Spurred by a particularly shoddy article we read in Lalitha’s class, I’ve written what ended up as kind of a continuation of Bread and Circuits. It’s also kind of my first channeling of theory-voice. Not sure I do it well. Probably I ought to read some Zizek.
(I’ve included the full text here as I worry I may eventually lose Lalitha’s class blog. –7/11/07)
Simulation of Presence
I was really having trouble with the idea of presence; it just seemed exceedingly vague. I’ve done a lot of thinking about it, and I don’t think the concept holds water. Here’s my reasoning:
The author usually phrases it as “sense” of presence. On p. 34 they refer to Lombard and Ditton’s definition, “an illusion that a mediated experience is not mediated.” (1997) They then borrow Witmer and Singer’s definition, “the subjective experience of being in one place or environment, even when one is physically situated in another. As applied to a virtual environment (VE), presence refers to experiencing the computer-generated environment rather than the actual physical locale.” (1998) The words “sense,” “illusion,” and “subjective experience” imply that “presence” is a product of the human mind. Thus it should likely be investigated qualitatively. A sense of presence is phenomenological and, as the author himself admits, cultural; it will be most effectively gauged through summaries of human description, not attempts to measure and quantify.
And this is the form the first paragraph takes, with the author speaking metaphorically (if not condescendingly fancifully) about “journeying to ‘strange lands.'” Let’s not lose track of that fact: “presence” as described in this article is essentially a metaphor, or more accurately a simile. “Being in the presence” of an object you are perceiving means all information about that object is coming to you, unmediated, through your own senses. Now that I have glasses, I can’t avoid the possibility that this conception of presence might include minor enhancements to the senses, such as hearing aids or corrective lenses.
Still, “being in the presence of” implies physical proximity. “Having a sense of presence,” by contrast, means what is being described here are experiences which are only like presence. It implies that what you sense has been transformed into another shape — ones and zeros, electrical impulses, radio waves, ink on paper, paint on canvas, etc. — before it reaches your sensory organs.
Thus “presence” is not a substance which can be measured independently of individual human standpoints, or outside of a social consensus. (Lance was arguing to me earlier that there’s nothing which can be measured outside of human understanding, which is ultimately true, but I’d like to leave that point aside for the moment. I find trying to reduce socially and technologically mediated phenomena to measurable numeric quantities to be far more problematic than trying to use a device like a light meter, scale, thermometer, or pH test to emulate and quantify the human senses.)
Though the study of presence should therefore be phenomenological, in subsequent paragraphs the author talks about the “variables” which have been found to impact a sense of presence; “cognitive overload,” “arousal,” and other human states usually in the domain of empirical cognitive and physiological research; and discusses the effects of varying the degrees of a geometric field on reported sense of presence. As a result, the evidence the author uses to demonstrate the existence of “presence” is a mismatch for the phenomenon he purports to be studying; it is thus unconvincing. Presence, he says, is related to the “variables” “enjoyment,” “involvement,” and “motivation to complete the task,” according to various studies. All of these are problematic when taken as empirical “variables;” they are highly subjective, very complex, and not demonstrably separable from elements of “presence” such as temperature, physical proximity, and frequency of feedback.
So the idea of presence breaks down as Fontaine proceeds; it proves inaccurate. I’ll argue that another term, simulation, would serve the authors’ inquiries better. It moves the question of how “present” a mediated object is out of the head of the individual and finds it instead in the object, its affordances, and the social surround.
I began my dissection of “presence” by trying to come up with a medium which had the least presence possible. I settled on the telegraph. It conveys a message which must be even more attentively decoded than written text in order to have an impact on the person on the receiving end of the line.
So does a telegraph message give the receiver a sense of “presence?” Well, certainly it consists of audio and visual stimuli, which the authors allow are part (though a small part) of creating a sense of presence. The net effect on the recipient is, in fact, the presence of an idea about the sender and their meaning in the recipient’s mind.
But can we say that a person communicating through a telegraph is less present than a person communicating by audiovisual chat? Well, the recipient must mentally conjure up the missing aspects of what she would know in the “presence” of the sender in order to make sense of the message; also perhaps the sender’s tone of voice, facial expression, etc. (Possibly why we apparently read the intent of about 50% of email messages wrong, as a recent study suggested; we have a lot of gaps to fill in.) Does it give the recipient a sense of being someplace else? If the recipient has conjured those additional factors, yes. There’s no guarantee that the recipient will not imagine those additional factors to the point at which the telegraph message seems as auditorily and visually vivid as they would be in an AV chat. There’s also no guarantee the recipient would not tune out elements of an AV chat, focusing only on the same idea which could have been communicated through the telegraph.
The sender’s physical person can be equally far away in both cases, and ultimately distance does not matter. The receiver of an AV chat message gets more information about the sender — some of their body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, etc. — but what they perceive, ultimately, is still not the presence of the original. They perceive the sender’s metaphorical presence, their sound and image encoded into ones, zeros, electrical impulses, reassembled at the other end of the line. The person is no more present for being represented in a wider range of media. Their mood and speech are simulated more accurately, but they are still not interchangeable with the original human presence or speech.
