FORUM
When “Real” Seems Mediated: Inverse Presence
Abstract
As our lives become increasingly dominated by mediated
experiences, presence scholars have noted that an increasing number of these mediated experiences evoke (tele)presence, perceptions that ignore or misconstrue the role
of the medium in the experience. In this paper we explore
an interesting countertrend that seems to be occurring as
well. In a variety of contexts, people are experiencing not
an illusion that a mediated experience is in fact nonmediated, but the illusion that a nonmediated “real” experience
is mediated. Drawing on news reports and an online survey, we identify 3 categories of this “illusion of mediation”:
positive (when people perceive natural beauty as mediated), negative (when people perceive a disaster, crime, or
other tragedy such as the events of September 11, 2001, as
mediated), and unusual (when close connections between
people’s “real life” activities and mediated experiences lead
them to confuse the former with the latter). We label this
phenomenon inverse presence and consider its place and
value in a comprehensive theory of presence, its possible
antecedents and consequences, and what it suggests about
the nature of our lives in the 21st century.
“We kept waiting for Arnold [Schwarzenegger] to
march out of the ruins and watch the end credits roll.”
Anonymous journalist at the World Trade Center in
New York City, September 11, 2001. (Author, personal
communication, September 11, 2001)
ble. I think, ‘Oh, my God, am I really here?’ It’s a great
sensation. It’s like a movie.”
Florida’s First Lady Columba Bush, on her experience
in the mansion. (Barrs & Cabrera, 2002)
“And it’s true we are immune, when fact is fiction
and TV reality. . .”
Lyrics from “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” by the rock band
U2. (1982, track 1).
Figure 1. Robert Weber, The New Yorker, February 2, 1998.
© The New Yorker Collection 1998 Robert Weber from
cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.
1
“I couldn’t believe my eyes. I thought I was
watching a movie.”
Eva Greenwood, who was watching TV in her Philadelphia apartment as a man set another apartment in her
building on fire, then plunged to his death. She saw the
actual fall through her own window. (Kasuba, 2003)
“Sometimes at night when I go upstairs in the
governor’s mansion, it’s so romantic. It’s really incrediPresence, Vol. 14, No. 4, August 2005, 492–500
©
2005 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
492 PRESENCE: VOLUME 14, NUMBER 4
Introduction
As media scholars and pundits frequently note,
our lives are increasingly dominated by mediated experi-
Lydia Reeves Timmins*
Matthew Lombard
Department of Broadcasting, Telecommunications, and Mass
Media
Temple University
Philadelphia, PA 19122 USA
*Correspondence to lydiat@temple.edu
Timmins and Lombard 493
ences—traditional media including the telephone, radio,
television, film, newspapers, and magazines have been
joined by e-mail, instant messaging, chat rooms, cell
phones, video games, HDTV, the Web, simulator
amusement rides, and, soon, virtual reality. As presence
scholars have noted, an increasing number of these mediated experiences evoke (tele)presence, perceptions
that ignore or misconstrue the role of the medium in
the experience, perceptions that constitute an “illusion
of nonmediation” (Lombard & Ditton, 1997).
But as the quotations above suggest, an interesting
countertrend seems to be occurring as well. In a variety
of contexts, people are experiencing not an illusion that
a mediated experience is in fact nonmediated, but the
illusion that a nonmediated, “real” experience is mediated. In this paper we discuss this phenomenon, which
we label inverse presence, and consider its place and value
in a comprehensive theory of presence, its possible antecedents and consequences, and what it suggests about
the nature of our lives in the 21st century.
2
Why Study Inverse Presence?
Presence theory and research have evolved from
simple unidimensional definitions to sophisticated multidimensional ones, and from an intense focus on defining the core concept of presence to understanding its
relationship to other important and related concepts
and phenomena (e.g., immersion, involvement, flow,
empathy, and consciousness; Lombard & Bracken,
2003). A better understanding of these concepts and
phenomena helps us refine our theories regarding presence itself, and inverse presence represents another of
these key phenomena.
