Through the process of developing the social presence tutorial, I gained a deep understanding of the importance of message volume in an online environment. The amount of messages or feedback required by students to participate in forums/bulletinboards is an important factor to consider because large amount of messages generated can be very intimidating or exhausting for students to keep up. What at first seems like a fun asynchronous way to communicate now becomes a tedious task to keep up. I reflect back to some of the online classes that I thought were a drag, or poorly facilitated, and those were the classes that heavily required me to post thoughts and then respond at least two or three times over to the same thread.

The dawning of instant messenger brought about an awareness that spurred change in the way people communicate with text. Not only did common phrases become shortened to create a proliferation of internet slang and abbreviations (ttly, g2g, lol, rofl, imho, ect) but also a method of adding media richness to text was created. The emoticons, :) , :p , :s and many others were adopted to convey the meaning behind the text. I do not believe that this was the first attempt for a culture to relay what was lost without tone, gestures, facial expressions
and other context clues given in face-to-face meetings. However it was and is a great way to increase social presence in a text based environment.

Research suggests that participants who felt a higher sense of social presence enhanced their socio-emotional experience by using emoticons, such as smiley faces or sad faces. The emoticons express the non verbal cues that were missing from the interactions due to the decline in media richness. According to the media richness theory, communication richness is judged by the ablilty of the media to reporduce information sent through its channels (text, audio, audio-visual, face to face) with face-to-face as the most media rich mode of communication.

"It is hypothesized that using strategies to improve social context, online communication, and interactivity will increase interaction of online students and instructors in online classes (2002)."

Gunawardena and Zittle's results indicated that participants who felt a higher sense of social presence within the conference enhanced their socio-emotional experience by using emoticons to express missing nonverbal cues in written form. Therefore, "Instructors who are accustomed to relying on nonverbal cues to provide feedback and who have a lesser-developed ability to project their personality will need to learn to adapt to the CMC (computer mediated communication) medium by developing skills that create a sense of social presence."