INLS 180 Human Information Interactions

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INLS 180 Human Information Interactions

• Session 22
• Technology and Organizational Communication
• Jesse Safir and Terrell Russell
• Tuesday, November 9, 2004

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Networked Society

• Wellman, Barry (2002).  Designing the Internet
  For A Networked Society. Communications of the
  ACM 45 (5)91 96

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Networked Society

• 3 types of societies
• Traditional - Little Boxes
• Networked Societies
• Glocalization

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Traditional Little Box Societies
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Traditional Societies

• Lives encapsulated in villages and small work
  groups
• All members connected directly
• Highly restrictive boundaries to the outside
• Almost everyone knows everyone else
• Little isolation, much social control, and
  sporadic contact with the outside world
• Face-to-face information seeking
• Densely-knit and tightly-bound clusters
• Little box society

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Groupware

• Attempts to replicate little box societies
  among physically-dispersed people
• Assumes a limited set of people communicating
  frequently
• Designed to help members share information and
  resources and be aware of each others activities
• Other than most bi-directional instant messaging
  applications, groupware is not widely used
• It is best suited for communication within
  complex organizations (e.g. with Lotus Notes)

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Networked Societies
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Networked Societies

• Boundaries are permeable
• Interactions are with diverse others
• Links switch among multiple networks
• Hierarchies are flatter and organizational
  structures more complex
• Social networks are sparsely knit and physically
  dispersed
• Began in 1960s but really took off in 1990s with
  the Internet
• Flexible openness to intermittent communication

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Transitions

• Technology has allowed us to move from a more
  traditional information society to a more
  networked society.
• However, we only ever exist somewhere in the
  middle.

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1979 Study in Toronto

• 22 most active ties with others within one mile
• 21 most active ties with others over 100 miles
  away
• Median distance of active ties was 10 miles away

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Reasons for changes in social relationships

• Increased transportation and communications
  (telephone and Internet)
• Industrial revolution
• Development of nation-states

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Glocalization
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Glocalization

• The definitions of household and neighborhood
  have changed as a result of networked societies
• Far-flung ties with family and friends
• Less vibrant neighborhood life
• Connections to others outside the little box
  societies are increasingly important

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Glocalization

• With the increasing pervasiveness of
  communication between networked computers, we are
  in the middle of the most transforming
  technological event since the capture of fire --
  John Perry Barlow (Utne Reader, 1995)

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Glocalization

• People seek more social connections
• Religious gatherings
• Adults take a class
• Online chat groups and message boards
• Neighborhood block parties
• Neighborhood interaction is no longer necessary
  but it is still sought to preserve the feeling of
  local community
• Social networks may be replacing local group
  participation

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Social Networks on the Internet

• Support large numbers of transitory
  relationships
• Enable people to maneuver among multiple
  community and work networks
• Make it possible for people with similar
  interests to find each other even if physically
  dispersed

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Social Networks on the Internet (Questions)

• Wellman believes that Internet inhabitants
  develop elaborate routines to guard their
  accessibility, prioritize contact, form
  evanescent grouplets, and compartmentalize who
  has access to what.
• Do you think this is true or do you see the
  Internet as perhaps more open than the real
  world?

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Social Networks on the Internet (Questions)

• Wellman believes that for every interpersonal tie
  operating only online, many more combine email
  with in-person and telephone contact.
• Do you think this is true or do you think a
  minority of online social contacts result in
  face-to-face interaction?

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Social Networks on the Internet (Questions)

• Wellman believes the Internet provides less
  social capital to those of low socioeconomic
  status or who dont speak English.
• Do you think this is still true or has the
  Internet and access evolved to provide these
  opportunities to most people? To what extent has
  the digital divide disappeared?

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Social Networks on the Internet (Questions)

• Does the Internet weaken face-to-face community
  and domesticity? Do people interface more with
  their computers and TV screens than with other
  human beings? (Jim Hightower, 1995).

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Social Networks on the Internet (Questions)

• Will the Internet facilitate new forms of
  voluntary local communities, based on shared
  interests? Will there be more or less
  face-to-face contact?
• For example, is meetup.com effective at using the
  Internet to create new active local communities?