As communication and computer technologies advance we will continue to have not only more frequent
mediated experiences but more frequent presence experiences. There’s no reason the increasingly common
confusion regarding what is “virtual” (i.e., mediated by
technology) and “real” (i.e., nonmediated) should operate in only one direction. Confusions in which nonmediated experiences are mistaken for mediated ones
are increasingly likely and so also merit scholarly attention.
One of the key reasons presence is the subject of
study concerns its potential to affect the emotions,
judgment, learning, task performance, and so forth, of
those who experience it. Ironically, another potential
effect of having frequent presence experiences may be a
susceptibility to experience additional confusions regarding what is “real” and not, including inverse
presence. The possibility that presence makes inverse
presence more likely certainly merits study, and has
important implications (discussed below) for the role
of technology in our lives.
3
Explicating Inverse Presence
Chaffee (1991) notes that a good way to define
and understand a concept is to identify examples of the
phenomenon the concept is thought to represent.
Having informally gathered examples from media
reports and personal experiences, in which comments
such as “It felt like a movie” were common, we adopted
a more comprehensive approach by conducting several
searches using Google News (http://news.google.
com/). Over a period of one year we used the search
terms “like a movie,” “like a picture,” and “like a television” to identify media reports that might describe situations in which people had experienced the inverse of
(tele)presence. We also conducted a survey on the
World Wide Web, asking respondents if they ever had
an experience during which they felt they were part of a
mediated environment.1
We examined 376 results from seven searches conducted between February 2003 and January 2004, and
divided them into categories. We first excluded stories
1
The specific question wording was, “Have you ever felt like you
were living inside or actually experiencing a movie or TV show (or
another medium such as a video game) instead of the real world? If so,
please describe your experience (including when it happened, how it
felt, etc.) in the space below.” An invitation to complete the survey
along with the URL was distributed to a convenience sample via university listservs; 37 relevant responses were obtained. The goal was not
to assess the prevalence of inverse-presence experiences but to identify
examples of the phenomenon.
494 PRESENCE: VOLUME 14, NUMBER 4
that bore no relation to presence or inverse presence,
including those that mentioned film preferences (e.g.,
“I like a movie that features action” as part of a film review), contained references to specific technology (e.g.,
“like a movie camera” to describe a consumer electronics product), and compared one medium to another
(e.g., identifying satellite radio as being “like a movie
without pictures”). Another group of stories featured
the use of media experiences only as a reference point or
shorthand way to communicate information (e.g., a
Chicago reporter’s reference to the Blackhawks sports
team’s season as being “like a movie that was intended
to be a drama but turns out to be so bad it’s funny”
(Want a good. . ., 2003).
The remaining 97 stories in the search results fell into
three categories of reports of people perceiving nonmediated experiences as mediated ones:
1. Positive—stories in which people experience natural beauty and perceive it as a picture, nature documentary, or other mediated experience (14%;
n ⫽ 14).
2. Negative—stories in which people are involved in
a disaster, crime, or other tragedy and experience
it as if it were mediated; many examples featured
quotes from victims saying their experience
seemed “like a movie” (48%; n ⫽ 46).
3. Unusual—stories in which close connections between people’s “real life” activities and mediated
experiences lead them to confuse the two. Examples include actors or people in situations that are
fantastic (38%; n ⫽ 37).
In the following we discuss and provide examples of
some of the stories (and survey responses) in each of
these inverse-presence categories.
