COPRESENCE AS ‘BEING WITH’

Abstract

This article examines the issue of ‘ubiquitous connectivity’ on the Internet. The Internet, combined with the wireless technologies, is said to have made it possible for ‘anyone to contact anyone else anywhere at anytime’, but such ubiquity of connectivity has failed to materialize in actual human contact. Drawing on Goffman and Giddens's theories of human interaction, the authors make a distinction between co-location, which is a spatial relationship among individuals, and copresence, a social relationship. While co-location puts people within range of each other, copresence renders people mutually accessible for contact. However, the establishment of copresence is normatively regulated in society, which demarcates different regions of space for different types of activity. Social contact takes place in a domain where copresence is affected not only by the regionality of contact but also by the power relations that underlie personal affinity and social engagement. It is concluded that so long as there are social barriers that separate people into different groups of interests and different positions in the hierarchy of fame and power, there will be fragmentations in the online world that make the ubiquity of social connectivity impossible.