he begins with the controversy that emerged after “Whitney Houston’s teary-eyed wartime rendition of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ at the 1991 Super Bowl” in which it was “revealed that her vocals actually were recorded several days prior to the game” (Wurtzler, 1992: 87).  While the event was represented as live to both the spectators at the game and the television audience, it is clear that this representational practice and convention for the sake of “the finest possible performance” had become “standard procedure.”  Indeed, record stores quickly sold out of recordings of what was marketed as Houston’s stirring and emotional ‘live’ performance, a phenomenon made possible because of the audience’s acceptance of it as ‘live’:

As socially and historically produced, the categories of the live and the recorded are defined in a mutually exclusive relationship, in that a notion of the live is premised on the absence of recording and the defining fact of the recorded is the absence of live” (Wurtzler, 1992, p. 89).

            Because of the ubiquity of sound reinforcement of ‘live’ events, the spectators did not realize, nor perhaps care, that Houston’s microphone was turned off.  They responded emotionally to the immediacy and intimacy of the moment.  Without the intervention of sound reinforcement, this story would never have been told.

Wurtzler argues (like Auslander and Lee) that the binary opposition of live and recorded no longer exists given “contemporary representational technologies and strategies (including virtual reality and other computer imaging methods, sampling, and lipsyncing)…” and that a new conception has emerged, one in which “representation is conceived of as the complete dismantling of the notion of an original event.  In such practices, copies are produced for which no original exists.”   This notion is the key to defining immediacy and intimacy of presence in the contemporary context of modern communication and entertainment.

Wurtzler proposes, “separating the spatial and temporal parameters” to create four general positions in which various states of presence can be defined. The following chart was recreated from Wurtzler’s essay to demonstrate the positions:

	Spatial Co-presence	Spatial Absence
Temporal Simultaneity	LIVE
	(I)	(II)
Temporal Anteriority		RECORDED
	(III)	(IV)

Some Associated Representational Technologies/Practices

Position I:        Public Address, vaudeville, theatre, concert

Position II:      Telephone, “live” radio, “live” television [instant messaging, web cams, virtual reality]

Position III:     Lip syncing, Diamondvision stadium replays [web surfing, TiVo, VCR]

Position IV:     Motion Pictures, recorded radio and television [on-line movies, e-mail]

[ ]= my additions for later discussion

            This chart effectively represents the notion that “the socially constructed categories of live and recorded cannot account for all representational practices and they do not exhaust the possibilities of the consumer’s relationships to posited original events.”  Modern technologies make “simultaneous presence and absence” possible by providing

“a combination of qualities of both the live and the recorded, the immediate and the mediated. As such they problematize the binary oppositions on which dominant notions of representation are based, live/recorded and the related oppositions event/representation or original copy” (Wurtzler, 2004, p. 90).

Often in our mediated society, the intervention of technology between the event and the spectator is necessary, even preferred, whether the event be perceived as ‘live’ or not, thereby eliminating any ontological distinctions.  It is only the production of presence within a specific spatio-temporal relationship that defines these events.

Even in Position I, the experiences often involve the technological mediation of sound amplification so that the spectator can have the greatest sense of immediacy and intimacy with the event. Rather than accept the degradation of the original or the ‘death of the aura’ as Benjamin might have had us believe, “at the hands of mechanical or electronic reproducibility, the recorded reinstates the ‘aura’ in commodity form accessible only within those events socially constructed as fully live” (Wurtzler, 2004: 89).  Indeed, Wurtzler and Auslander argue in various ways that the live has become a degraded version of the recorded and that mediation has become necessary to achieve the ‘aura’ around an event.

The best way to effectively make any sense of presence, then, is to plot the chronotopic positions in their relative placements on Wurtzler’s chart. Ontologically, the chronotopes are now only relative to one another across a wide variety of experiences.

Many other variables to the ‘production of presence’, to use Gumbrecht’s term, have been studied and documented with regard to technologies in the digital domain, such as Internet communication and virtual reality.