In Category 1, the person experiencing inverse presence experiences nonmediated beauty in nature as if it
were mediated. A merchant marine says, “The Middle
East is like a picture in National Geographic come to
life” (Midland man travels. . ., 2003). A columnist describes a ride on a train through Ohio’s Cuyahoga Valley, relating how “a landscape of mythical perfection
unreels like a movie before my hungry eyes” (Bloom,
2003). A respondent to the Web survey describes his
experience while hiking: “The view from [the] mountaintop is like something you’d only see in a movie. . .
picture-perfect.” While in some cases the comparison
may simply be a convenient way to communicate a familiar experience to a listener or reader, in many stories
the nature of the experience is unambiguous. In Steiner
(2004), a hunter describes the first day of deer season as
she begins to walk the trails in search of a buck:
The trail angled up to a high country lake that reflected the rocky peak above, a picture perfect postcard. The trail continued climbing, and at one point
I could look down into the blue-green pool I had
passed. Other mountains now framed the scene, another picture postcard. I got to the top of the mountain and turned to look at what was on the other side,
more snow-capped mountains and wildflower-studded
meadows, more picture postcards. I had seen such
scenes on TV and in the movies, and in paintings and
photographs. Was it real this time or just another imitation? (pp. 45– 47)
In this and other cases the people having the real,
nonmediated experience define and describe it as a mediated experience. One reason this happens may be because the intensity and perfection of the natural beauty
make it seem like it must have been created rather than
naturally occurring. Most of us have seen paintings,
photos, or videos that feature perfect clouds in a brilliant blue sky. But when with our own eyes we see the
sky above us looking the same way, we associate it with,
and at some level experience it as, a mediated experience.
In the second category of inverse-presence examples,
tragic reality is experienced as a mediated, artificial experience, usually a movie. A witness to a tour bus crash
that injured 50 people says, “It looked like a movie set”
(Packer, 2003). The mother of a San Bernardino, California, man shot and killed by police says, “It’s not real.
It’s like something that happened in a movie and not to
me” (Schexnayder, 2003). A witness to a police shooting in Yonkers, New York, says, “It was like a video
game. He falls down and says ‘I’m shot, I’m shot’”
(David, 2003). A respondent to the Web survey recalls
the experience of being diagnosed with a bipolar disor-
Timmins and Lombard 495
der: “I felt like it wasn’t really happening. I felt like I
was on a talk show or in an E! True Hollywood story.”
In many cases when a community suffers a trauma,
such as a fire or explosion, eyewitnesses tell reporters
that the experience was like watching a movie. In Philadelphia in January 2003 (Kasuba, 2003), a man set fire
to his girlfriend’s apartment and then climbed from balcony to balcony in the high-rise building, setting other
fires until he fell to his death. Hundreds of residents of
that building, as well as people passing by on the street,
saw the drama unfold before their eyes. The quote at
the beginning of this paper is just one of many similar
comments newspaper and broadcast journalists recorded
that day. The experience of seeing someone die in real
life is not a common one for most people. But in film
and television fiction it happens frequently. When people see such a shocking event in reality it seems logical
that they confuse it with their familiar mediated experiences.
The most dramatic context for this category of
inverse-presence examples is the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York. The first
author interviewed fellow journalists and members of
the public who witnessed the World Trade Center attacks firsthand when she covered the events for the
NBC television station WCAU in Philadelphia. She
heard more than one person make the Arnold Schwarzenegger comment at the beginning of this paper. Others commented that the scene looked like “a Spielberg
blockbuster.” A reporter on the scene that day wrote in
the New York Daily News, “The way people were running, it was like a scene out of ‘Godzilla.’” Another reporter said, “All I could think of was how much it was
like ‘The Blob,’ just this big mass coming at you”
(Goldiner, 2001). The first author remembers staring at
Manhattan’s skyline at 11 p.m. on September 11th and
thinking that there was no way the scene before her
could be real. Manhattan glowed not with the lights of
Broadway and skyscrapers, but with orange fire. With
the night sky so black and the fire so bright, she felt as if
she were in a movie theater watching the scene, not that
she was actually seeing a real event. Many members of
the journalistic corps discussed how if the real events
had been a summer movie, few would have believed it.
The first author also interviewed people who survived
the carnage in Manhattan. As they were brought into
the triage area, she was able to speak to those who
didn’t require medical treatment. The phrase they repeated was, “This can’t be real.” A woman who described seeing people jumping to their deaths compared
it to a horror movie she would never have chosen to
watch.
