Beyond being there

Abstract

A belief in the efficacy of imitating face-to-face communication is an unquestioned presupposition of most current work on supporting communications in electronic media. In this paper we highlight problems with this presupposition and present an alternative proposal for grounding and motivating research and development that frames the issue in terms of needs, media, and mechanisms. To help elaborate the proposal we sketch a series of example projects and respond to potential criticisms.