Social Presence

The concept of social presence was from the seminal work of Short, Williams, and Christie in1976. Social presence refers to the “degree of salience of the other person in the interaction and the consequent salience of the interpersonal relationships...”

1.Gunawardena,C.N.(1995).Social Presence Theory and Implications for Interaction and Collaborative Learning in Computer Conferences
Social presence is considered as a quality of the medium itself and hypothesize that communications media vary in their degree of social presence, and that these variations are important in determining the way individuals interact. The capacity of the medium to transmit information about facial expression, direction of looking, posture, dress and nonverbal cues, all contribute to the degree of social presence of a communications medium. My question is whether users’perceptions of media alter their behavior or the capability of the medium alter users’behavior?

2.Rettie,R. Connectedness, Awareness and Social Presence.
Christiansen and Maglaughlin (2003) classify four types of awareness: workplace awareness, which is knowledge of tasks within the virtual environment, availability awareness, which relates to the availability of people and objects, group awareness, which promotes the feeling of belonging to a group, and contextual awareness, which includes physical, social and mental context. Rettie states that extent of awareness is larger than the extent of social presence. I feel that awareness and social presence are interwoven. What do you think the relationship between awareness and social presence?