In the third category of inverse presence, people have
confusion concerning where mediated experience ends
and “real life” begins. Actors experience this “Reality
Show” phenomenon when they have the dual experience of playing a role that is duplicated in their offscreen life. Actor Bill Paxton appeared in a movie about
exploring the Titanic but he also did deep sea diving to
the wreck. “It was strange, because here I was doing
something in real life that I pretended to do in a film,”
Paxton said. “There were times when I was down there,
I thought (director) Jim (Cameron) was going to yell,
‘Cut!’ and we would go to lunch” (Cameron sails
back. . . , 2003). The almost seamless, even if momentary, confusion between diving for a movie role and diving “for real” makes this an example of an unusual and
perhaps extreme form of inverse presence. Actors and
other participants in mediated events, particularly those
that involve telling fictional stories, often must “become” another person, and in the process move back
and forth between (being present in) mediated and
nonmediated realities; the popular Method acting technique developed by Stanislavsky and Strasberg encourages actors to “live” a role (director John McGlynn
notes that “They’re not acting; they’re really there”;
Screen Actors Studio, 2003). It seems likely that this
makes them more susceptible to the illusions of both
presence and inverse presence. Actor Matt Dillon tells
the Philadelphia Inquirer, “I guess starting as an actor
at age 14, I always see the world as a movie” (Rea,
2003).
This susceptibility is unlikely limited to actors. Anyone can have a nonmediated experience that closely
mimics a familiar mediated one. A young soldier at boot
camp reflects on an intense experience he had as a raw
recruit: “Our CO dismissed us, we did an about-face
and everyone screamed ‘Ooh-rah!’ It was like a movie
496 PRESENCE: VOLUME 14, NUMBER 4
moment” (Military term causes. . . , 2003). Two of our
Web-survey respondents reported experiencing this type
of inverse presence. One describes a visit to Dallas,
Texas, and the grassy knoll made famous in President
Kennedy’s assassination. He explains that he had seen so
many movies and documentaries that when he actually
stood on the spot, “I felt like I was walking onto the set
of a TV show.” Another respondent remembers coming
out of high-presence movies and “for a few hours I was
not in my body at all, but in another plane in which I
hardly felt at all, or at least in a place where I could not
tell where my feelings ended and where the characters’
feelings began.”
4
A Definition
The phenomena revealed in the examples above
are clearly related to presence, and in many ways seem
to represent the reverse type of experience.
The explication of the presence concept by the International Society for Presence Research (2003) defines
presence, short for telepresence, as
A psychological state or subjective perception in
which even though part or all of an individual’s current experience is generated by and/or filtered
through human-made technology, part or all of the
individual’s perception fails to accurately acknowledge
the role of the technology in the experience. Except
in the most extreme cases, the individual can indicate
correctly that s/he is using the technology, but at
some level and to some degree, her/his perceptions
overlook that knowledge and objects, events, entities,
and environments are perceived as if the technology
was not involved in the experience.
The common element of the examples described
above can be stated, in contrast to this definition, as:
A psychological state or subjective perception in
which even though an individual’s current experience
is not generated by and/or filtered through humanmade technology, part or all of the individual’s perception fails to accurately acknowledge this. Except in
the most extreme cases, the individual can indicate
correctly that s/he is not using technology, but at
some level and to some degree, her/his perceptions
overlook that knowledge and objects, events, entities,
and environments are perceived as if the technology
was involved in the experience.
If (tele)presence is the illusion of nonmediation, then
inverse presence is the illusion of mediation. Two interrelated types of illusion of mediation can be identified,
one involving the form of experience and the other its
content. When an individual says something such as, “it
looked like a postcard” or “it felt like a movie,” they are
reporting similarities in the form of nonmediated and
mediated experiences, and confusion between the two.
