Presence (telepresence) - Presence in Popular Culture

Presence in Popular Culture

• Sheridan's view of presence earned its first pop culture reference in 1984 with William Gibson’s pre-World Wide Web science fiction novel "Neuromancer", which tells the story of a cyberpunk cowboy of sorts who accesses a virtual world to hack into organizations.

• Joshua Meyrowitz's 1986 "No Sense of Place" discusses the impact of electronic media on social behavior. The novel discusses how social situations are transformed by media. Media, he claims, can change one's 'sense of place,'by mixing traditionally private versus public behaviors - or back-stage and front-stage behaviors, respectively, as coined by Erving Goffman. Meyrowitz suggests that television alone will transform the practice of front-stage and back-stage behaviors, as television would provide increased information to different groups who may physically not have access to specific communities but through media consumption are able to determine a mental place within the program. He references Marshall McLuhan's concept that 'the medium is the message,' and that media provide individuals with access to information. With new and changing media, Meyrowitz says that the patterns of information and shifting accesses to information change social settings, and help do determine a sense of place and behavior. With the logic that behavior is connected to information flow, Meyrowitz states that front- and back-stage behaviors are blurred and may be impossible to untangle.