Cover not available
Article published In:
Pragmatics and Society
Vol. 9:2 (2018) ► pp.274–296

Breathing life into social presence

The case of texting between friends

| University of Southern Denmark
| University of Southern Denmark
Whilst many studies focus on human-to-media interactions, this paper turns to how a multimodal medium contributes to human-to-human interaction. By bringing together both radical embodied cognitive science (Chemero 2009) and dialogism (Linell 2009), the paper develops an anti-representationalist approach to the concept of social presence. We use an exploratory study of close friendships that maintain their interaction through the use of the mobile instant messaging service WhatsApp. In so doing, we describe texting as language-activity where people engage with each other by using resources from body, environment, and brain. Our work represents a major departure from previous studies of mobile interaction in adopting an embodied view of language and cognition. By so doing, we show how parties create anticipatory routines that enable them to ‘hear’ and ‘see’ their interlocutor. The paper’s main contribution is to draw attention to this kind of heightened social presence that we choose to call “co-imagining”.
Keywords: social presence, radical embodied cognitive science, distributed language, dialogism, mobile communication, interworld, co-imagining, texting
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1Reaching out for social presence
    • 2.2Language in a socially embodied interworld
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Data collection
    • 3.2Participants
    • 3.3Measures
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Texting in a shared environment
    • 4.2Bringing forth a Pre-pivot
    • 4.3Texting and the living other
    • 4.4Hearing voices
  • 5.Social-embodied interworld – past to presence
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
Published online: 28 June 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.15067.fes
References (55)
Bibliography
Aharony, Noa, and Tali Gazit. 2016. “The importance of the WhatsApp family group: an exploratory analysis.” Aslib Journal of Information Management 68 (2): 174–192. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Androutsopoulos, Jannis. 2008. “Potentials and limitations of discourse-centred online ethnography.” Language@ internet 5.8.Google Scholar
Biocca, Frank, Chad Harms, and Judee K. Burgoon. 2003. “Toward a more robust theory and measure of social presence: Review and suggested criteria.” Presence 12 (5): 456–480. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chemero, Anthony. 2009. Radical embodied cognitive science. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2016. “Sensorimotor empathy” Journal of Consciousness Studies 23 (5–6): 138–152.Google Scholar
Cowley, Stephen J. 1994. “Conversational functions of rhythmical patterning: a behavioural perspective. ” Language and Communication 141: 353–376. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1997. “Conversation, co-ordination and vertebrate communication” Semiotica 115 (1): 27–52.Google Scholar
Cowley, Stephen. J. (Ed.). 2011. Distributed language. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cowley, Stephen J. 2014. “Linguistic embodiment and verbal constraints: human cognition and the scales of time.” Frontiers in Psychology 51, 1085. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cowley, Stephen J., and Matthew I. Harvey. 2016. “The illusion of common ground.” New Ideas in Psychology 421: 56–63 DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cowley, Stephen, and Luarina Nash. 2013. “Language, interactivity and solution probing: repetition without repetition.” Adaptive Behavior 21(3): 187–198. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dewey, John. 1896. “The reflex arc concept in psychology.” Psychological Review 3 (4): 357–70. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fester, Marie-Theres. 2015. More than Social Interaction: Case Studies of Texting in an Interworld. Unpublished Masters Thesis, Odense: University of Southern Denmark.Google Scholar
Fuchs, Susanne, Egor Savin, Uwe D. Reichel, Cornelia Ebert, and Manfred Krifka. 2017. “Letter replication as prosodic amplification in social media” Paper presented at Phonetics and Phonology in German speaking areas, Berlin.
Garrison, Randy D., Terry Anderson, and Walter Archer. 2000. “Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education” The Internet and Higher Education 2 (2–3): 87–105.Google Scholar
Gibson, James J. 1979. The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving. 1983. “The interaction order.” American Sociological Review 48 (1): 1–17. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gooch, Daniel, and Leon Watts. 2014. “Social Presence and the void in distant relationships: How do people use communication technologies to turn absence into fondness of the heart, rather than drifting out of mind?” AI & Society, 29 (4): 507–519. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gunawardena, Charlotte N. 1995. “Social presence theory and implications for interaction and collaborative learning in computer conferences” International Journal of Educational Telecommunications 1(2/3): 147–166.Google Scholar
Harrison, Marissa A., and Angela L. Gilmore. 2012. “U txt WHEN? College students’ social contexts of text messaging.” The Social Science Journal 49 (4): 513–518. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heft, Harry. 2001. Ecological psychology in context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the legacy of William James’s radical empiricism. Mahwah, N. J.: Lawrence Erlbaum. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heritage, John. 1998. “Oh-prefaced responses to inquiry” Language in Society 27 (3): 291–334. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hollan, James, Edwin Hutchins, and David Kirsh. 2000. “Distributed cognition: toward a new foundation for human-computer interaction research.” ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) 7 (2): 174–196. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jensen, Thomas W. 2014. “Emotion in languaging: languaging as affective, adaptive, and flexible behavior in social interaction” Frontiers in Psychology 51: 720. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kravchenko, Alexander V. 2007. “Essential properties of language, or, why language is not a code”. Language Sciences 29 (5): 650–71. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kreijns, Karel, Frederik van Acker, Marjan Vermeulen, and Hans van Buuren. 2014. ”Community of Inquiry: social presence revisited” E-Learning and Digital Media 11 (1): 5–18. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kuru, Ozan, Joseph Bayer, Josh Pazek, and Scott W. Campbell. 2017. “Understanding and measuring mobile Facebook use: Who, why, and how?” Mobile Media & Communication 5 (1): 102–120. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
