Reconceptualizing presence as an interactional practice in video-mediated professional encounters

Literature review

The notion of presence has long been associated with physical co-location and mutual perceptual access. Goffman’s (1959) foundational work framed presence as “co-presence,” where participants can perceive and be perceived by one another in real time. His participation framework (Goffman, 1979) and his distinction between primary and secondary involvements (Goffman, 1963) have proven valuable in understanding how participants shift their orientations between competing foci.

Phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty (2002) and Casey (1998) have further grounded presence not just in interpersonal co-location, but in bodily emplacement: the idea that perception is always spatially and sensorily situated. As Casey (1998) puts it, “nothing we do is unplaced” (p. ix), highlighting the deep entwinement of presence, perception, and spatial emplacement. Extending this view, some strands of research highlight that presence may also be experienced in the absence of a physically co-located or living other. In bereavement studies, for instance, individuals frequently report a sensory or quasi-sensory impression that a deceased person is still “there” (e.g., in familiar places, objects, or routines) experienced not merely as memory, but as a lived, embodied presence (Steffen and Coyle, 2011). Being a part of a broader conceptual landscape, these accounts suggest that presence is not reducible to physical proximity or temporal co-presence.

While physical co-presence is often treated as the prototypical form of presence, it is no longer tenable to assume that presence is only possible when people are physically together. Video-mediated meetings have been part of professional and institutional interaction for decades; and intensified and routinized use in the 2020s has sharpened questions about how people participate, interact, and experience one another across spatial separation. Even in such settings, participants do find ways to coordinate, respond, and meaningfully engage with one another. To account for this, Zhao (2003) proposes that co-presence consists of two dimensions: the physical mode of being with others, and the subjective experience or “sense” of being with others. As Dreyfus (2001: 62) argues, however, attempts to simulate presence through technological mediation (whether via avatars, interfaces, or virtual agents) risk abstraction if they are not anchored in the embodied nearness and perceptual openness that underpin human interaction. Building on Goffman’s participation framework, Wasson (2006) shows how participants in video-mediated encounters often straddle both the screen-mediated exchange and their immediate surroundings, navigating competing orientations across co-present and remote environments.

Early research on mediated interaction already pointed to the role of modality shifts, embodied conduct, and spatial arrangements in shaping alignment and co-presence (Norris and Jones, 2005). In their seminal study, Heath and Luff (1992) demonstrated how, in video-mediated encounters, the “technology appears to interfere with the local, sequential impact of a range of visual actions, generating a shifting imbalance between speaker and hearer and their abilities to influence each other” (pp. 335–336). Raudaskoski (1999) showed how institutional video-mediated encounters challenge ordinary interactional expectations, particularly through disruptions to mutual visibility and embodied coordination. Luff et al. (2003) later conceptualized these environments as “fractured ecologies,” where participants must navigate asymmetrically distributed perceptual access. These asymmetries arise not only from technological conditions (e.g., latency, limited camera angles), but from the fact that participants inhabit distinct physical-material environments (Raudaskoski, 1999). Taken together, these studies point to communicative asymmetries, showing how bodily orientation, turn-taking, and mutual responsiveness are systematically reconfigured under technological mediation, thereby reshaping the conditions under which presence can be achieved in remote interaction.

A growing body of EMCA research has demonstrated how participants work to sustain mutual engagement despite communicative asymmetries, though not framed explicitly in terms of presence. Licoppe and Morel (2012), for instance, show how participants in mobile and Skype calls manage disruptions such as screen freezing, delay, and desynchronization by adjusting gaze, screen layout, and turn-taking to preserve coordination. Extending this focus on mutual intelligibility, Nielsen (2019) documents how participants render otherwise inaccessible visual information publicly available (e.g., by verbalizing off-screen events, translating embodied actions into talk, or referencing spatial arrangements) to bridge perceptual asymmetries.

