presence in strange lands

Presence in Strange Lands

 Gary Fontaine, Ph.D.

Emeritus Professor, School of Communications, University of Hawaii

 I was trekking over the Milke Danda toward Taplejung. ... It was very clear and fine and soon I caught sight of Kangchenjunga.  I've often seen the Himalayas take on an ethereal appearance as they seem to float above the horizon.  As I looked at Kangchenjunga, I could not believe that I could possibly be in the same place, at the same time, as anything so utterly beautiful.  Then I saw fire-tailed sunbirds drinking nectar from the rhododendrons.  Superficially they are like hummingbirds.  They were the most brilliant birds I had ever seen, scarlet and gold with sapphire blue heads and incredibly long tails.  Words cannot do justice to the experience.  The sense of presence was extreme. ... Since then my definitive description for a magical experience has always been like Kangchenjunga and the sunbirds.

Strange Lands  -- we were all born into one.  Most of us over the years have by choice or necessity molded ours into the much more familiar and predictable place we call "home."  But strange lands are still out there, everywhere.  By "strange lands" I mean those relationships, teams, organizations, or foreign lands within which we must deal effectively with new peoples, cultures, places, and technologies.  Increasingly we confront these lands abroad on global assignments for multinationals, in foreign study, or intercultural marriage, or even as tourists.  We encounter them face-to-face or online as we participate more and more in geographically dispersed teams.  And, of course, we encounter them at home every time we wander into our culturally diverse office, classroom or bar.  Presence in Strange Lands  focuses most significantly on those literal new lands encountered on sojourns abroad, though it deals significantly with these others as well.

"Why do we journey to such lands?"  That, in a nutshell, is what this book is about.  In spite of ecoshock, frustration, fatigue, failure, and sometimes danger what lures we sojourners from home to the road?  What causes us to journey to these strange lands for an assignment, a career or a lifetime?  What keeps us there?  And, what entices us back there, again, and again–the job, the money, the adventure, the people and cultures we find, the challenges we encounter, the stories we can later tell?  That is what this book is about.  It is also about the tools we need to take with us to be optimally effective in these lands.  But most particularly, it explores the experience of a "sense of presence" -- the heightened immediacy, broad awareness, vividness, responsivity, and clarity so commonly described by sojourners on these journeys.  It explores what a sense of presence is, what induces it, what nurtures it, and its key role in helping us deal with the challenges to success encountered in these lands.  It introduces the “presence-seekers” -- sometimes presence “junkies” -- for whom a heightened presence is the allure of a life on the road.  And it describes what happens as we return to that once familiar land we called "home."  Presence in Strange Lands  unfolds through the words of numerous sojourners on a broad variety of journeys to very diverse lands (an excerpt from one such opens this prospectus).  These descriptions of a sense of presence were elicited through several research projects with methodologies ranging from informal interviews, to focus groups, to web-based forums.  They are intertwined with interpretation based on current research and theory to guide readers to a better understanding of their own experiences and to better deal with the challenges encountered in their own strange lands.

I first noticed it as I was dragging my baroto (small double-outrigger canoe) up the beach after diving for shells in the late afternoon.  It was a faint, pastel pinkish glow in the clouds low to the east over the Sibuyan Sea.  I at first thought it must be a projection from the sunset in the west over the Sulu Sea — hidden from me by the hills behind our cottage on the tiny island of Boracay.  As I tied up the baroto and walked up the steps to our cottage the late afternoon turned to evening and the glow became richer.  I put my diving gear away and opened a San Miguel and walked out onto the deck that looked out over the Sibuyan Sea.  Framed between the 'cocos' lining the shore and rising out of the horizon and over a glassy lagoon — made more so by a very low tide blocking any swell from the sea beyond — was a massive, blood red blob that I initially and incredulously perceived as the sun rising, again, in the east!  As I blinked and watched, it became a huge glowing crimson orb filling the sky and — it's reflection — the lagoon.  The cicadas stopped chirping.  The dogs stopped barking.  The 'atis' (the original, indigenous residents of the island) and other Filipino locals walking along the road between the sea and I stopped and watched.  The fish that skimmed the surface for evening insects — stopped.  And the moon rose.  It was my first moonrise.  I mean I've seen a 'harvest moon.'  But never this.  The sky, the lagoon, then the entire sea outside the reef became blood red ... The allure!  ...

A sense of presence, or the feeling of “being there,” has been receiving a great deal of attention in work with teleoperators, virtual environments, online collaboration, and distance education.  The concern is with maximizing the degree to which these mediated experiences can approximate “real,” face-to-face encounters.  That is, the experience of being present when we’re not.  Primarily the objective of this work has been to enhance our task effectiveness or in marketing the products that do so and has been extensively described by Riva and Ijsselsteijn (2002) in Being there:  Concepts, Effects and Measurements of User Presence in Synthetic Environments.  Presence in Strange Lands addresses online and virtual environments -- particularly in a chapter dealing with "presence in teleland" -- but, again, its emphasis is much more on face-to-face encounters.  But even when we really are “there” our experiences are not all equivalent.  Sometimes we feel much more present than others, sometimes the world is much more vivid than others.  Presence in Strange Lands  focuses on people, teams and tasks at a micro level and emphasizes the role of a sense of presence in motivating journeys to strange lands.  It speaks through the words of those "on the road," literally or figuratively.

Fundamentally, this is a book for "travelers," but one that deals not so much with the wear on the feet, but the changes to the mind and the spirit.  In that sense, though much more concerned with task, team and organization, it is like O'Reilly, O'Reilly & O'Reilly (1997)  The Road Within: True Stories of Transformation.  In fact, selected quotes from some of my early work are included in the latter and I include some from it in mine.  We are all talking here about journey, through places, people, cultures and technologies.

Presence in Strange Lands  opens with the view of Kangchenjunga floating in the sky and along its trek encounters much both outside us and within us.  After journeying through the many ways that a sense of presence affects our experiences as we travel the globe--both literally as we get into airplanes and figuratively in geographically dispersed online teams, it ends with an appeal for continued dialogue designed to nurture both the exhilaration and insight that we all have of the Strange Lands in our own lives.  And those that by choice, or necessity, we will face in the future.

The book is available through eBookMall or as a Google Book  or an Amazon Kindle edition.  Or check us out on Facebook.

 ... and dear fellow sojourners,

As part of a continuing research project my colleagues and are eliciting travelers' descriptions of their experiences of a "sense of presence." Perhaps you could help us.

Do you recall experiences abroad in which you were totally aware of what was happening around you at that time? That is, your thoughts weren't wandering into the past or future or to people or events elsewhere. That is the experience called a "sense of presence." If you recall such experiences, please describe one or two in terms of:

Where were you (country, city, etc) and what were you doing?

What was the experience like (your sensations, feelings, thoughts)?

How long did the experience last (seconds, minutes, hours, days)?

Did you enjoy the Experience?  Do you seek more such experiences in your life?

Please email your description to me at garymfontaine@gmail.com

I thank you in advance. All your responses will be treated anonymously.

Aloha, Gary Fontaine

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