Initial thoughts

After taking a sneaky peek at the brief online ahead of the lesson, social networking tools spring to mind, primarily facebook. Every day there more possibilities for connectivity springing up, and with the development of smartphones 24/7 access is available where there is an internet connection. I currently feel that the need for almost continuous desire for connectivity is in a way fuelled by the nosiness and exhibitionalist sides of human nature-we want to keep an eye on friends and also show off. I have an iphone and i've turned off push messaging but i can't help pulling up the mailbox and requesting information fairly often despite feeling slightly disgusted with myself!

With tools like facebook you get a physical impression of the person as any textual data is backed up by photos and videos anda continuous stream of little updates when they do absolutely anything.

But firstly i need to think about what constitutes presence before trying to capture it.

We have 5 senses:
Touch
Sight
Sound
Taste
Smell

How can these be represented/reproduced?

Is it possible to synthetically reproduce taste, touch, and smell?
Is description enough to reproduce these feelings?

Will synthetically recreating the effect a person/people have on their environment create a sense of their presence?

Taste
-Virtual reality
http://synthetic.ning.com/profiles/blogs/touch-taste-smell-virtual
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4006-virtual-reality-conquers-sense-of-taste.html

The second link is much more interesting, providing details on how the sense of taste could be reproduced

-whils reading it i had an idea: creating a thin device that fits over the tongue that would send impulses to various parts of the tongue in exactly the right order to recreate the taste. It would be crazy cool but everyones tongues are different so wouldn't work!

I will look into virtual reproduction of the other senses at a later date but perhaps this is being a bit too detailed erly on, and maybe recording interaction first would be the best start.