This work aligns with broader EMCA findings on how participants display orientation to each other’s conduct through multimodal resources. As Goodwin (1979, 1981) and Mondada (2007) demonstrate, such orientation is achieved through the coordination of speech, gaze, gesture, bodily positioning, and the spatial configuration of the environment. In video-mediated contexts, these practices take on new relevance: to render persons, objects, and actions intelligible, participants must actively manage visibility; thus adjusting their embodied conduct to be positioned for camera capture and compensating for what others cannot directly perceive (Nielsen, 2019). Consequently, mediated interaction has been argued to require respecification from the participants’ perspective (Arminen et al., 2016; Due & Licoppe, 2020), with attention to the local, embodied methods through which technological conditions are made interactionally accountable.

Presence has in media and communication studies widely been approached as a psychological phenomenon. A much cited definition by Lombard and Ditton (1997) describes presence as “the perceptual illusion of nonmediation”: the extent to which users in mediated environments respond as if the medium were not there. They distinguish six conceptualizations: social richness (e.g., warmth, intimacy), realism (the lifelikeness of representation), transportation (a sense of spatial relocation or co-location), immersion (psychological absorption), perceiving a social actor within the medium, and treating the medium itself as a social actor. While these categories have informed a large body of work (e.g., Kim et al., 2016; Lombard and Jones, 2015), they tend to treat presence as a perceptual or cognitive state, rather than as something achieved in social interaction. For example, in media psychology, Biocca et al. (2003) has argued that presence within mediated environments involves fidelity as well as perceived actorhood, sociability, and influence.

Communication scholars have further conceptualized presence in terms of social and relational dynamics. The notion of social presence has a long history in communication theory, originating with Short et al. (1976), who described it as the degree of salience or emotional intensity of interpersonal relationships within mediated communication, charted along a continuum from telephone to face-to-face interactions. Later, Palmer (1995), defined social presence as including the effective negotiation of a relationship “through an interdependent, multi-channel exchange of behaviors” (p. 291). In educational and online learning research for example Cui et al. (2013) review how instructional design can intentionally cultivate social presence in virtual classrooms, emphasizing affective and cognitive engagement.

Already Walther (1996) provided empirical critique of the Media Richness Theory by demonstrating that even “lean” media can support “rich” social presence via selective self-presentation and strategic interaction dynamics. In the domain of computer-mediated communication (CMC), classic research by Kiesler, Gergle, and Kraut demonstrated that, even in “lean” media environments such as email or online group interactions, users can collectively create warmth, alignment, and engagement by means of textual cues such as punctuation, timing, and emotive typing as substitutes for nonverbal behavior (Kalman and Gergle, 2014; Kraut et al., 1998; Sproull and Kiesler, 1991). This aligns with how presence in Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) studies is now viewed as “induced” (Felton and Jackson, 2022).

Together, these strands of research offer valuable insights into communicative cues and interactional dynamics by highlighting how warmth and cognitive engagement can be actively constructed in mediated environments, even if they tend to foreground channel properties rather than participants’ situated practices.

Presence is not merely the state of being connected; it is the accomplishment of showing up: being available for interaction, accounting for delays or silences, engaging with the subject matter, and demonstrating orientation to the other’s embodied or verbal conduct (Due et al., 2019; Hjulstad, 2016; Nielsen, 2019). It involves more than managing visibility; it also requires establishing shared focus, enabling access to the floor, and displaying uptake and progression (Hassert et al., 2016, 2024). Presence is thus sensitive to affective and moral dimensions, enacted through practices of care and attentiveness, whether in the form of timely responses, efforts to include distant participants in the discussion, and responsiveness to the specific needs and vulnerabilities of others (Due et al., 2019; Hassert et al., 2016, 2024; Nielsen et al., 2025).

While early research thus highlights how presence should be viewed as a matter of physical emplacement, or cognitive engagement, a growing body of work thus emphasizes that presence is not simply felt or perceived; it is actively and collaboratively “produced” in interaction.