Mathew Lombard and Theresa Ditton (1996), in a definitive work on the subject, identify “six interrelated but distinct conceptualizations of presence”  from a review of the literature.  They offer several “variables that encourage and discourage presence”  that are of interest in the ‘production of presence’ in any mediated experience. For a brief synopsis of their finding, see Appendix A.

Presence and the Internet

Liveness is the sense of living presence. This often involves the sense of a presence that is elsewhere, where actions are registered simultaneously across different spaces (geographical, operational, perceptual, disciplinary....)⁴.

            This quote hopefully summarizes my arguments.  Modern communication technologies, particularly the characteristics of ‘interactiveness,’ and the sense of ‘connectiveness’ associated with it, have effectively dematerialized the ‘live’ and ‘recorded’ in a complex and rich mediated culture, and the only way of defining each experience is as a sense of presence using Baktin’s chronotopes of time and space, immediacy and intimacy, of the experience.  New chronotopes have emerged.

            Cable television, satellite television, TiVo, pay-per-view, and the World Wide Web have raised new issues about the relationship between such mediums as television and film, which has changed significantly with the advent of new entertainment distribution technologies. With cable TV and satellite, the criteria that make films distinct from television are no longer applicable, and with films going directly to broadcast cable/satellite rather than being released in theaters, the boundaries that define each are blurred even further. An entirely new cultural economy has evolved “based on the instant transportability and the ease of processing images and digital information” (Morse, 1998: 4)

The new mediated communication technologies has necessitated this discussion of presence in relation to existing, older forms of communication, from the telephone to television, and from performance to films.  Individual forms or methods of communication experience can actually be placed in several regions of Wurtzler’s chart above at once.  Communications can entwine intimacy and distance, immediacy and delay, all at the same time. From cybersex to on-line shopping, mediated communication and interaction has become a complex economy of processing images and digital information, often in real-time.

I will focus the discussion on one area of discourse in emerging technologically mediated experiences called ‘information technology’ (IT). I shall look at one aspect of IT: the Internet, and one use colloquially called ‘web surfing .’ Internet-based communication possess distinct characteristics of ‘liveness’ hence presence as I have defined it, and therefore threatens to usurp the dominance of television in our culture. There are several reasons for this.

Internet communication is accomplished primarily through the use of personal computers.  The interface between the machine and the viewer is the computer monitor.  While the interaction is immediate and intimate, it could be argued that it is with the screen as opposed to any actual event in time and space.  But that same argument can be made about the television.  However, they are both ‘televisual’ experiences that happen from the comfort and convenience of your home or office.  In terms of proximity, the experience is intimate.  Like television, there is a sense of the immediate, that we are seeing things as they happen.  However, the ontological similarities end there.

Communication across the Internet is really text-based, hence the interesting parallel to Philo Farnsworth’s image that led to electronic television: an electron beam create images, line by line, just as you read a book. Web pages are constructed on the viewers computer based on instructions in a language called HTML (Hyertext Markup Language). HTML is really just plain text instructions laid out like lines on the page.

The Internet works by breaking up the body of information to be communicated over the Internet into smaller fragments, called ‘packets’.  Each packet consists of many smaller fragments of information called a ‘bit’, a contraction of the words ‘binary digit’.  A character of text equals 1 bit. In the early days, imagery, broken up into individual ‘bits’ of information, was far too large and complex to be transmitted over the Internet in any practical timeframe, a postcard-sized image could take hours.  Instead, information was stored in textual form and a user navigated to it via a textual ‘link.’ Hence the World Wide Web (WWW) was conceived as a series of links connecting various pages of textual information like a giant web.  Using a GUI (graphical user interface) to navigate the web came much later, with the invention of the first GUI web browser by Netscape Corporation. 

