Introduction to Wearable Technology and the Internet of Everything Minitrack

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Online child sexual exploitation: a new MIS challenge

© 2021, Association for Information Systems. All rights reserved. This paper deals with the difficult yet increasingly important MIS phenomenon of online child sexual exploitation (online CSE). Through the use of secondary and publicly available data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as primary data from a cybercrime police unit in the United Kingdom, this study takes a grounded theory approach and organizes the role that technologies and social actors play in shaping online CSE. The paper contributes to IS theory by providing a consolidated model for online CSE, which we call the technology and imagery dimensions model. This model combines the staging of the phenomenon and the key dimensions that depict how the use of technology and imagery both fuels and defuses the phenomenon. In informing the construction of the model, the paper extracts, organizes, and generalizes the affordances of technology and discusses the role of information systems in detecting online CSE

In touch out in the field. Coalescence and interactive innovation of technology for mobile work.

Today, more than 90% of Britons own a mobile phone handset. Yet, the popularity of mobile telephony is a fairly recent phenomenon, with the first mobile phone call in the UK made only 21 years ago. Mobile technology has come a long way since the first mobile call that was made from St Katherine's dock to Vodafone's head office in Newbury. Many interesting mobile computing technologies have surfaced, including pagers, laptop computers, tablet PCs and Blackberries, constantly offering altogether new communicative acts to mobile workers. Innovation of mobile information systems, too, has changed quite dramatically over this time period. What was once an industry marked by low competition and high profit margins for devices developed purely by Research and Development departments now increasingly involves, even requires, the interaction with users for the innovation of new mobile devices in highly competitive environments. Despite the increasing popularity of mobile technologies, the concept of mobility and the innovation of mobile information systems remain largely unexplored. This study takes up the challenge to examine how innovation of mobile technology unfolds today. With this focus, this research explores the relationships between innovators of technology for mobile work and its users. It departs from the prevalent product- oriented view of innovation and treats technology in the making as a conscious human activity, made possible through the trinity of innovator companies, their organisational clients as innovation partners and their particular mobile workers as end users of the technology. This study examines the complex interaction and coalescence of these parties as shaped by their respective organisational activities, their unique motives for cooperation with one another, their use of technology and their relationship to the geographical mobility and distribution of work. From the outset, this study was committed to providing a rigorous examination grounded in actual work. As an Action Researcher, I was very fortunate to be invited to follow the innovation and development of a fundamentally new mobile information system, based on the convergence of mobile telephony and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology. The empirical work and theoretical analysis emphasised the epistemological differences among innovation participants and unearthed many complications that shape how interactive innovation of technology for mobile work unfolds. Moreover, the analysis of the empirical work led to the conceptual difference between mobility and pervasiveness of work as it pertains to innovation. It revealed Individual Pervasiveness, or the extent to which an individual's technology is aware of its immediate context and communicates details of its bearer and his behaviour. It also uncovered a Pervasive Order, imposed from superior to mobile worker and made possible in this case through mobile RFID. Together, these two concepts fundamentally change the information flow within mobile work activities. The trajectory from mobility to pervasiveness dramatically reshapes the activities of mobile workers and their superiors and, thus, the activity of interactive innovation of technology for mobile work

Social Media? Get Serious! Understanding the Functional Building Blocks of Social Media

Traditionally, consumers used the Internet to simply expend content: they read it, they watched it, and they used it to buy products and services. Increasingly, however, consumers are utilizing platforms–—such as content sharing sites, blogs, social networking, and wikis–—to create, modify, share, and discuss Internet content. This represents the social media phenomenon, which can now significantly impact a firm’s reputation, sales, and even survival. Yet, many executives eschew or ignore this form of media because they don’t understand what it is, the various forms it can take, and how to engage with it and learn. In response, we present a framework that defines social media by using seven functional building blocks: identity, conversations, sharing, presence, relationships, reputation, and groups. As different social media activities are defined by the extent to which they focus on some or all of these blocks, we explain the implications that each block can have for how firms should engage with social media. To conclude, we present a number of recommendations regarding how firms should develop strategies for monitoring, understanding, and responding to different social media activities

On your marks, headset, go! Understanding the building blocks of metaverse realms

In 2011, Business Horizons published the social media honeycomb article to help managers and scholars understand what was, then, a new form of media, along with its various platforms and how to engage with and learn to use it. Today, we face similar challenges and opportunities with the metaverse as we try to discover how to attract, enable, serve, and capture value from users in the virtual world. In this article, we introduce the concept of a metaverse realm (i.e., a specific type of metaverse space and community) and present the metaverse honeycomb model to explain the functionalities and affordances for different metaverse realms. We present two applications of the honeycomb model to show how shifting attention to immersive functionalities can characterize various metaverse realms. To conclude, we outline how the model could be used to strategically evaluate metaverse realms in terms of their external fit (i.e., the who-what-how of realms), internal fit (i.e., the trade-offs and synergies of realm functionalities), and life cycles (i.e., roadmapping and directing realm evolution)