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Social presence theory explores how the "sense of being with another" is influenced by digital interfaces in human-computer interactions. Developed from the foundations of interpersonal communication and symbolic interactionism, social presence theory was first formally introduced by John Short, Ederyn Williams, and Bruce Christie in The Social Psychology of Telecommunications. Research on social presence theory has recently developed to examine the efficacy of telecommunications media, including SNS communications. The theory notes that computer-based communication is lower in social presence than face-to-face communication, but different computer-based communications can affect the levels of social presence between communicators and receivers.

Origins
The concept of social presence originated from Morton Wiener and Albert Mehrabian's study of immediacy and Michael Argyle and Janet Dean's concept of intimacy. Wiener and Mehrabian identified immediacy as nonverbal communication behaviors such as eye contact and body movements that can enhance closeness in interactions. Argyle and Dean noted intimacy as a combination of eye contact, physical proximity, and smiling.

The U.K.'s post office first funded Short et al.'s work in an attempt to observe customer's attitudes towards different media channels.

Measurement
There are three common forms of measuring social presence:

The Social Presence Scale (SPRES), created by Charlotte Gunawardena and Frank Zittle, consists of 14 Likert items to indicate users' perceived social presence.

The Social Presence and Privacy Questionnaire (SPPQ), designed by Chih-Hsiung Tu, distinguised social context, online communication, and interactivity based on a CMC attitude instrument and perceived privacy. However, Tu acknowledged that future work needs to improve the validity of the research.

Karel Kreijns, Paul A. Kirschner, Wim Jochems, and Hans van Buuren developed a self-reporting Social Presence Scale, consisting of five items:

Shortcomings
Patrick R. Lowenthal noted that concepts of social presence fall on a spectrum between users' perceptions of a person being real or "being there" and whether two communicators experience positive interpersonal and emotional connections between each other. Lowenthal believes that most researchers tend to fall somewhere on the spectrum between those two perceptions.

Chih-Hsiung Tu said that Short et al.'s definition was not satisfactory because it did not include all components of social presence. He also said that the theory did not address enough degrees of social presence in computer-mediated communications.