Archive for May 7th, 2009:

In George Orwell’s 1984 the two-way “telescreen” displays propaganda in everyone’s home and keeps tabs on what people are doing. It’s a disturbing presence intent on control. At the time of publication, in 1949, the telescreen was merely an imaginary tool of totalitarianism. Today we might shrug and say, “a monitor and a webcam.”

In a virtual office, where employees work in separate locations, “presence” can be more beneficent and comforting. Instead of working alone and having no idea if our colleagues are there, we can look at a program—Skype, Office Communicator, or something built into a larger application, such as Groove—to see if someone is at work. We can IM our coworkers, call them, or have a video conference, all from the same presence application. I have been working within a system of presence for some time now, and though I work alone most of the time, I no longer feel quite so alone.

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