Abstract
Social presence, or the subjective experience of being present with another existing person, varies with the interaction medium. In general, social presence research has mainly focused on uni-directional aspects of each exchanged message, not on bidirectional interactions. Our primary purpose is to introduce such bidirectional evaluation by quantifying the degree of social presence with a few statistical measures. To this end, we developed a software called “TypeTrace” that records all keystrokes of online chat interactants and reenacts their typing actions and analyzed the results from different chat conditions, mainly focusing on the characterization of bi-directional interactions. We also compared the chat interaction patterns with the patterns from phone call datasets to investigate the difference of live communication in different media. The hypothesis of the experiment was that either richness or concurrency of communication is important for organizing social presence. Richness is defined by the variety of information at a time in communication and the concurrency is the number of temporal thread being processed at the same time. Our results show that when we merely increase the richness of information by presenting the typing process, the cognition of others' presence does not significantly increase. However, when the information concurrency is augmented by introducing the transmission of realtime text, we found that the transfer entropy between the interactants becomes considerably higher, and the social presence and emotional arousal, intimacy increased. High transfer entropy was also observed in the phone call dataset. This result shows that the mere augmentation of information richness does not necessarily lead to increased social presence, and concurrent communication is another critical factor for fostering vivid conversation in digital environments.
Highlights
Conversations are central to our social lives
We analyzed the dyadic interactions in perceptual crossing experiment, which consisted of a minimal CMC that only involved a vibration device and a computer mouse, using the local form of transfer entropy (Lizier et al, 2008), and we found that passive information flow was related to the feeling of the presence of the others (Kojima et al, 2017)
We found that in condition 4, the rating of Enjoyment was significantly higher than it was in condition 2 (p < 0.05) and condition 3 (p < 0.05), the rating of Closeness was significantly higher than it was in condition 3 (p < 0.05), and the rating of Presence was significantly higher than it was in condition 1 (p < 0.05)
Summary
Conversations are central to our social lives. In Face-to-face (FtF) circumstances, social interaction includes not just the exchange of verbal sentences, and interactions with non-verbal means such as body gestures, vocal cues, temporal structures in speech like turn-taking, facial expressions, and gaze exchanges. It is known that the medium of communication affects, among other aspects of social interaction, affiliative behaviors, and the resulting outcomes (Sprecher, 2014). Modern societies have become inundated by computer-mediated communication (CMC) systems. Since the early introduction of personal computers in the 1980s until the universal dissemination of smartphones in the 2010s, we have experienced a drastic influx of new CMCs
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