Using a discourse-analytic perspective, scholars have explored how presence is socially constructed in actual interaction. Fägersten (2010), for instance, argues that social co-presence in video conferencing is constituted not simply through the social richness of the medium, but through participants’ real-time use of multimodal cues to create a sense of interactant satisfaction. In organizational communication, the communicative constitution of organizations (CCO) approach views organizational realities as emergent from and co-constructed by communicative practices, and conceptualizes presence as contingent on participants’ ability to produce fitted responses and achieve mutual alignment in real time. On this view, presence becomes a form of “co-production” (Cooren et al., 2008: 1346). While CCO and EMCA differ in analytical focus and epistemology, they share an interest in presence as an emergent, interactional phenomenon. CCO research highlights the relational and distributed nature of presence, shaped across modalities and spaces (Fairhurst and Cooren, 2009), and foregrounds how presence is co-constructed not only between participants, but also with and through material and technological assemblages. Cooren (2020) further challenges the tendency to associate materiality only with what is tangible or visible, arguing for a broader view that bridges human and non-human dimensions of interaction.

Across these research traditions, presence emerges not as an automatic or medium-driven effect, but as a reflexively sustained achievement, accomplished through what might be called “self-reflexive visibility work”: participants’ ongoing efforts to ensure that bodies, objects, and environments are seeable, audible, and accountable within a shared perceptual field. These practices (managing talk, gesture, and spatial orientation) bridge perceptual asymmetries and sustain intersubjectivity even when full visual access is constrained.

It is now evident from the research that technological mediation (with its delays, visual constraints, and spatial disjunctions) systematically complicates mutual responsiveness. From an EMCA perspective, “producing presence” under such conditions hinges on sequential alignment: the situated, timely organization of turns and actions that sustains intersubjectivity despite fractured interactional ecologies. While grounded in different methodological traditions, EMCA research (e.g., Heath and Luff, 1992), the CCO approach (e.g., Cooren et al., 2008; Fairhurst and Cooren, 2009), and multimodal discourse studies (e.g., Norris and Jones, 2005) have all highlighted how spatial arrangements and modality shifts shape participants’ efforts to secure alignment and co-presence in mediated interaction.

EMCA research has long examined how communicative asymmetries (such as latency, overlapping talk, or restricted visibility) reshape turn-taking, mutual responsiveness, and embodied coordination (Due et al., 2019; Hansen, 2020, 2022; Hjulstad, 2016; Luff et al., 2003; Raudaskoski, 1999; Stommel et al., 2020). These studies document how participants manage sequential disjunctures by repairing silences and overlaps, negotiating latency, and reconfiguring embodied conduct or screen-shared resources to guide attention and re-establish alignment. Earlier, Oittinen (2018) and Oittinen and Piirainen-Marsh (2015) demonstrated how co-orientation is interactionally achieved in professional video-mediated meetings, with attention being sequentially organized and socially managed. Similarly, Hansen (2020, 2022) shows how participants in video-mediated hospital interpreting adapt their verbal and embodied conduct to navigate spatial and technological asymmetries. Across these studies, alignment is not taken for granted but evidenced as a member’s concern: continuously, actively, and visibly achieved through multimodal practices calibrated to the constraints and affordances of the fractured ecologies of mediated settings.

Together, these strands of research demonstrate that presence in video-mediated interaction is not a given, but a situated, sequential, and multimodal accomplishment. Rather than relying solely on technological fidelity or perceptual cues, participants reflexively construct presence through embodied practices, spatial calibration, and interactional alignment. Across diverse literatures, from phenomenology to EMCA and CCO, presence emerges as a collaborative, relational, and materially situated achievement, continuously negotiated under varying conditions of access, visibility, and responsiveness. This understanding provides the foundation for the analytic framework developed in the remainder of this paper.

Aims and contribution

This study examines how presence is achieved in professional video-mediated interactions, using an ethnomethodological conversation analytic (EMCA) approach (Garfinkel, 1967; Sacks et al., 1974; Streeck et al., 2011). While presence is often conceptualized as a psychological state or general social condition, EMCA offers a way to investigate how presence is publicly displayed, sequentially organized, and practically achieved by participants in situ. Although contemporary EMCA research has illuminated how technological mediation affects participation, turn-taking, and embodied conduct, there is currently no comprehensive EMCA-based framework for understanding how presence itself is interactionally accomplished across professional settings, whether mediated or face-to-face.

