A Short History of Telepresence

Our contemporary sense of telepresence stands as a selective aggregate of earlier technological assemblages and their attendant practices. The term carries with it traces of the past in the form of claims and half-realized desires. A closer look will reveal continuities, of course, but may also help to contextualize and even unsettle the nature of some of the more persistent desires. Telepresence offers more: a heuristic device to talk about the root-word ‘presence.’ For textual-ists, it offers tangibility; for historians, it offers precedent; and for the more phenomenologically minded, it offers a wealth of affect. The tangibility of practice, and the situational embeddedness of anecdote and language, together suggest that the history of telepresence has something substantial to offer our understanding of presence.