Regimes of information and the paradox of embeddedness: an introduction

This introduction outlines the problematic that has served as the basis for this special issue. Interaction weaves the fabric of social life in the form of events that are usually embedded in a series of particulars, variously referred to as contexts or situations. At the same time, actors, and the contexts in which they are embedded, are constituted by social rules, role systems, and normative frameworks that transcend situated encounters. Furthermore, most interactive events involve a range of resources and technological capabilities that recur across contexts and situations. This special issue deals with how the multivalent involvement of information and communication technologies in social practice alters this basic problematic. It entails six research articles that investigate particular social practices and the ways each of these practices are refigured by the deepening involvement of information and communication technologies. This special issue also features an invited perspective piece by distinguished philosopher Albert Borgmann

Something We Loved That Was Taken Away : Community and Neoliberalism in World of Warcraft

In this paper, we explore social life and play experiences on Nostalrius Begins, a World of Warcraft (WoW) private server. Private servers allow players to return to previous versions of a game before changes that modified it. Research indicates that changes to the current version of WoW discourage sociality and are upsetting for many players. Through a year-long ethnography, we found that the stories, memories, struggles, and concerns that players shared on Nostalrius Begins allowed them to rebuild the social community that they missed from earlier versions of the game. Over time, however, the neoliberal ideology of offline culture influenced players’ behaviors and affected social experience in a different way. Our research provides an analysis of the tension between community and neoliberal values in online games

Using Synthetic Worlds for Work and Learning

Synthetic worlds [Castronova 2005] are graphically-rich, three-dimensional (3D), electronic environments where members assume an embodied persona (i.e., avatars) and engage in socializing, competitive quests, and economic transactions with globally distributed others. Frequently categorized as technologies of play, synthetic worlds range from massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) such as World of Warcraft, to virtual reality environments such as Second Life. Increasingly, educators, researchers and corporations are recognizing these 3D online spaces as legitimate communication media, thereby blurring the lines between work and play, and between reality and virtuality. In this panel, presented at the 2007 International Conference on Information Systems, we explore how the fluid work-play and reality-virtuality boundaries are negotiated and managed in practice. The panelists will rely on their research, conducted in educational, corporate and game environments, to address questions about learning, working and playing in these new media spaces

Online Media Forums as Separate Social Lives: A Qualitative Study of Disclosure Within and Beyond Reddit

Social media websites and web forums increasingly resemble massive media-sharing spaces where participants must manage self-presentation by targeting data disclosures to anticipated audiences. To explore the dynamics of selective disclosure, we conducted a qualitative study with participants on the social news site, reddit, and examined how people discuss its content in conversation on the website, in other websites, and in face-to-face conversation. We conducted 24 interviews with users and analyzed a supplementary corpus of popular reddit threads and reddit Internet Relay Chat logs. We also made regular use of the website to ground our understanding of the community. In our inductive analysis we found that many reddit users described deliberate social choices to compartmentalize discussions involving content on the website from their social lives beyond.ye

An ethnographic study of distributed problem solving in spreadsheet development

In contrast to the common view of spreadsheets as “single-user ” programs, we have found that spreadsheets offer surprisingly strong support for cooperative development of a wide variety of applications. Ethnographic interviews with spreadsheet users showed that nearly all of the spreadsheets used in the work environments studied were the result of collaborative work by people with different levels of programming and domain expertise. Cooperation among spreadsheet users was spontaneous and casual; users activated existing informal social networks to initiate collaboration

Determining Community Attitudes and Preferences for Programs and Services

Planning programs may fail to accomplish their goals and objectives because they do not meet the needs of the population for which they are designed. Planners may be of different socioeconomic, regional, or ethnic backgrounds from those for whom they plan. They may perceive and evaluate important aspects of the environment differently from their clients. For these reasons, individuals who will be living and working in the environment to be designed or modified by planners should be encouraged to provide input into the development of plans which will affect their activities and enterprises. A means of assessing needs and values of the community ought to be incorporated into planning projects

Mapping the Margins: Navigating the Ecologies of Domestic Violence Service Provision

Work addressing the negative impacts of domestic violence on victim-survivors and service providers has slowly been contributing to the HCI discourse. However, work discussing the necessary, pre-emptive steps for researchers to enter these spaces sensitively and considerately, largely remains opaque. Heavily-politicised specialisms that are imbued with conflicting values and practices, such as domestic violence service delivery can be especially difficult to navigate. In this paper, we report on a mixed methods study consisting of interviews, a design dialogue and an ideation workshop with domestic violence service providers to explore the potential of an online service directory to support their work. Through this three-stage research process, we were able to characterise this unique service delivery landscape and identify tensions in services' access, understandings of technologies and working practices. Drawing from our findings, we discuss opportunities for researchers to work with and sustain complex information ecologies in sensitive settings

On the Margins of the Machine: Heteromation and Robotics

Growing interest in robotics in policy and professional circles promises a future where machines will perform many of the social and institutional functions that have traditionally belonged to human beings. This promise is based on the unexamined premise that robots can act autonomously, without much support from their human users. Close examination of current social robots, however, introduces a different image, where human labor is critically needed for any meaningful operation of these systems. Such labor is normally unacknowledged and made invisible in media and academic portrayals of robotic systems. We take issue with this erasure, and seek to bring human labor to the fore. Drawing on the concept of “heteromation,” we illustrate the indispensible role of human labor in the functioning of many of the existing technological systems. Given current uncertainties in the robotic design space, we explore various scenarios for the future development of these systems, and the different ways by which they might unfold.ye