Social Presence in Virtual Communication to Foster On-line Guanxi

Abstract

Human communication via the internet is becoming fundamental for sharing information. Netizens through on-line communication start, maintain and enhance social relationship when sharing information. The practice of having a relationship that benefits one another is called on-line Guanxi. Guanxi is actually a Chinese business concept that is related to networking that benefits business transactions. This study investigates, one of the features that enhance on-line Guanxi which is social presence. This study investigates social presence as one of the features in on-line interaction that enhances on-line Guanxi. This study verifies how members of web-forum communities maintain or enhance their relationship with others or choose to neglect or damage it. Text messages from online discussions are coded and tagged according to the language functions they seem to perform as prescribed by Speech Acts Theory and Herring’s Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis (CMDA) framework. This study found that social presence encouraged forum members to indulge in return–action to share information, where an initial information seeking act necessitated responding messages. Social presence encouraged forum members to feel the presence of others users when they echo a fellow member, code switch and code mix, joke or answer questions. These strategies aided forum members to engage socially by recognizing the presence of others and their need for new information. This study was able to show that the feature of social presence in web-forum interaction was essential for on-line Guanxi. This paper introduces a new perspective of CMC and calls more attention to this new phenomenon of on-line Guanxi that promotes healthier and fruitful on-line interaction.