König, Katharina. 2015. “Dialogkonstitution und Sequenzmuster in der SMS-und WhatsApp-Kommunikation“. Travaux neuchâtelois de linguistique 631: 1–19.Google Scholar
Laursen, Ditte. 2006. Det mobile samtalerum: Unges kommunikations-og samværsformer via mobiltelefonen. [Mobile spaces of communication: Modes of mobile phone communication among teenagers]” Unpublished Ph.D Dissertation, Odense: University of Southern Denmark.Google Scholar
Linell, Per. 2009. Rethinking language, mind, and world dialogically: Interactional and contextual theories of human sense-making. Charlotte, N. C.: Information Age Publishing.Google Scholar
Love, Nigel. 2004. “Cognition and the Language Myth.” Language Sciences 26 (6): 525–544. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lowenthal, Patrick R. 2009. “Social presence” In Encyclopedia of Distance Learning (2nd ed.) ed. by Patricia Rogers, Gary Berg, Judith Boettcher, Carole Howard, Lorraine Justice, and Karen Schenk, 1900–1906. Hershey, Penna. and London: Information Science Reference DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Maturana, Humberto. 1978. “Biology of language: The epistemology of reality” In Psychology and Biology of Language and Thought: Essays in Honor of Eric Linneberg, ed. by George A. Miller & Elizabeth Linneberg, 27–63. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Noë, Alva. 2004. Action in perception. Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press.Google Scholar
. 2012. Varieties of presence. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
O’Regan, J. Kevin, and Alva Noë. 2001. “A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (5): 939–73. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pedersen, Sarah B. 2015. The cognitive ecology of human errors in emergency medicine. An interactvity-based approach. Unpublished Ph.D Dissertation, Odense: University of Southern Denmark.Google Scholar
Port, Robert F. 2010. “Rich memory and distributed phonology” Language Sciences 32 (1): 43–55. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rice, Ronald E., and Gail Love. 1987. “Electronic emotion socioemotional content in a computer-mediated communication network.” Communication Research 14 (1): 85–108. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rommetveit, Ragnar. 2003. “On the role of “a psychology of the second person” in studies of meaning, language, and mind.” Mind, Culture, and Activity 101: 205–218. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson. 1974. “A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation.” Language 50 (4): 696–735. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 2015. “Conversational Interaction The Embodiment of Human Sociality.” In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis (2nd ed.), ed. by Deborah Tannen, Heidi E. Hamilton, and Deborah Schiffrin, 346–366. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Short, John, Ederyn Williams, and Bruce Christie. 1976. The social psychology of telecommunications. London & New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. 1995. Relevance: Communication & Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Steffensen, Sune V. 2013. “Human Interactivity: Problem-Solving, Solution-Probing and Verbal Patterns in the Wild” In Cognition beyond the brain: Computation, Interactivity and Human Artifice, ed. by Stephen J. Cowley and Frédéric Vallée-Tourangeau, 195–221. London: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Steffensen, Sune V., and Sarah Bro Pedersen. 2014. “Temporal dynamics in human interaction.” Cybernetics & Human Knowing 21 (1–2): 80–97.Google Scholar
Tagg, Caroline. 2016. “Heteroglossia in text‐messaging: Performing identity and negotiating relationships in a digital space.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 20(1): 59–85. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tagg, Caroline, Rachel Hu, Agnieszka Lyons, and James Simpson. 2016. “Heritage and social media in superdiverse cities: personalised, networked and multimodal.” Working Papers in Translanguaging and Translation (WP17). ([URL])
Thibault, Paul J. 2011. “First-order languaging dynamics and second-order language: the distributed language view” Ecological Psychology 23 (3): 210–245. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tu, Chih-Hsiung, Marina McIsaac, Laura Sujo-Montes, and Shadow Armfield. 2012. “Is there a mobile social presence?” Educational Media International 49 (4): 247–261. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vilhauer, Ruvanee. P. 2016. “Inner reading voices: An overlooked form of inner speech“. Psychosis 8(1), 37–47. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Walther, Joseph B. 1992. “Interpersonal effects in computer-mediated interaction a relational perspective”. Communication Research 19 (1): 52–90. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1996. “Computer-mediated communication impersonal, interpersonal, and hyperpersonal interaction”. Communication Research 23 (1): 3–43. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2007. “Selective self-presentation in computer-mediated communication: Hyperpersonal dimensions of technology, language, and cognition”. Computers in Human Behavior 23 (5): 2538–2557. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Warren, William H. 2006. “The dynamics of perception and action.” Psychological Review 113 (2): 358–89. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

Kolmogorova, A. V., S. A. Lyamzina & I. B. Gimazdinov
2023. Semiotically Adaptive Computer-Mediated Speech Therapy with Patients in Aphasia in the Light of Ecolinguistics. SibScript 25:1 ► pp. 102 ff. DOI logo
Cowley, Stephen J. & Anton Markoš
2019. Evolution, lineages and human language. Language Sciences 71 ► pp. 8 ff. DOI logo
Wu, Manfred Man-fat
2019. Second Language Reading from an Hegelian Perspective. Interchange 50:3 ► pp. 339 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 15 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.