Rights statement: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Distance Education on 10/05/2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/01587919.2017.1322456
Accepted author manuscript, 417 KB, PDF document
Available under license: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Social presence reconsidered
T2 - moving beyond, going back, or killing social presence
AU - Oztok, Murat
AU - Kehrwald, Ben
N1 - This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Distance Education on 10/05/2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/01587919.2017.1322456
PY - 2017/7
Y1 - 2017/7
N2 - Online education research has long employed the concept of social presence to study interactionsin technologically-mediated spaces. Yet, a precise shared definition of social presence does notexist. There is a lack of clarity around this term and conflation with other phenomena. Asresearchers and practitioners striving for clarity, do we need such a heavily burdened and deeplyambiguous term? To support the development of clarity and provide a way forward with currentconversations about social presence, this article traces how the concept of social presence hasbeen developed and appropriated in the online and distance education literature. We do notsimply focus on the historical trajectory of the concept but discuss how it is utilized to address thegrowing complexities of social interactions in parallel to the increasing affordances of newtechnologies. Our aim is to illustrate that social presence is over extended and widely stretched tocorrespond with the possibilities of socialization and that it has long lost its depth and breadth,and thus, its analytical strength. We argue that we should focus more on the relative salience ofinterpersonal relationships if we are to understand the relational aspects of being online.
AB - Online education research has long employed the concept of social presence to study interactionsin technologically-mediated spaces. Yet, a precise shared definition of social presence does notexist. There is a lack of clarity around this term and conflation with other phenomena. Asresearchers and practitioners striving for clarity, do we need such a heavily burdened and deeplyambiguous term? To support the development of clarity and provide a way forward with currentconversations about social presence, this article traces how the concept of social presence hasbeen developed and appropriated in the online and distance education literature. We do notsimply focus on the historical trajectory of the concept but discuss how it is utilized to address thegrowing complexities of social interactions in parallel to the increasing affordances of newtechnologies. Our aim is to illustrate that social presence is over extended and widely stretched tocorrespond with the possibilities of socialization and that it has long lost its depth and breadth,and thus, its analytical strength. We argue that we should focus more on the relative salience ofinterpersonal relationships if we are to understand the relational aspects of being online.
KW - Social presence
KW - online education
KW - online communication
KW - computer-mediated communication
KW - being online
U2 - 10.1080/01587919.2017.1322456
DO - 10.1080/01587919.2017.1322456
M3 - Journal article
VL - 38
SP - 259
EP - 266
JO - Distance Education
JF - Distance Education
SN - 0158-7919
IS - 2
ER -