Being There Together and the Future of Connected Presence by Ralph Schroeder, Presence, Vol. 15, No. 4, Pages 438-454, 2006. The paper is about presence in virtual environment, a very broad topic. But I am less interested in presence per se than in some of the elements that contribute to this experience; namely mutual awareness:

This paper proposes a model for the different modalities of connected presence whereby research on shared virtual environments can be integrated with research on other new media - and vice versa. (...) People are either immersed in the physical world or in the virtual world, stepping in and out of these constantly, and sometimes participating in several such worlds, limited only by the fact that sensory attention needs to be focused on a limited set of people and features of the environment, which makes multiple simultaneous channels (communicative multitasking) difficult. Increasing communication means that we are continuously connected to others who are aware of our presence and copresence to a greater or lesser extent. If we think of the multiple devices for connected presence that we use constantly throughout the day, it is possible to see that we need to manage our accessibility, mutual awareness and focus of attention continuously with different affordances (or constraints and possibilities) in different technologies for mediated interaction.

Why do I blog this? because it's quite related with the first project of my phd thesis.