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Survey2000 from 1998

• Survey2000 was conducted 6 years ago (1998)
• 47,176 visitors to a web-based survey at National
  Geographic web site

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Survey2000 from 1998

• Survey 2000 data showed that the telephone was
  used more frequently than email and email
  represented only 50 of contacts with friends and
  family.
• Has this changed in the past 6 years? Has the
  transition from single household land-line phones
  to individual personal cell phones changed this?
• Has the ubiquity of networked computers changed
  this?

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Survey2000 from 1998

• Problems with the study
• Far fewer friends and family members were
  available online in 1998 than today
• Contact rates were fallibly reported
• Self-selected survey rather than random sample
• Only Canadian and US data
• Statistically biased toward higher socio-economic
  status and computer use

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Other Studies of Networked Societies

• Wellmans 1997-1999 study of Netville found
  email especially useful for forging the weaker
  ties of acquaintanceship that help knit a
  community together.
• Wellman cites a study from the spring of 1999
  that found that the majority of email was sent
  from locally geographic sources. Is this still
  true?

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Implications for System Design

• Need to create technology that reflects and
  enhances how the world functions in social
  networks
• In the past, you adapted to the network. In the
  future, the network adapts to you Thomas Gray,
  Mitel Computer Scientist

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Implications for System Design

• Wellman forecasts this change to happen within a
  decade due to increased broadband, global
  ubiquity, portability, availability and
  personalized services.
• We must simultaneously look backward as
  ethnographers and forward as computer scientists
  while designing future systems to aid development
  of social networks.

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Organizational Memory

• Ackerman, Mark S. (1998).  Augmenting
  Organizational Memory A Field Study of Answer
  Garden.  ACM Transactions on Information Systems,
  16 (3) 203-224. 

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Organizational Memory

• The likelihood that a perceived problem will
  find an organizational solution increases as the
  organization has additional resources to find
  previously created solutions or to create new
  solutions (Cohen et al, 1972)
• If an organization learns, then the result should
  be available later.

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Organizational Memory

• The contents of an organizational memory can be
  made available for further individual and
  organizational learning.
• Organizational memory is organizational knowledge
  with persistence.
• Organizations are concerned with achieving their
  goals in ways that minimize the drain on limited
  resources.

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Organizational Memory

• Organizational memory can be contained in many
  locations
• Individuals
• Organizational culture
• Organizational transformations
• Organizational structures
• Organizational ecology
• External Archives
• Corporate manuals, databases, filing systems, and
  even stories

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Information Technology and OM

• Information Technology can support Organizational
  Memory in two ways
• Making recorded knowledge retrievable
• Making individuals with knowledge accessible

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OM from the Information Seeking Perspective

• Can be seen as the process of finding the right
  piece of organizational memory
• 1977 Allen study of engineers found that the
  major source of organizational information was
  from direct contact and communication with
  colleagues

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OM from the Information Seeking Perspective

• Engineers tended to not go to the channel of
  highest quality of technical information but
  rather to the channel of the highest
  accessibility
• Some people tend not to seek organizational
  information because they are afraid of being seen
  as incompetent if they ask for help

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Answer Garden

• Developed at MIT
• It is a system for storing and retrieving
  organizational knowledge
• It is extensible and provides for the knowledge
  base to grow when new questions are asked
  because the answers dont already exist in the
  system
• Information seekers can ask questions anonymously
  so they dont have to worry about being seen as
  incompetent or lacking common knowledge

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Answer Garden

• You can find it yourself
• Travel down a set of diagnostic questions that
  lead the user to the information sought. This is
  similar to playing the game of Twenty Questions
• Go directly to the information sought through a
  directed acyclic graph of diagnostic questions
  projected into a tree to ease navigation for
  advanced users
• Free text retrieval and keyword retrievable

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Answer Garden

• Or ask an expert
• Im Unhappy button on all nodes allows the user
  to jump to a mailer that allows him/her to ask a
  question directly, which is then directed to an
  appropriate human expert (via email, etc.)
• The human expert then answers the user directly
  and can also generalize the answer and add it to
  the knowledge base. The expert can also add any
  diagnostic questions that might be necessary to
  arrive at the new answer