This paper addresses that gap by proposing a grounded, multidimensional analytic approach to understanding presence as an ongoing interactional task. This analytic articulation is not offered as an a priori typology, but as an empirically derived set of dimensions that emerged through abductive analysis of naturally occurring video-recorded data. Drawing on institutional interactions from healthcare, international business, and social work, we identify four interdependent dimensions through which presence is locally achieved: infrastructural-spatial, embodied-visual, relational, and sequential calibration. We argue that presence should be understood as collaborative interactional work, observable in how participants manage turn-taking, respond to embodied actions, adapt to technological and spatial contingencies, and sustain mutual orientation over time.

Infrastructural responsiveness and self-reflexive agency

A key aspect of presence in video-mediated interaction is participants’ capacity to exploit the infrastructural affordances of the medium (such as camera mobility) to configure mutual visibility and to reflexively account for their conduct in relation to it. An example of this from our video data is from online physiotherapy, where physiotherapists and clients routinely reposition their webcams to enhance the other’s visual access to relevant bodily displays or physical settings critical for the ongoing activity. As they move their cameras, they comment on this action and account for the resulting change in perspective for their interlocutor, thereby treating the visual access as something to be accountable for and actively take responsibility for. The following data excerpt (Figure 1) shows how a participant’s camera-moving gesture explicitly manifests self-reflexive agency and infrastructural calibration as part of presence-making. We see the interaction from where the physiotherapist announces that she will demonstrate a physical exercise to her client:

Excerpt 1: I’ll move you over here

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Figure 1.

Frame 1–6: Participant moves camera to give the other location better visual access.

In the example, we see how the physiotherapist prepares the movement of the camera by projecting it verbally and constructing an assemble of man + space + technology (“I’ll just move you over here”). “You” refers in this turn both to the mediating technology and the person simultaneously. The client accepts the spatial reconfiguration, and the physiotherapist proceeds with the move, whilst explicitly apologizing for it (“I am sorry that you are moved”). The apology can be seen as an orientation to the norm of talking heads in video-mediated interaction (Licoppe and Morel, 2012), and to the social accountability of momentarily disrupting the interactional ecology. This action demonstrates an orientation to one’s own mediated presence, not merely as a bodily display but as something to be reflexively managed in relation to the other’s perceptual access. Such reflexive monitoring of the visual field constitutes a key dimension of achieving presence in goal-oriented encounters.

Enabling material visibility by responding to automated technical input

Another important dimension of presence is how participants actively take responsibility for managing their own visibility. We illustrate this with a video-mediated team meeting involving four participants in Mumbai and one in Pune. The meeting is filmed at the Mumbai location. When the head of the team in Mumbai grabs a remote control to adjust something, a box appears on the Mumbai screen, and immediately the Pune participant tilts his head (Figure 2). This case highlights how participants responsively manage visual access, treating screen artifacts as socially consequential cues within presence work.

Excerpt 2: Tilting to avoid boxes on screen

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Figure 2.

Participant responds to automated technical input by tilting his head to give the other location better visual access to him.

Through the physical tilting action, he orients to giving the participants in Mumbai better visual access to him. Nobody comments verbally on this, but his action is social towards the Mumbai group because it accomplishes the action of giving them better visual access. Moreover, as he responds to input from boxes appearing on their screen, we also see this as a person interacting nonverbally with computer messages. The boxes constitute automated technical input, and it is the very act of a human responding to the boxes that makes them social, and thus retrospectively turns the computer screen into a social actor. We see it as an aspect of presence, because the interaction with the technology-based actions is social and done as a part of the encounter with human participants, much like shifting one’s gaze from one participant to another serves to give the latter primary recipiency.

Embodied spatial co-orientation in the achievement of referential clarity

Second, we will explore how participants co-create their embodied-visual presence. We will address this dimension by focusing on participants’ embodied work to secure co-orientation and referential clarity.

The next example we use to argue that gestures and embodied actions function as place-based practices contingent on the situation and tied to specific courses of action. In the following data excerpt a participant points toward displaced spatial locations through the screen. This excerpt is from a medical consultation in which a nurse is instructing an elderly couple about how to put on a blood pressure monitor (see Figure 3). We see how visual gesturing across mediated ecologies enables place-relevant representation and co-construction of shared focus.

Excerpt 3: Pointing through the screen

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Figure 3.

Frame 1–7: Nurse showing a patient on screen how to put on a blood pressure monitor.

