Is It Fun to Go to Sydney? Common-Sense Knowledge of Social Structures and WAP

This paper investigated how people navigate through early Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) sites using their common-sense knowledge of social structures. The study is based on a close analysis of 9 videotaped test sessions of WAP use situations taped in Helsinki, Finland between 2000-2004. The data was transcribed using standard conventions of conversation analysis, and analyzed in an inductive fashion to identify and describe the ways in which subjects used their common-sense knowledge in navigating through WAP. The analysis reveals how the structure of WAP makes it necessary for people to rely on their common-sense knowledge in trying to decide what to do next when on a particular WAP page, but also how common-sense knowledge leads them astray. The analysis is qualitative. The conclusions point out the ambiguous role of common-sense knowledge and relates WAP to previous technologies like the pre-visual Internet of the early 1990s