I suggest, then, that we can talk about a greater or lesser simulation of presence through electronic media, not greater or lesser presence itself. Like I said, this moves the measurement of presence away from its impact on individual minds and takes as its locus instead the social consensus about those impacts, be that through agreement on standards for empirical measurement or through description of interpersonally shared meanings about presence. This analysis also sits more comfortably with Fontaine’s desire to speak of the “causes of a sense of presence,” namely the affordances of a medium, lack of distractions, degree of control, etc. Simulation is the sum of these causes, rather than the sum of subjects’ perceptions.
* * *
I’m probably just irritated by a minor semantic quibble here; more often than not Fontaine does refer to augmenting a “sense of presence” rather than augmenting “presence” itself, and when he just refers to “presence” it appears to be mere sloppy shorthand. But I think it’s vital to say “a simulated sense of presence” to keep in mind the metaphorical nature of “telepresence,” especially as we work with young children. If we do not, I fear we may end up serving only a narrow spectrum of human needs and further exacerbating existing social problems.
Leaving the semantics behind, we can now pose the question of how to “nurture presence” in a slightly different way: What elements of a situation must be simulated in order to give the user a sense that they are present in that situation?
This is a great question to ask within the domain of education. Instruction should be a process of shaping the environment to draw learners’ attention to important details, so that in the chaos of the greater world they can later perceive salient patterns. It is thus an iterated process of elimination: gauging and adapting the ideal set of cues to best get a point across to the learner. (Trying to ensure that the specific point you’re trying to make is kept intact in the learner’s head has lately seemed to me like a form of coercion; especially when the lesson taught is about the best way to live one’s life, who are we to insist on our correctness in such a diverse world? I’ll put this worry aside for the moment, though, as I think it can temporarily be quelled by a desire for interpersonal harmony at least at the familial level.) It has been a process of such selective attention in many learning contexts across cultures, from agrarian people separating out qualities of plants, soils, animals, and seasons to teach their offspring the optimal means of cultivating food, to professors of medicine pointing out counterintuitive symptom patterns in medical cases, to kindergarten teachers reinforcing the differences in line between the letter M and the letter N.
But in the rest of the world, and even kinds of instruction which are liminal and not explicitly or solely educational, there are more troubling questions to ask about what elements of a situation should be simulated.
The motor driving technology now is a desire for more and more accurate simulations of the things we can perceive with our own senses. Each new video game console guarantees more lifelike movement of hair, rain, and grasses; the Internet tends ever more towards the visual and auditory, not to mention the sensations of teledildonics. I was told by an acquaintance at GDC this year that the Pentagon, taking cues from Star Trek, has developed a Holodeck. She swore that while in it, she saw the simulator create a door which was indistinguishable to her from the real thing when she opened it.
It is conceivable that within our lifetimes our technologies will achieve a near-immersive simulation of presence. One which might convince us, for example, that even though our bodies are physically lying immobile on tables in a cold, dark, low-ceilinged room in the basement of Thorndike, we are actually engaging in a vigorous game of volleyball on a pebbly beach in Fiji, with the sun beating down on our shoulders and the breeze riffling our hair.
Sounds great, sign me up, right? The basement of Thorndike is, in my scientific opinion, really fuckin’ dank. If all of us could live less difficult, more fulfilling lives mediated 24/7 by technology, lives made more equal by a liberation from material resources, wouldn’t it benefit humanity to do so? And if we have such technology at our command, and if adults regularly use it, shouldn’t children perhaps receive their instruction fully immersed from a young age so as to prepare them adequately for a productive life?
I’m not sure. As I’ve said elsewhere:
Historically, we haven’t done a great job of managing human sensation. We’ve managed the tastiness and attractiveness of food with alar, DDT, BHT, MSG, and red number five, and look where that got us. We tried to take away the pain of pregnancy with thalidomide, other pains with morphine. We tried to solve schizophrenia with electric shocks. Then there’s been findings about the effects of exposure to natural light on depression.
I think about babies — human babies, condor babies, monkey babies, horse babies — and what we know about the sensations they need for healthy growth. How human babies which are not held or cuddled will generally experience higher stress throughout their lives. How condor and other bird babies will not imprint on others of their species if fed by human hands. How monkey babies sleep better even with the simulated sound and vibration of a beating heart nearby. How mares will not nurse orphaned foals unless someone rubs them down with the same herb or perfume, so that the foal smells like it belongs to them.
I don’t think we have anywhere near enough knowledge of how much sensory s(t)imulation is enough for a nourishing experience. I have my suspicions that Western empirical ways of knowing, with their obsessive attention to measurable visual, auditory, abstract, and verbal cues, are dangerously ignorant of what’s really important to leading a good human life. I have this suspicion my sister Sylvie is right when she insists she doesn’t ever want a desk job because of the physical strain, and my sister Ariel may be right to avoid working indoors at all.
Should we continue eliding simulated presence as if it is just the same as real presence, we are at risk of losing an understanding of why it is not enough to sustain us.
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