Todays group text chat gave me some food for thought. In no particular order :
- I noticed that identifying who was making a “post” to the session was difficult as the only cue is their login name. IRL we locate the spatially from the direction their voice comes from, the tone, accent and quality of their voice and their visual image when we look at them. It seems a visual image is important in identifying a contributor. If the text entry submitted by a contributor included the contrbutors image (avatar) this would enhance presence. Of course video would be best but even an avatar would be better than nothing. If the avatar was a photo of the contributor then even better.
- Allied to this thought above, I noticed that one contributor (I’m keeping this strictly private – aren’t I just so ethical ?) changed her avatar during the session from a clipart avatar to a photo of herself. This increased presence for me. She became more present for me.
The speed of the interaction of contributors influenced presence. The faster the text entries appeared, the more real the conversation became. Though there was a limit to this – which resulted in overload and having to read the entries that had appeared in order to re-orient to what was being said. This contributed to the idea that the conversation flowed in a way that could be compared to dancing with someone or dancing in a group. If the group gets out of “sync” then we all stop and get back to our places to start over.
There are no cues in the “silences” as to what someone is doing or even if they are still there. Compare this with a phone conversation. The silences are not as cueless in that we can hear background noise in the place callers environment, maybe hear them breathing.
How important is this difference? Well, in f2f counselling all those cues – body language, tone of voice, facial expression, movement, breathing are there to allow the counsellor to “be with” the client – to be more empathic. In a chat environment the counsellor would need to compensate for the paucity of cues. Not sure yet how this can be done utilising whats available in the chat environment. Enhancers would include:
- emoticons
- client being able to txt some of their reactions (e.g. laughing, crying, tense)
- animated “talking head” images (see CrazyTalk)
- emoticons that produce sounds (e.g. sighs, crying, or that say a phrase – pre-recorded)
- webcam
- voice
How could the counsellor enhance the presence by other methods ?
“The faster the text entries appeared, the more real the conversation became. Though there was a limit to this – which resulted in overload and having to read the entries that had appeared in order to re-orient to what was being said.”
Yes each group chat evolves its own rhythms and thresholds and that is one of the finer aspects of working with groups whether online or off.
Presence can be enhanced in so many ways, sending an email, leaving a comment in a blog, – one thing I’ve wondered a lot about recently is how clients would feel sharing their MySpace or Facebook page with a counsellor and how helpful this might or might not be to the overall therapeutic process.