For example, how we may share a color, how we may share a texture. A feeling about which colours look good together may be very different if we were colouring together. In online communication human beings have less access to physical exchange, but people compensate for this with the human capacity to project and attribute things that are not there. As in poetry, in online communication references to profound experience makes online experience rich as well. In online communities the awareness of a shift in rhythm or shift in intention will happen. It may just take that bit longer. In small online communities, in which people are deeply engaged, patterns are formed and it will be easier to notice changes in flow and intention than in larger communities with more players involved.
Witnessing emerges out of a break in flow or a break in awareness of intention. Until now ‘witnessing’ is formulated as taking responsibility for what happens next and having the possibility to act upon what happens next. Gill contributes to this notion that in both offline and online environments, creation and synchronization of rhythm is essential for well-being of human beings and a requirement for witnessing to take place as well.
Sharing Rhythm is required for witnessing to take place
The spatial dimension is physical embodiment, but in the online environment we’re disembodied, time is disembodied. We can have action to feeling. But that is still not the same. So it may be that the qualities of what we achieve in an online environment are different from the qualities in a face-to-face environment.
