The value of questions in organizing : reconceptualizing contributions to online public information goods

In contrast to previous research that treats question‐askers as free‐riders, this article conceptualizes questions and information requests as important forms of contribution to generating online public information goods. By requesting information, individuals make visible an informational need, calling for attention from those who may be able to fulfill that need and alerting those who share that need. Communicating questions can result in groups forming around particular shared interests, giving rise to permeable group boundaries that distinguish the interested from others. Such groups continue or even grow if new information needs are introduced. Once all information needs are fulfilled, the group will eventually dissolve, leaving their informational assets as public goods for the whole community.Accepted versionThe development of this article was supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation Grant IIS-151450

Utilization of video conferencing

Stressing the importance of accumulating systematic empirical information on the users and uses of video teleconferencing, the authors present the findings of a pilot study of AT&T's Picturephone Meeting Service. They then set out preliminary conclusions that may be drawn from those findings. The authors suggest that video telecommunication is likely to be beneficial to decision making processes in modern organizations.Teleconferencing Video communications Business communications

Cultural Assumptions that Influence the Implementation of Communication Technologies’, Paper presented at IAMCR

The authors describe the role that cultural assumptions play in the transfer of new communication technologies between the West and third world countries. They contrast Great Britain, West Germany, and India on five value orientations along which cultures vary: regard for human nature, relationship of man to nature, time orientation, orientation towards activity, and types of relations between people. Pointing out the widely differing assumptions in implementation research in the West and the third world, the authors argue that successful transfer of communication technologies depends upon a match between the cultural values of the third world country implementing the technology and the assumptions inherent in the technology itself and the implementation process for that technology. Noshir S Contractor and Arvind Singhal are doctoral students and Peter R Monge and Janet Fulk are Professor and Associate Professor respectively at the Annenberg School of Communications, University of Southern California, Los AngeJes, California. The authors wish to thank Ms. Vicki Leong for providing some of the resource material used in this paper. A substantial body of research in the West studies the implementation of new information technologies in organizations. As with other aspects of organizational behaviour, many of the theories and models developed were primarily for organizations in western cultures. Crossnational studies of management and organization have provided evidence that much of the research conducted in the West is not generalizable across different forms of economic and cultural systems. In this paper we argue that the cultural determinants of the implementation process are particularly important when studying organizations in the third world

Author's personal copy Age differences in perceptions of online community participation among non-users: An extension of the Technology Acceptance Model

a b s t r a c t This study examined age differences in perceptions of online communities held by people who were not yet participating in these relatively new social spaces. Using the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), we investigated the factors that affect future intention to participate in online communities. Our results supported the proposition that perceived usefulness positively affects behavioral intention, yet it was determined that perceived ease of use was not a significant predictor of perceived usefulness. The study also discovered negative relationships between age and Internet self-efficacy and the perceived quality of online community websites. However, the moderating role of age was not found. The findings suggest that the relationships among perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, and intention to participate in online communities do not change with age. Theoretical and practical implications and limitations were discussed

The Emergence of Core (Hash)Tags and its Effects on Performance

The informational and social impacts of tags on forming networked publics have drawn extensive scholarly attention. However, existing literature lacks systematic and longitudinal accounts of how trending tags garner community interest and facilitate the promotion of user-generated content. This study addresses this issue by explicating the structures and functions of social tagging, showing how users employed certain tags to improve performance. To provide empirical evidence, we tracked and analyzed social tagging activities in an online community from its early stage for seven years. Over this time frame, very few tags emerged as core tags--the consensus choices that both occurred and co-occurred frequently. Furthermore, the application of core tags, which can represent the tacit rules and platform vernaculars co-defined by the community members, improved performance noticeably more than using peripheral tags. Interestingly, among the core tags, those that possessed linguistic idiosyncrasies particularly contributed to high performance. The findings highlight the complex contingencies of social tagging structures and functions and provide practical implications for users and platforms to strategically manage tag-based networked publics