When they suggest that the unfolding of events was
“like a movie” (i.e., scripted or artificial) they are pointing to similarities in (and confusion about) the content
of nonmediated and mediated experience. Ultimately,
when people experience presence they think (at some
level) that the mediated world is “real,” while when
they experience inverse presence, they think (at some
level) that reality is mediated. Inverse presence also
seems to frequently include the feeling that the experience is ephemeral and that there is a trigger somewhere
that will “turn off ” the movie or video game, at which
point the person will resume his or her real life. Lombard and Ditton (1997) define presence as “the perceptual illusion of non-mediation.” Therefore, inverse presence can be defined as the perceptual illusion of
mediation.2
5
A Theory of Inverse Presence
What causes inverse presence? The answer would
seem to lie with presence itself. Although it is likely in
part a function of our search strategy, the most common medium people mention when they describe in-
2
As Lombard and Ditton (1997) note, all experience is mediated
by our perceptual apparatus. The perceptual illusions of presence and
inverse presence refer to second-order mediation, or mediation by
human-made technology (International Society for Presence Research,
2003).
Timmins and Lombard 497
verse-presence experiences is film. And although presence has been identified in a wide range of media and is
thought to be most intensely experienced with sophisticated interactive simulations such as those generated in
virtual reality, the medium that in 2004 generates the
most frequent, intense experiences of presence among
the public is also film. The large-screen, high-resolution
images, high-fidelity and often multichannel sound, and
the darkened room of the movie theater, when combined with believable plot, dialogue, and acting, often
transport viewers into a movie’s world such that they
experience spatial and social presence. At the same time,
there are two characteristics of the nonmediated experiences that seem to evoke inverse presence: the experiences are compelling and idealized. And these are characteristics of movie experiences as well.
Many movies, and the experience of watching movies
in general, can reasonably be described as big, special,
dramatic, involving, engaging, powerful, intense, even
overwhelming—in short, good movies, at least, are
compelling. Movies also present not everyday reality but
a manufactured, idealized reality. With rare exceptions,
films focus on the peaks and valleys of life—not the dull
repetitive parts but the most unusual and interesting
events. And plots are devised and revised, scripts are
written and rewritten, scenes are recorded and rerecorded until every nuance is as the director envisions.
The result is a distilled, idealized reality, a sequence of
“perfect moments.” This sequence has a beginning,
middle, and end; viewers know that the event will be
“over” at some point. As with a TV program or VR, the
movie experience ends and real life reasserts its hold.
Most people then have experienced presence as they
visited compelling and idealized realities in the movie
theater. It seems logical to assume that when they have
an unusual, compelling, idealized (either positive or
negative) experience in their nonmediated life, they associate the nature of the experience with the perceptions
and emotions they’ve experienced in the movie theater.
They fall back on their memories, associations, and perceptions from familiar compelling and idealized movie
experiences to interpret what is happening. They feel
the sensations in nonmediated reality and at some level
associate them with, and perceive them as, a mediated
experience. The previous presence experience triggers
and accentuates the inverse-presence experience. The
limited duration of mediated experiences is transferred
to the new, nonmediated one as well—whether beauty
or tragedy, the person feels it is so unreal and unlikely
that it will suddenly end and “real life” will take over
again.
The range of events and experiences that can evoke
inverse presence is unclear, but as filmmaking and presentation (e.g., CGI and IMAX 3-D), virtual reality,
and simulation ride technologies evolve and become
more available to the public, the number and range of
presence experiences will likely increase, and the diversity of inverse-presence experiences should increase as
well.
A simple form of the more complex cognitive and
emotional phenomenon of inverse presence described
here involves the immediate perceptual aftereffects of
certain experiences mediated by technology. For example, in discussing research on the use of bifocal eyeglasses, Fitzpatrick (2004) notes that on first use,
“[t]here is a difference in what you perceive visually and
what your hand does when you go to reach for something.” After a time the brain adjusts to the new mediated reality (the world seen through the eyeglasses), but
when a subject removes the bifocals, the brain continues
to respond to the unmediated environment as if it were
still mediated, leading to the subject tripping or overreaching for objects. Similar perceptual aftereffects can
occur with virtual reality and other technologies. If you
stop using the bifocals or a simulator, for instance, you
continue to treat the nonmediated reality as you did
while you were wearing the glasses or were inside the
simulator. You may hold your head or walk in a certain
way that is not appropriate or useful outside the mediated situation. These aftereffects are immediate and
short-term as well as being more physiological, automatic, and universal than the examples above, but they
involve the same illusion of mediation. The other
inverse-presence examples are based on the cumulative
memories people have of mediated experiences.