As the personal computer and Internet technology improved, and larger amounts of information could be retrieved over the Internet in less time, the probability of producing a greater sense of presence becomes more feasible.  As an example (referring to Lombard and Ditton’s (1997) “Causes of Presence” in Appendix A), visual display characteristics (the monitor screen) are a key factor in producing presence, primarily image size, color, and motion.  As the speed of transmission of Internet content has improved, the size of images that can be transmitted in a reasonable time frame has become mush larger.  The images possess far better depth of color, and can even be moving.

The recent use of ‘streaming’ video on the World Wide Web for the real-time distribution of moving images “has enabled an interface that supports a new phenomenon of virtual, deferred, remote presence” (Donati &  Prado, 2001). Furthermore, with the ubiquity of the remote web cam (remotely controllable cameras that send moving video imagery over the Internet), the viewing of electronic images has an aspect of agency in the production of presence. One can remotely control the perspective, or point of view, in ways never before possible in televisual experience.

Conclusion

While every new entertainment medium is supposed to spell the doom and of the pre-existing mediums with which it competes, this has never actually been the case.   As older mediums redefine itself within the new context, the new market, to survive.  I believe this will be the case as the relationship between television, film, live performance, print media (such as newspapers and magazines), the World Wide Web, and the novel for that matter, continues to evolve and mature.

There are similarities between the WWW to the traditional concepts of both broadcast and text, but there is a great divergence underway, a divergence in ontological existence.  The most fundamental is that the tyranny of older entertainment mediums such as theatre, television and film is its inherent linearity.  Only one event can be shown at a time.  However,

The World Wide Web, with its intrinsic capacities for interconnectivity and synchronicity has generated new possibilities for the relationship between participants, information, and technological support and provides an interactive communication space where infinite paths allow for participation in events, real-time experiences, and remote actions exploring the sensation of ubiquity and simultaneity. (Donati &  Prado, 2001: 437)

As Internet technology improves, and greater production of presence becomes possible, the Internet will continue to colonize ‘liveness’ and usurp television’s cultural dominance in the very same way Auslander described television’s dominance over live performance.  With faster Interent in our homes and offices, the televisual experience becomes as immediate and intimate as television, but with the added value of ‘interactiveness’ beyond changing the channel. Agency, defined by ‘interactiveness’ in this context, becomes a key concept of the WWW’s cultural dominance.

Images have been transformed from the static representations of the world into spaces in which events happen that involve and engage people to various degrees in physical space. (Morse, 1998: 21) (author’s emphasis)

____________________________________________

Footnotes:

1. Retrieved on 03/18/04 from http://www.time.com/time/time100/scientist/profile/farnsworth.html

2. While there are many, a definitive example of an older medium becoming as much like another as possible is the relationship between theatre and cinema and the dimming of the house lights during presentation.  The common convention of dimming the house lights during a live performance was adapted only after implementation of this practice in the movie theatre.  While this is by necessity in the movie house because of the low light intensity of the original film projectors, there was no such practical purpose for it in live theatre except that it copied the convention introduced in the movie house.  Indeed, since the chandeliers in the house (or audience area) had traditionally provided lighting for the actor’s faces as well, another system of lighting the actors needed inventing.  This need gave birth to the modern theatrical profession of Lighting Designer.  How the older medias of live performance, film and television have responded to the oppression of new mediums such as the Internet will be discussed shortly.

3. Auslander quotes several early leaders of the television age, including Lenox Lohr, the president of NBC as saying in 1940: “the most utilitarian feature of television lies in broadcasting events exactly when and as they happen” (original emphasis). This continues today in the form of ‘live’ news broadcasts, sporting events, and other events.

4. Retrieved on 03/18/04 from http://www.sial.rmit.edu.au/Projects/Liveness_Manifold.php

Bibliography:

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. (2000). Published by Houghton Mifflin Company.

Auslander, P. (1999). Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. New York, NY: Routledge.

Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Donati, L. P. & Prado, G. (2001). Artistic Environments of Telepresence on the World Wide Web. Leonardo 34, 5: 437–442,

Gumbrecht, H. U. (2004). Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Lee, K. M. (2004). Presence, Explicated. Communication Theory 14, 1: 27-50.

Lombard, M. & Ditton, T. (1997). At the Heart of It All: The Concept of Presence. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 3, 2.

Morse, M. (1998). Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and Cyberculture. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Wurtzler, S. (1992). “She Sang Live, But The Microphone Was Turned Off: The Live, the Recorded and the Subject of Representation.” pp. 87-103 in Altman, R. (Ed), Sound Theory Sound Practice. New York, NY: Routledge.

Appendix A

From “At the Heart of It All: The Concept of Presence” (Lombard & Ditton,1996)

 

Causes and Effects of Presence

Causes of Presence as Invisible Medium

Form variables: The formal characteristics of media most often cited as important determinants of presence are those that involve sensory richness or vividness.

·      Number and consistency of sensory outputs: the greater the number of human senses for which a medium provides stimulation (i.e., media sensory outputs), the greater the capability of the medium to produce a sense of presence.

·      Visual display characteristics: including image quality, image size and viewer distance, motion and color, variables related to the perception of dimensionality, and the use of a variety of camera techniques.

·      Aural presentation characteristics: quality and dimensionality.

·      Stimuli for other senses: olfactory output, body movement (vection), tactile stimuli, force feedback.

·      Interactivity: the ability to interact with a mediated environment.

·      Obtrusiveness of medium: the medium should not draw attention to itself and remind the media user that she/he is having a mediated experience.

·      Live versus recorded or constructed experience: the knowledge that a mediated event has been recorded or constructed may make it more difficult for users to perceive the experience as nonmediated.

·      Number of people: the final media formal feature that may encourage a sense of presence is the number of people the user can (or must) encounter while using the medium. The ability to interact with larger numbers of people may lead to even greater presence.

Content variables: While the form or structure of a mediated presentation or experience plays a vital role in generating presence as invisible medium, the content -- which includes objects, human and nonhuman characters and personae, tasks and activities, messages, stories, etc. -- that is delivered within that form or structure also serves to encourage or discourage presence.

·  Social realism: socially realistic experiences are also more likely to evoke a sense of presence.

·  Use of media conventions: the use in media content of conventions that users have come to associate specifically with mediated presentations and experience.

·  Nature of task or activity: the difficulty of the task and the degree to which the control of the task is manual versus automatic may each influence presence.

Media user variables: the identical media form and content might generate a sense of presence in one media user and not in another, or might generate presence in the same user on one occasion but not another one.

·  Willingness to suspend disbelief: if we try to "get into" the experience, we overlook inconsistencies and signs that it is artificial, we suspend our disbelief that the experience could be nonmediated.

·  Knowledge of and prior experience with the medium: It should be easier for users unfamiliar with the nature of a medium and how it functions to experience presence while using the medium.

·  Other user variables: personality type, user's preferred representational system (visual, auditory, or kinesthetic), their cognitive style, the degree to which they "screen" complex stimuli, their level of sensation-seeking, their need to overcome loneliness, their mood before and during media use, and their age and gender.

Causes of Presence as Transformed Medium

Presence is defined here as a transformed into a social entity.

Form variables

   Interactivity

   Use of voice

   Medium size and shape

Content variables

   Social realism

   Use of media conventions

   Nature of task or activity

Media user variables

   Knowledge of and prior experience with the medium

   Other user variables

The Effects of Presence

One of the most interesting aspects of the presence phenomenon concerns the physiological and psychological consequences of the perceptual illusion of nonmediation.

Physiological effects of presence as invisible medium

   Arousal

   Vection and simulation sickness

   Other physiological effects

Psychological effects of presence as invisible medium

   Enjoyment

   Involvement

   Task performance

   Skills Training

   Desensitization

   Persuasion

   Memory and social judgment

   Parasocial interaction and relationships

Psychological effects of presence as transformed medium