Social Presence and Modes of Communication

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We will first discuss the concept of social presence and its relationship to modes of communication. Following we will discuss the literature examining the use of video feedback to establish instructor social presence.

Social Presence and Modes of Communication

Historically, social presence has been closely related to the mode of communication used. Short, Williams, and Christie (1976) originally defined social presence as “the degree of salience of the other person” in mediated communication (p. 65). They also emphasized that social presence was an attribute of the mode of communication—the more communication cues that the tool could transmit, the more social presence it contained. Short et al.’s original definition of social presence is similar to the concept of media richness (Draft & Lengel, 1986). Draft and Lengel (1986) defined media richness as a communication medium’s capacity to process rich information and explained that face-to-face communication had the highest richness; and “impersonal written documents” and “numeric documents” had the lowest (p. 560).

Short et al. (1976) also believed that social presence was closely related to the concept of immediacy. Wiener and Mehrabian (1968) defined immediacy as the level of psychological distance that exists within communication. The words that are used, as well as the visual and auditory cues, during communication can affect the level of immediacy. Short et al. (1976) reasoned that when using the same communication tool it was possible for immediacy (a product of behavior) to vary while social presence (an attribute of tool) stayed constant.

The distinction between immediacy and social presence has since become less clear. Unlike Short et al. (1976), Gunawar...

... middle of paper ...

...gorous thinking that occurs during the editing process. Furthermore, technological problems are more likely to arise when using video as compared to text (Barrow, 2012; Thompson & Lee, 2012). Barrow (2012) added that while many handheld devises allow students and instructors to communicate via video it can be difficult and awkward to do so in public settings. As a result, instructors who follow Barrow’s (2012) advice to create video comments “in an indoor quiet setting with minimal external audio and visual distractions” (p. 170) may find that it is less convenient to provide video feedback as compared to text.

Works Cited

Yang, C., Tsai, I., Kim, B., Cho, M., & Laffey, J. (2006). Exploring the relationships between students’ academic motivation and social ability in online learning environments. The Internet and Higher Education, 9(4), 277–286.

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