Perceived Social Presence in the Text-Based Media: Mobile Communication Case

Since the advent of smart phone, a variety of text-based media are developed and used as popular communication tools even in mobile phone environment. This study explores differences in terms of users` perceived social presence level across different text-based media, specifically KakaoTalk, Facebook, SMS. A survey was conducted using items adopted from previous studies on social presence. 203 data points were collected and used for analysis. Across the whole sample, KakaoTalk is perceived as the highest in terms of perceived social presence level, followed by Facebook and SMS. Also, the users with higher level of sociality tends to reveal higher level of perceived social presence across all the media while younger and/or student users tend to maintain higher level of social presence perception across all the media. Further studies seem necessary investigating features of specific medium that may increase or decrease the perceived level of social presence.