--Originally published at Digital Identity
Introduction
What you do on internet? How much time you spend on it? What is its main use? This are some questions that if asked to different people you will get different answers maybe to all of them. But what has to do this with online presence, well, everything. The way we interact with internet, the websites we visit when being online and almost anything we do, determines our type of presence online, our main roles (as visitor or residents) and our priorities when it comes to travel the web.
The Presence
Presence, as Bonnie Stewart say is multi-faceted, that means it involves a set of different areas. Even if sometimes we lack of a type of presence we still have a kind of it. An example for this is when you assist to a class, even if you don’t talk to anyone and don’t interact at all, you will still have physical presence and some sort of influence in the perception others have from you.
An example for the different types of presence is a learning community where we have three mayor types of presence: cognitive, social and teaching all of them need to merge together in order to create a proper educational experience.
The elements of a learning community. (Garrison, et al., 2000)
On internet something similar happens, we have different kinds of presence determined by the objective we are seeking. This interaction or type of presence can be easily represented with the concept of visitors and residents.
Visitors & Residents
photo retrieved from http://daveowhite.com/vandr/
Internet could be used for a variety of tasks that goes from researching and looking for particular information to posting on websites or social networks and talking with friends. The concept of visitors and residents tries to summarize the way people interact with the web, is main objectives when doing so and if there exist an interaction with other users or a creation of content each time someone gets online.
Visitors vs residents
This concept could be better understand if we compare the characteristics that can make be either a visitor or a resident.
Visitors
Being a visitor is the most common type of role we play when going on internet to look information. It is mainly going online for data and getting offline when finding it. Visitors use the web as a toolbox, actions are instrumental, this is that users leave no social trace online and the task is a priority(D. S. White & Cornu, 2011).
Examples of this can be searching for information for a research, looking for directions to go to a certain place, watching videos online (without commenting) and mostly anything that involves getting information or completing a task, actions that don’t require socialization.
Residents
The resident mode is the mode of the social presence as a resident when we decide to go online is to be present with other people, we life a portion of our lives online. Residents consider the web as a human, social connected place. This engagement leaves social traces, connections and content behind this interaction, synthesis is a priority. This mode also involves a highly visible state because of the content we leave behind, in blogs, social networks, and so on(D. White, 2014).
Examples of this role are publishing photos on social networks, publishing videos on YouTube, commenting on others blog’s or on their publications, tweeting or posting in your blog, and mainly all the actions that involve interacting with others online or adding information to the web, so that others can see it.
Other definitions
Personal: All the actions we do because we want to, using the web for our own personal purposes, like talking with friends and family or watching videos we like.
Institutional: This role involves everything that has to do with work, an example is to make a research for project or finding information to complete a homework.
The map
No role online is restricted, you can be either a resident in a certain time of the day and a visitor on other, and actually you can act as both depending on the context. The following map represents popular websites and the area that they can be classified depending on the interactions you have on it. This is merely illustrative and different people might use a social network for a complete different purpose. For example, someone who only gets to YouTube to watch videos because they like to will classify it as a personal-visitor, but a Youtuber (the one that publishes the videos) might classify this website as a resident- institutional if he makes money from it or simply as a resident-personal if he uploads videos only for sharing them with his friends and family, but this are only some combinations.
flickr photo by jisc_infonet https://flickr.com/photos/jiscinfonet/12947691804 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license
Interview
https://soundcloud.com/luis-fernando-amador-604664412/online-presence-interview
Videoconference
References
Garrison, D., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical Inquiry in a Text-Based Environment: Computer Conferencing in Higher Education. The Internet and Higher Education 2(2-3): 87-105.
White, D. S. (2014, September 9). Visitors & Residents. Retrieved from http://daveowhite.com/vandr/
White, D. S., & Cornu, A. L. (2011). Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16(9). Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3171
