From New Observations, No. 120, 1999
'Asence' is a term which I use to describe the unusual relationship between presence and absence in those societies which form on mailing lists or newsgroups. It is intended to point to some aspects of people's experience of those societies and account for some of their features.
In offline societies it is generally possible to tell whether a person is present or absent. Normally presence and status will be acknowledged by others making, at the least, eye contact or grunts in a person's direction, or by their pointedly ignoring that person. People are generally aware of who is listening to the conversation and their reactions to each other - these listeners and the reactions become part of the conversation itself. On a mailing this is not the case. It is possible for a person to feel present on a list without others being aware of them as there is no marker of existence other than communication. This can produce a situation in which one person has a deep sense of intimacy with another person or other people who live out their lives before them, and yet the others have no awareness of this reader at all. When the person tries to take this felt intimacy to the others they can meet with quite radical and unexpected rejection.
If you do post to the list then, as email tends to be buried under the influx of new mail, there is little to continue to remind people of your presence. A person who is not posting at this moment, to some extent does not exist. The only way you can know that you exist to others is by the response of others, and yet only a relatively few of the mails to lists receive acknowledgment - even if people like the post. So the writer gets little reinforcement or feedback to most of their communication-presences. If the volume of the list is heavy this apparent lack of response may even be exaggerated by the apparent presence of other people. This may lead to a sense of discouragement or dislocation.
Asence is also emphasized by the uncertainty about 'audience'. Lists or newsgroups have little in the way of clear boundaries - members have little idea who is actually present - and it is possible that people who you think might be present, are not receiving mail for some reason. They may have left the list for a few days without notification or be skipping whole chunks of mail if they are busy. Messages to which you might expect a response can go unnoticed. It is even possible that you may be engaged in conflict with someone, or 'risk' a personal remark, and those you would expect to notice do not, and thus your presence seems snubbed or absent, 'community' seems fragile.
Even in email conversation this absence in presence is emphasized by the termination patterns used. Whereas offline communication is terminated by a negotiation of grunts and formal phrases, email conversation is usually terminated abruptly with no certainty whether you have been received or read, or what your reader's reaction was. You live with continual suspension of closure.
As a person is only present in their acts then reputation, status or social identity is something that must be repeatedly 'earned'. New people, perhaps whole new 'generations', may appear on a list in a period of a few months. Non of this new generation are aware of long time list members who are currently not active, even if these 'long time members' are reading the list, are engaged in correspondence outside the list and feel themselves to be active members of the list. Therefore the new generation may construct a completely different view of the 'community' of a list and its accepted practices (as such practices only exist in the postings currently made), and longer time members may feel continually displaced from the list.
To use an anthropological metaphor social identity in such a situation is like a continual potlatch, new gifts of text must be repeatedly given and in that giving are consumed. Nothing is returned but a short lived respect in which the receiver may be completely uncertain. Not surprisingly some find this tiring.
It may also be the case that well known net phenomena like flaming stem from asence as without these extreme measures your presence and existence is always drifting away. The easiest way to get acknowledgment is to try and irritate people, particularly people that you do not have any connection to, or to attack a post. Given the numbers of such unconnected people on lists and newsgroups there is a high chance that someone will respond. The responses you get clearly demonstrate that you exist and reduce asence. This reduction in asence is probably far more important in producing flame wars than ease of expressing aggression.
In the space of this article there is not room to demonstrate more consequences of asence, but at least I can hope to point out to people who are tempted to use the most enjoyable parts of the net some of the otherwise strange effects they might notice.