When is Co-presence? On the Consensual Hallucination of Co-temporality

Abstract In social virtual reality, people can feel co-present with one another in the same virtual space while still having unequal access to what is visible, hearable, and actionable from their own technologically-mediated viewpoint. Alongside these differences in perspective, participants must also deal with a less obvious problem: that of (un)shared time. This paper argues for a reconceptualization of mediated co-presence, shifting the analytic focus from the spatial dimension of ‘being there’ to the temporal dimension of ‘being there together in time’. While existing scholarship often treats temporality as a stable background condition provided by technology, we posit that participants of virtual environments experience ‘fractured temporalities’, that is, they live through subtly divergent interactional biographies under the assumption of temporal synchrony. Drawing on multimodal interaction analysis of a series of social VR encounters, we illustrate the temporal specificities of studying mediated co-presence (case 1), analyze the effects of latency on social interaction (case 2), and identify structures participants use to bridge the spatiotemporal divide under technologically non-identical conditions (case 3). Our findings suggest that temporal and spatial non-reciprocity should be treated as analytically separate due to the asymmetry in their practical awareness. We conclude with a methodological reflection on the relationship between emic and etic analyses in the study of virtual environments.