This paper investigates how human warmth and sociability (social presence) can be integrated through the Web interface to positively impact online trust. An empirical study was undertaken to explore the impact of various levels of socially-rich text and picture design elements on the perception of online social presence and its subsequent effect on online trust and its antecedents. Higher level...

Trust is considered to reduce uncertainty, and, therefore, is a prerequisite for people to engage in online transactions. Social presence potentially bridges the discrepancy between offline and online commerce in terms of face-to-face interaction. These concepts are often studied under the assumption that social presence in itself increases trust. In addition, these studies typically treat trus...

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships of the students’ perceived levels of collaborative learning, social presence and overall satisfaction in a blended learning environment. This research studied the relationship of these three variables and identified critical factors related to them. The participants were 48 graduate students who took a blended-format course in health ed...

Research Article

In this paper we investigate group maintenance behavior in community-based Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development teams. Adopting a sociolinguistic perspective, we conceptualize group maintenance behavior as interpersonal communication tactics—specifically, social presence and politeness tactics—that help maintain relationships among group members. Developer email messages were col...

s International. Witner, B.G. & Singer, M.J. (1998). Measuring presence in virtual environments: A presence questionnaire. PRESENCE, 7,

In this paper, we compare the impact of monophonic, stereophonic, and binaural human speech recordings in terms of their ability to induce the feeling of presence and influence the understanding of the emotional state the speakers were in. These factors are generally important in entertainment applications, for example when conversing with a non-player character or in mediated synchronous human...

In this paper we propose an approach to recommend to a user similar users, resources and social networks in a Social Internetworking Scenario. Our approach presents some interesting novelties with respect to the existing ones. First of all, it operates on a Social Internetworking context and not on a single social network. Moreover, it considers not only explicit relationships among users but a...

The potential of information technology to facilitate collaboration in education has grown considerably in recent years. The use of Web videoconferencing, whereby learners in an online classroom can simultaneously collaborate using audiovisual communication tools, increases the learner’s ability in social and emotional expression, thus improving communication which may enhance learning satisfac...

A sociological theory that is appropriate to the processes of globalization has as its testing ground the ability to capture the morphostasis/morphogenesis of relations, which includes the morphostasis/morphogenesis of structures, culture and agency. This is the task that defines what a relational sociology has to be. The morphogenesis of relations is not the result of the morphogenesis of its ...