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  4. Área de Especialização em Cultura Contemporânea e Novas Tecnologias
  5. Cyberspace, Media and Interaction

Cyberspace, Media and Interaction

Objectives

Telepresence, often shortened to presence, is a state or perception in which we overlook or misconstrue the role of technology and feel present in environments and/or connected to people or things we experience via technology or only exist via technology. The technologies of tele-presence are increasingly relevant to a wide range of media experiences and application areas, namely on cyberspace.
With this course the student should be able to:
1) Establish a theoretical framework for technological mediation in human experience
2) Understand cyberspace and discuss the utility of the concept
3) Distinguish interaction from interactivity, and understand interactivity as an attribute of interaction
4) Identify the place and role of “interfaces” in technological mediation
5) Understand (tele)presence and some of its dimensions
6) Analyse and discuss telepresence and its effects in reference with specific contexts of human digital activity,

General characterization

Code

722011034

Credits

10.0

Responsible teacher

Graça Maria Bordalo Rocha Simões

Hours

Weekly - 3

Total - 280

Teaching language

Portuguese

Prerequisites

Available soon

Bibliography

Referências Fundamentais:
Idhe, Don (1990). Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington and Indianopolis: Indiana University Press.
Kiousis, S. (2002). Interactivity: A Concept Explication. New Media & Society, Vol. 4, September, pp. 355-383.
Kiran, A. (2012). Technological Presence: Actuality and Potentiality in Subject Constitution. A Journal for Philosophy and the Social Sciences.
McMillan, Sally (2002). Exploring Models of Interactivity from Multiple Research Traditions: Users, Documents, and Systems”. Leah Lievrouw and Sonia Livingstone (eds.).
Nilsson et al. (2016), Immersion revisited: A review of existing definitions of immersion and their relation to different theories of presence. Human Technology.Volume 12(2), November 2016, 108
Vu et al.(2012). Towards Evaluating Social Telepresence in Mobile Context. VRCAI 2012, Singapore, December 2 – 4, 2012.
Zhao, S. (2004). Toward a Taxonomy of Copresence. Department of Sociology, Temple University, Philadelphia.

Teaching method

In class teaching. The teaching method includes theoretical exposition of contents supported by the active and critical participation of students. 

Evaluation method

Evaluation Methodologies - 1) Active individual participation and contribution on class, which includes two individual assignments with oral presentation in class, the second one using interactivity in context as focus (2000 words);(40%), 2) A final individual paper (3000-4000 words), with oral presentation and discussion in class(60%)

Subject matter

1. Technological mediation, human-technology relations, human-technology interaction: theoretical framework
2. What is Cyberspace? Still a useful concept?

3. About interaction design and experience design
4. Interaction and interactivity. Active and passive interaction. The "place" of interfaces.

5. Tele(presence). From presence in tele-operations/tele-robotics and Virtual Reality to other digital mediated contexts. Social presence and co-presence. Artificial agents: bots, robots (and others).
6. Dimensions of telepresence: interactivity, vividness, engagement, immersion, flow