Inverse presence as explicated here is also related to
other types of confusion between and among different
modes of experience. Most of us have had the odd ex-
498 PRESENCE: VOLUME 14, NUMBER 4
perience of not being able to remember whether an
event we recall actually occurred in our waking life or
only in a dream. Dream researcher Maurice MerleauPonty (1968) discusses the ways in which dreams inform waking reality:
Our waking relations with objects and others especially have an (unconscious) character as a matter of
principle; others are present to us in the way dreams
are and the way myths are, and this is enough to
question the cleavage between the real and the imaginary. (p. 48)
The effect, and likely the process, seems strikingly
similar to the examples of inverse presence above. One
news story quotes a Canadian lottery winner saying, “It
felt like a dream, like I might wake up at any moment”
(No great urge. . ., 2003). Again there’s more than just
a metaphor at work here; the person perceives a very
real nonmediated event as if it were mediated not by
technology but by their sleeping brain. As with other
inverse-presence examples, the words also describe an
ephemeral feeling, a sense that the real experience might
vanish like a dream does when we wake (or a movie
does when it ends).
French postmodern scholar Jean Baudrillard (1994)
theorizes about a mode of experience he calls hyper reality in which distinctions between reality and the unreality of images (simulations) and signs (simulacra) are
blurred. He suggests people create the reality they experience by using idealized models that have no connection to reality. “Unreality no longer resides in the
dream or fantasy, or in the beyond, but in the real’s hallucinatory resemblance to itself ” (Baudrillard, 1976, italics in original). Theorist Paul Virilio prefers the term
substitution to simulation: “[N]ew technologies are substituting a virtual reality for an actual reality. . . . We are
entering a world where there won’t be one but two realities. . . . One day the virtual world might win over the
real world” (Wilson, 1994). The increasingly sophisticated simulations and substitutions of hyperreality and
virtual reality can reasonably be expected to lead to confusions similar to both presence and inverse presence as
described here.
6
Potential Effects of Inverse Presence
As with most phenomena, inverse presence has the
potential for both positive and negative effects. Unfortunately, unlike presence itself, the potential for the latter seems to outweigh the former.
One positive effect of inverse presence may be its
function as a defense mechanism. Consumers of media
experiences can become desensitized or inured to violence or disaster when they see many portrayals of such
events. So if such a person is involved in a disaster in
real life, he or she may find the experience more familiar
and less threatening, and may recover more quickly.
The inverse-presence experience allows the person to
pretend, at least at some level, that the event is not real
and not “really” happening; because the event seems
like a mediated experience that is therefore not real, it
can serve to distance the person from, and help him or
her cope with, the unpleasant reality.
Despite this potential benefit, inverse presence can lead
to serious negative effects. Fortunately rare, the perception
that the nonmediated world one experiences is in fact mediated (and so not real) has led to tragically destructive
behavior. The two teenagers who killed their classmates at
Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado in 1999
left a video in which they indicated they were “following a
script they seem to have learned through the entertainment media—particularly from ultra-violent films and
video games” (Provenzo, 2000). Of course we can’t know
exactly how they felt as they killed their fellow students
and teachers, but speculation about the way they used media suggests that they may have experienced inverse presence. The “Matrix killers” offered as a defense that they
believed they were living in the film’s virtual reality and
that therefore shooting people didn’t really mean they
were killing them (Jackman, 2003).
