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G. Riva, M.T. Anguera, B.K. Wiederhold and F. Mantovani (Eds.)
From Communication to Presence: Cognition, Emotions and Culture towards the
Ultimate Communicative Experience. Festschrift in honor of Luigi Anolli
IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2006, (c) All rights reserved - http://www.emergingcommunication.com
“An illusion of nonmediation occurs when a person fails to perceive or acknowledge
the existence of a medium in his/her communication environment and responds as
he/she would if the medium were not there.... Presence in this view can not occur
unless a person is using a medium.”
(online: http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol3/issue2/lombard.html).
Are these positions so far? According to Searle the answer maybe no. For this author
[116], an action is “a causal and Intentional transaction between mind and the world”
(p. 88). Specifically, any action is composed of two parts: an intention, and a
movement. When the action is premeditated, it is caused by a “prior intention”: an
intention to act formed in advance of the action itself.
However, in most everyday actions there is not a prior intention. These actions are
caused by an “intention-in-action”: an intention not formed in advance of the action.
The basic intentional content of the intention-in-action is self-referential causality: its
success or satisfaction can come about only if it (and not some other force) is the
cause of the movement whose mental component it is. In short, intentions-in-action
drive the movement prereflexively, without the need of a prior intention.
This is possible because, as suggested by the Common Coding Theory, actions are
coded in terms of the perceivable effects they should generate. More in detail, when
an effect is intended (intention-is-action), the movement that produces this effect as
perceptual input is automatically activated, because actions and their effects are
stored in a common representational domain [44].
This is the typical case of synchronous mediated communication when the user
masters the medium: the fingers of an expert chatter or the hands of a Doom III
cooperative player are driven by intentions-in-action. Following Heidegger [1], the
medium is “ready-to-hand”. Only when there is a breakdown, a problem - the
keyboard is no more responsive or the screen disappears - the user needs to plan a
new action (prior-intention) to solve the problem.
For Lombard and Ditton the Doom cooperative players are present in the game “if
this does not draw attention to itself reminding them that they are having a mediated
experience”. For us, the players are present in the virtual environment if they are able
to drive successfully and prereflexively their interaction. If we substitute in our
definition of presence the word “intention” with the one “intention-in-action” we
have an almost perfect match with the Lombard and Ditton’s position: the non
mediated (prereflexive) perception of successful intentions-in action. The main
difference is that this definition works for experiences not related to media, too.
To make this concept clearer two examples may help. A stroke patient with a left
hemiplegia is no more “present” in the left part of his body: using his left hand he is
not able to translate an intention-in-action in a purposeful behavior.
But it is not only, or not mainly, the body to be not “present” - or not “ready-to-
hand” - to the self. I’m in a restaurant for a formal dinner with my boss and some
colleagues, but I don’t know how to directly use (intention-in-action) the many
different strange forks I have around my dish. In this situation I’m physically there,
but the lack of knowledge puts me outside, at least partially, from the social and
cultural space of the “formal dinner”. The result is a reduced presence and a
limitation in my agency: I don’t use the forks to avoid mistakes. These examples
show clearly how both physical boundaries (body, wall, obstacles, etc.) and social