ABSTRACT
The above quote could be that of a person who had just visited some exciting, futuristic virtual environment, or someone who had recently played the latest high-defi nition video game. But in reality, as any media scholar might guess, it comes from a college student who had listened to the War of the Worlds radio broadcast at a party on Halloween Eve, 1938. This famous incident of millions of Americans being panicked by a radio dramatization highlights the power of the mass media to affect audiences, which has received a great deal of scholarly attention. The scientifi c study of media effects has a rich history dating back to investigations of such high-profi le phenomena as World War II propaganda (Hovland, Lumsdaine, & Sheffi eld, 1949) and the War of the Worlds broadcast itself (Cantril, 1940). Although this early research did not include the concept of telepresence, it seems plausible that telepresence played a key role, for example, in the fright reactions observed following the “invasion from Mars.” Radio listeners who were especially frightened may have felt more “in” the invasion (spatial presence) or “with” Martians (social presence), causing them to be more fearful of the broadcast. The concept of telepresence has the potential to help explain fright reactions such as these as well as a host of other media effects, making it a valuable consideration for media scholars and anyone else interested in the ability of presence to affect outcomes of technology use.
