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Presence: Form, Content and Consciousness

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Book cover Immersed in Media

Abstract

In this chapter we present a rather wide-ranging perspective on presence as a central, characterizing feature of conscious mental life. After clarifying what we mean by presence in the first section, Sect. 3.2 discusses the implications of this for measurement. In Sect. 3.3, we consider the importance of media form for the sense of presence, before moving on in Sect. 3.4 to the relationship between presence and the sense of self considered in evolutionary terms. Section 3.5 deals specifically with attention, viewing presence as a reflection of attentional focus. Our aim is to convey the big picture about presence: what it is, what it’s for, how it evolved, what it is determined by and the effects it can have.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Distal attribution is a related term. Loomis suggested in the very first issue of Presence journal (Loomis 1992) that distal attribution results when afference is lawfully related to efference (after White 1970) and that attribution to self occurs when they are unrelated.

  2. 2.

    Damasio refers to this as the “autobiographical self ”. But because of its intrinsic dependence on extended consciousness, and because it consists of more than autobiographical memories and the self-conscious idea of self, we prefer to call this third layer the “extended self ”.

  3. 3.

    Alpha waves indicate activity of the visual cortex in an idle state.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Informatics, Umeå University, SE-901 87, Umeå, Sweden

    John A. Waterworth & Eva Lindh Waterworth

  2. Applied Technology for Neuro-Psychology Lab. – ATN-P Lab., Istituto Auxologico Italiano, I-20149, Milan, Italy

    Giuseppe Riva

  3. Communication and Ergonomics of NEw Technologies Lab. – ICE NET Lab., Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, I-20123, Milan, Italy

    Giuseppe Riva

  4. Centre for Studies in Communication Sciences, University of Milan-Bicocca, Milan, Italy

    Fabrizia Mantovani

Authors
  1. John A. Waterworth
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  2. Eva Lindh Waterworth
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  3. Giuseppe Riva
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  4. Fabrizia Mantovani
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Correspondence to John A. Waterworth .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Temple University, School of Media & Communication, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

    Matthew Lombard

  2. Syracuse University, Newhouse School of Public Communications, New York, USA

    Frank Biocca

  3. Goldsmiths, University of London, Department of Psychology, London, United Kingdom

    Jonathan Freeman

  4. Eindhoven University of Technology, School of Innovation Sciences, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Wijnand IJsselsteijn

  5. Temple University, School of Media & Communication, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

    Rachel J. Schaevitz

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Waterworth, J.A., Waterworth, E.L., Riva, G., Mantovani, F. (2015). Presence: Form, Content and Consciousness. In: Lombard, M., Biocca, F., Freeman, J., IJsselsteijn, W., Schaevitz, R. (eds) Immersed in Media. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10190-3_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10190-3_3

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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