Mountains, Molehills and Mediation: Exploring the Affordances, the Drawbacks and the Facilitation of Presence Via Face-to-Face Communication and Texting

This thesis explores how social and corporeal presence is facilitated via texting and face-to-face communication. Face-to-face communication is considered to be the preferred means of communication among many scholars due to its sensorial, co-present, human-based means of exchanging physical and social presence.Texting is but another form of communication that facilitates social presence via the dehumanized machine rather than the physical being itself. Ultimately, this thesis illustrates how one is the ruler of one’s own fate. It is the individual who is responsible for understanding the contextual strengths and weaknesses of each respective means of communication.