We notice that when the patient’s arm reaches a position that gives the nurse visual access to the blood pressure monitor, the nurse leans forward and positions herself close to the screen. In the same movement, the nurse makes a deictic gesture pointing towards the screen with her right-hand index finger. This gesture is accompanied by the utterance “ehm: .h and then is” (Frame 3), produced with hesitation and word search. The nurse then shifts to an interrogative syntax and asks “is it placed inside that” (Frame 4). While presenting the question, the nurse points at her own lifted upper arm, equivalent to where a blood pressure monitor would be positioned if it had been attached to her. The nurse thereby clarifies what was meant by the unspecific deictic expression “that” by visually showing that the “that” referred to a specific part of the monitor, which is attached to the particpant’s arm. The nurse continues the turn by verbally elaborating the question with the declaratively constructed account “there’s like: a: a- you put it IN to” (Frames 4–6). Simultaneously, the nurse moves her hand in a circular motion, animating how the tip of the arm cuff should be pulled through the metal hoop of the monitor (Frame 5).

This embodied demonstration, which has mimicable features built into it, has a clear recipient design aimed at conveying meaning and instructional information to the dislocated participants. The nurse uses a combination of verbal, visual, and embodied cues, designed with the recipient’s perspective in mind, to establish referential clarity and to index off-screen objects. This demonstrates how participants collaboratively produce referential clarity and embodied understanding through co-construction, recipient design and other-monitoring, as a social accomplishment.

Third, we will explore how participants calibrate their relational, affective presence. We will address this dimension by focusing on affiliative other-involvement and situated immersion, as well as emotional attunement.

Affiliative other-involvement and situated immersion

We argue that immersion is dynamic and locally produced. Even if two participants are physically co-present, they may say things like: “hey, are you here?” “Where are you right now?” “Earth calling Peter!” They may wave demonstrably in front of the other’s face – thus treating disengagement as a lapse in presence. This aspect of immersion we see as place-based availability, as competing immersion may be treated by participants as accountable when the mutual encounter is not put front and center: When attention drifts, whether due to parallel tasks, offscreen stimuli, or divided focus, participants may treat this as accountable non-presence. Immersion may therefore be interpreted as engagement and involvement in everyday affairs, such as when naturally involving other locally present participants. We thus suggest a respecification of immersion from being a matter of cognitive investment to being a matter of social presence, which is indeed achievable in video-mediated interaction. We treat involvement and immersion as naturally unfolded alignment in conversation.

In the following, we show an example of other-involvement and affiliation. We argue that this aspect has to do with involvement accomplished interactionally as affiliation and other-orientation. Presence as a member’s accomplishment may be shown via affiliative responses (Pomerantz, 1984; Stivers et al., 2011), by responding to bodily input from others with embodied response (Mondada, 2009) or by turning it into something meriting a verbal response. Participants may also affiliate in other ways, such as by mirroring (Ferrera, 1994) words, gestures, facial expressions and storytelling by others; or by producing collaborative completions (Sacks, 1992), or being able to build on each other’s ideas, thereby showing themselves to be so immersed in interaction that they are able to guess what will be said next. A version of this intersubjective practice of “showing to know” what co-participants are concerned with is when participants ask about things that interest the co-participant.

The next data excerpt is from an encounter in which a patient with COPD meets regularly with a hospital nurse via a so-called COPD suitcase, which is a laptop with video meeting facilities that are very user friendly. In the middle of the conversation about oxygen measures and well-being, the patient’s dog is suddenly audible to the nurse (Figure 4). This excerpt exemplifies affiliation and immersion: participants orient to unexpected off-screen cues to sustain intersubjective alignment.

Excerpt 4: I can hear you have a dog?

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Figure 4.

Frame 1–8: Hospital nurse and patient including dog and patient’s husband in a video meeting.

Note how the nurse immediately follows up on the dog’s whining (“I can hear you have a ↑dog”), even though it is outside the video frame. The dog is invited into the conversation: by the remote nurse, not because she has a relation to it or because it is necessary for the treatment of the patient, but presumably because of its significance to the everyday life of the patient and her spouse. The patient tells the nurse that the dog is “locked inside the ↑kitchen and she’s not totally [happy about that]” (Frame 3). The nurse immediately affiliates with this emotional display about the dog, and invites it into the participation framework. By doing so, she demonstrates an immersive engagement in the encounter – one that enables her to interpret, on the basis of the participants’ observable multimodal conduct, what might be on their minds, even if they do not mention it directly themselves. In this way, the nurse displays a finely tuned sensitivity to what is locally relevant.