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Answer Garden

• Users first browse the database but if they
  cannot find the answer they need, they are
  directed to the appropriate expert automatically
• The construction of the knowledge base is
  iterative and the corpus of information grows
  over time

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Incentives for Both

• The incentive for users to use the Answer Garden
  is that they can access the information they seek
  without having to worry about what others might
  think of them
• The incentive to experts to answer questions and
  add them to the Answer Garden is that they can
  rid themselves of commonly asked questions

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Answer Garden

• Design allows for the production of information
  on demand
• Different from expert systems and other knowledge
  base systems because of the communication
  channels (email, chat, etc.) and access to human
  experts that are built in as part of the system

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Field Study of Answer Garden

• Study of X Window System
• A research group at MIT and a class extension at
  Harvard
• 59 potential users
• Several supplemental sites

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Field Study of Answer Garden

• Assumptions
• Separate groups of information seekers and
  experts. In reality, there was a continuum of
  levels of technical knowledge among the users and
  experts
• Answer Garden contained only static information

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Field Study of Answer Garden

• Results
• Some users didnt want to spend the time to learn
  the system
• Future studies should be restricted to smaller
  domains so users will be more likely to find
  answers to their questions already in the
  information database, or the initial period of
  activity will be largely devoted to building the
  domain coverage

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Field Study of Answer Garden

• Results
• Users rated the system more highly when the
  answer to their question was already in the
  information database or they got a quick response
  by e-mail to their question
• Being able to quickly determine that the
  information sought was not in the information
  database was often seen as a positive attribute

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Field Study of Answer Garden

• Results
• Users had to be prompted to accept the use of the
  social network as part of the information
  retrieval process
• Users liked being able to ask their questions
  anonymously
• About a third of the users reported problems with
  the specificity of the material and the level of
  the explanation provided by the expert

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Field Study of Answer Garden

• Results
• Most experts provided very thorough and detailed
  answers, first because they tried to immediately
  generalize from the specific situation to a
  general answer and secondly because their
  response served as a public badge for them
  within their organization or community

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Field Study of Answer Garden

• Results
• This push toward formal and detailed answers was
  problematic for some users who desired short,
  easily readable answers. This problem might be
  resolved by adding an information moderator or
  editor to the system

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Field Study of Answer Garden

• Lessons Learned
• Such systems should provide suitable incentives
  for use
• Such systems have the potential to reduce
  concerns about status implications for
  information seekers because they can ask their
  questions anonymously
• Experts often feel a need to maintain their
  organizational face with high quality, in depth
  answers

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Field Study of Answer Garden

• Lessons Learned
• The need for information reciprocity appeared to
  have diminished, if not disappeared
• Many users have a preference for reading manuals
  and asking colleagues before consulting the
  experts because they are concerned about not
  bothering the experts
• The clear cut separation between users and
  experts might be artificial and it may lead to
  operational difficulties

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Field Study of Answer Garden

• Lessons Learned
• Some users were concerned that the experts were
  volunteers so that answering questions required
  labor that was not organizationally rewarded
• A large proportion of users did not get answers
  that were at the right level or length of
  explanation
• Organizational dysfunctionality occurs when the
  people at the same expertise level cannot answer
  a question and there is no person with greater
  expertise available

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Social Networks and Organizational Memory

• Unique Points
• The Internet has allowed us to expand our social
  networks so they have topicality in addition to
  being localized geographically.
• We manage much larger social networks today.
• Users seek equal footing. We like experts, but
  we find common ground among equals. It's how we
  learn with the least stress.
• Organic organizational memory exists and we
  simply need tools that capture it along the way.

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Discussion Questions

• As we move forward, will our social networks
  reinvigorate local community or will people
  isolate physically and immerse virtually?
• To what extent are online social networks tied to
  where we plug in? How might the future of
  ubiquitous wireless access, mobile instant
  messaging, or smart phones change the social
  landscape of Networked Societies?
• How might an Answer Garden system work
  differently for other domains of users and
  experts? Teacher Network? Doctor Network?
• In what ways might you be able to route anonymous
  information requests to the appropriate experts
  without setting up an artificial separation
  between users and experts?
• How is the Answer Garden better than a Wiki?
  Chat Reference? Are there better tools for the
  job? What's missing?