Being there through machines: a sociohistorical account on how presence became a technological concept

This thesis examines how presence became an authoritative measure of human–machine interaction, focusing on the conditions that enabled the concept to persist across disciplines. In telerobotics, for instance, presence was understood as a measurable dimension of interaction, often tied to physical embodiment; in early virtual reality research, it was pursued as a qualitative state of psychological and emotional immersion; and within psychology and cognitive science, it overlapped with cognitive absorption to denote different levels of involvement in technology-mediated experience. Drawing on science and technology studies, I argue that presence is a technoscientific object whose significance depends on contingent institutional and instrumental choices. The thesis combines conceptual history, media archaeology, and theoretical analysis across seven papers organised into three parts. Part I traces the development of presence as a concept, from Marvin Minsky's definition of 'telepresence' for space telerobotics to psychometric instruments such as the Witmer–Singer Presence Questionnaire. Part II examines engineering uses of 'presence' and compares them with religious rituals, which have long organised the experience of being present at a distance. Part III examines the implications of technological presence for labour and perception, with particular attention to the redistribution of perceptual capacities between human operators and machines. This historical and theoretical account challenges the characterisation of presence as a consistent property of mediated experience. The history of presence therefore aligns with the way technoscientific concepts acquire and sustain explanatory authority through successive processes of conceptual, institutional, and instrumental recalibration. It also shows how the changing distribution of perceptual capacities within technological systems reshapes the attribution of perception and agency to human and machine actors alike.