In much less severe but probably more common
forms, inverse presence may lead to disappointments
and missed opportunities as reality that seems mediated
turns out not to be as compelling and/or idealized as
high-presence mediated experiences. For example, intense, high-presence experiences of media portrayals of
romance may lead women or men to approach romantic
situations in their real life as if they were media portray-
Timmins and Lombard 499
als, with the unrealistic expectations of a media-derived
script running in their heads. When a person perceives
reality at some level as mediated, he or she is likely to
believe that, as in most mediated portrayals, the “story”
will all work out right in the end. Arnold Schwarzenegger will stride through the city and kill the bad guys (or
rescue the government). The movielike lifestyle of parties and fairy-tale romance at the governor’s mansion
will continue “forever” for the “heroine” of the story. A
person who assumes that everything will work out may
fail to take the actions required to ensure that they do.
7
Studying Inverse Presence
The consideration of inverse presence here is exploratory and suggests the need for more systematic
research. Unfortunately, even compared to presence
itself the nature of inverse presence makes it difficult to
study. In addition to in-depth interviewing of those
who report having experienced inverse presence at some
point in their lives, researchers might create an environment in which “reality” bears the form and/or content
of a compelling and idealized mediated experience and
then study observers’ reactions. Such an experiment
would require that participants not be told about the
study or their participation in it in advance. For example, a dramatic chase (including running up escalators
and jumping from one floor to another) or a dramatic
conversation or argument between members of an attractive “movie star” couple could be staged at a shopping mall or other public space and interviews conducted with observers to see whether and how they
experienced inverse presence.
Rather than staging an experience, researchers might
take advantage of one that already exists. Researchers
could find a location of natural beauty, or one well known
from common mediated experiences (such as the site of
the Kennedy assassination) and interview passersby about
their reactions to the scene. A less pleasant prospect would
be to wait for a tragic event to take place and shortly thereafter talk to the people who saw it. A final possibility
would be to provide study participants with a compelling
mediated experience (e.g., an IMAX movie set in a distinc-
tive or exotic location) and then after a suitable interval
expose them to the same or a similar experience (e.g., take
them to the location or set the film producers used) and
interview them to see whether and how the latter experience evoked inverse presence.
8
Conclusion
Mediated experiences increasingly dominate our
lives. Movies and television already confuse the real and
the mediated. New technology is blurring the line further.
Video games and virtual reality are becoming increasingly
realistic. “Augmented reality” technology is on its way to
the public. Wearable computers will allow people to enter
a news story and see and feel the events the way the journalist who was there did (Mobile Augmented. . ., 2003),
and no doubt eventually we’ll be able to experience the
events live. As the line between real and mediated gets
harder to see, presence increases. An important and overlooked consequence of this trend is an increasing confusion from the other direction, in which “real life” seems to
be mediated. People will have more and more trouble distinguishing reality, and some may not even appreciate that
there is a difference. It will get harder for people to trust
their own senses and judgment and it will be more difficult
to impress people with nonmediated experiences. Some
people may see themselves as being at the mercy of larger
forces, like a character in a video game who can only do as
the player directs. And some may feel they can act as they
please because they or someone can push a game reset
button or start the movie over, so their actions will have
no lasting consequences.
We can argue that presence is a mostly positive result of
the world we live in today and that inverse presence is just
a relatively rare extension of presence. But as the trend
toward more presence and thus more inverse presence accelerates, we need to consider a larger concern about the
effect of inverse presence on how we perceive and experience our world. If people come to see real experience as
they do most media presentations, as “fake” or “planned”
or “set up” in some way, what experience will be perceived
as truly natural and organic rather than as contrived? In a
world of “pseudo-events” (Boorstin, 1961), we are already
500 PRESENCE: VOLUME 14, NUMBER 4
seeing the fake masquerading as the real; fake Christmas
trees, artificial flavorings and colorings, machines that
generate synthetic smells at the store and at home, lipsynching singers, virtual orchestras, and plastic surgery are
only the beginning. It’s only reasonable for us to become
more cynical, distrustful, and apathetic about the nonmediated world as the mediated world becomes more
dominant and inviting.
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