Presence as emotional attunement: We use our next example to demonstrate that even a situation of emotional distress is an intersubjective achievement which contributes to an understanding of the notion of presence. The data excerpt is from a social psychiatric recovery-oriented meeting between a professional social health care worker and a mentally vulnerable citizen. The setting is a local drop-in center, which offers public social service to mentally vulnerable citizens under the stipulations of the Danish national public social psychiatric system. One distinct purpose of the recovery-oriented meeting is to support the citizen in dealing with personal and/or emotional difficulties to help improve his or her general well-being and develop autonomy in terms of managing challenges in daily life. A mentally vulnerable citizen (an emic category at this healthcare center) and the social healthcare worker are talking about the citizen’s relational problems with her partner. In what follows (see Figure 5), the citizen discloses her concern and she becomes overwhelmed with emotional distress in doing so. This excerpt illustrates how relational attunement and affective involvement emerge and are managed within the institutional setting of video-mediated care.

Excerpt 5: Do you get a bit affected now?

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Figure 5.

Frame 1–20: Social care worker supports a client in emotional distress.

We see how the crying sequence is a collaborative accomplishment of the two participants. Cues include whispering voices, swallowing/lip movements, wobbly voice, soft voice and changing pace, as well as long silences between turns.

The citizen displays the first sign of emotional distress in the 1.4 seconds of silence, where we hear a deep inbreath and a deep sign followed by her rhetorical question (“Did he mean it?”) (Frame 1). The social healthcare worker shows a sensitivity to the citizen’s emotional display by first inviting a continuation of talk about her troubles (Frame 2), then enquiring if she becomes affected (Frame 4). With a deep inbreath, the citizen verbally affirms this to be the case (Frame 5). The social worker remains silent (Frame 6) and the citizen continues expressing her stance on this issue with a wobbly voice and clear indication that she is wiping her eyes (Frame 7). The social healthcare worker encourages her to continue her talk (Frame 8), which is followed by a long silence (Frames 9 and 10) on the part of the citizen, during which she visibly wipes her eyes (Frame 9). The social healthcare worker demonstrates being present by maintaining her bodily position and gaze towards the screen, while withholding talk. This is followed by yet another long silence in which the citizen visibly wipes her eyes again (Frame 11). Through body and gaze, the social worker is oriented to what is going on, but remains silent (Frame 12), and now the citizen resumes verbally expressing her emotional stance (Frame 13). Her voice remains wobbly, and upon pausing, she performs an inbreath-swallowing-lip movement and gazes upward (Frame 15).

Throughout this part of the interaction, the social worker maintains a calm and fixed embodied position and gaze orientation towards the screen and refrains from talking. This prompts the citizen to resume talking once again (Frame 17), her voice no longer wobbly, and her pace of speaking is suddenly faster. The social worker invites her to continue by a minimal response token (“uhuh,” Frame 18), and as the citizen manages to get control of her rate of speaking, she now resumes a normal speed and formulates her stance on how she wishes to address her relational issue with her partner (Frame 19). The social worker shows support for her stance with a minimal response token, which affirms the stance as salient (Frame 20).

Both participants appear present and attuned to their joint activity as it unfolds, and both treat the emotional outburst as normal and allow for it to develop, peak and fade out. As the emotional distress accumulates, we see the citizen’s stepwise display of emotional distress, and how the professional responds to it. Except for the question which seeks validation that the citizen is affected (Frame 4), the professional remains calm and refrains from talking except for the few continuers (Frames 8, 10, and 18), which invites the citizen to continue talking and explore her feelings. The long silences (Frames 3, 9, 11, 12, and 14) are not treated as misplaced or unacceptable by either participant. Instead, both participants treat the unfolding emotional distress as something to be jointly inhabited, an occasion for being present together.

In this virtual setting, the participants display their interactional presence as the ability to embrace emotional outbursts as a member’s accomplishment and concern, which they collaboratively seek to acknowledge, experience, explore (peak) and allow to fade out. Through their collaborative efforts, the notion of presence – as displayed by the participants themselves – becomes a matter of embracing the emotional difficulties experienced and explored by the one, and supported and encouraged by the other. To them, presence is something that they “do” together and something that is very clearly a matter of orienting to the bodily displays. This co-presence unfolds through a distinct and locally fitted sequential pattern, which on the one hand allows for the citizen to display and work through her emotional distress and on the other hand allows for both aligning and affiliating uptakes by the social worker (Couper-Kuhlen, 2012; Stivers, 2008; Stivers et al., 2011).

Presence through sequential coordination: The last example explores how participants manage their presence by producing fitted and timely responses and interactional progression. If immediacy and structural alignment are relevant indicators of presence, then their absence, or participants’ immersion in parallel activities, becomes equally revealing. In the data excerpt below, two co-located participants take part in an ICT-mediated meeting distributed across three locations, we see split attention as a potential trouble source, causing delayed responses and repair in the cross-location meeting. The excerpt is from a five-party ICT-mediated meeting across three locations of an international company. The participants consist of Martin (MAR) and Atthar (ATT) in Copenhagen, Ishan (ISH) in Chennai and Arjun (ARJ) and Saanvi (SAA) in Mumbai. The meeting is video recorded from the Mumbai location. In the excerpt (Figure 6), we note how Saanvi mutes the equipment to initiate a conversation with co-located Arjun. This case emphasizes how latent delay and lapses in floor management pose practical challenges to sequential alignment and immediate responsiveness.

Excerpt 6: Ja Ishan

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Figure 6.

Frame 1–10: Two co-located colleagues have a bilateral conversation during a cross-location meeting.

The excerpt lasts 15 seconds and includes an 8-second pause, a “lapse” (Sacks et al., 1974). During that pause, the participants in Mumbai are muting the equipment to conduct a bilateral conversation. While participants in Chennai and Copenhagen are talking, Saanvi in Mumbai takes the initiative to mute the equipment (Frames 2 and 3). Ishan in Chennai is producing receipt tokens (Frame 4) to the confirmation from Copenhagen, and then there is an 8 second pause or lapse. During that pause Saanvi and Arjun in Mumbai are talking and giggling together (Frames 4–8). About halfway into the pause, we note that Saanvi takes the initiative to unmute the equipment (Frame 6); while preparing to re-engage in the meeting talk Saanvi turns to Arjun (Frame 7), but Arjun is oriented to the control panel, and no talk is currently being produced in the cross-locational meeting. While the excerpt is rich with interactional detail, we focus here on how the participants in Chennai and Copenhagen let the non-response from Mumbai hang, and once the participants in Mumbai realize that it is their responsibility to end the pause, they quickly produce talk designed to move the meeting forward. Arjun utters a loud, stressed and pitch reset “ja” and addresses the chair (Frame 10), and Saanvi utters a loud and high pitched “ja” in overlap (Frame 10). Finally, Ishan comes in and moves the cross-locational meeting to the next item on the agenda (Frame 10).

Lapses and latency are treated as accountable, as they involve delays in response and stall the progression of talk and its associated activity. Not responding immediately is accountable because it may indicate lack of engagement in interaction and lack of involvement in the joint activity. This lapse-repair sequence demonstrates how lapses are treated as interactional trouble, showing that immediacy is a participant concern closely tied to maintaining attentional presence.

Across these interactions, presence is not treated by participants as mere physical co-location, but as a socially accomplished, sequentially displayed orientation to one another. It is achieved through relational attunement, timely and fitted embodied contributions, and infrastructural responsiveness to technological conditions. Presence, in this sense, is not a default state but a practical task that participants continuously manage as the interaction unfolds. Taken together, the six excerpts demonstrate that presence in video-mediated professional interaction need not be blackboxed (Latour, 1999) as psychological states or cognitive immersion. Rather, it is observable in video-ethnographic data as participants’ practical and ongoing calibration across multiple modalities and ecologies, including spatial, embodied, topical, sequential, and affiliative forms of co-orientation and responsiveness.