We discuss findings from an ethnographic study of instant messaging (IM) in the workplace and its implications for media theory. We describe how instant messaging supports a variety of informal communication tasks. We document the affordances of IM that support flexible, expressive communication. We describe some unexpected uses of IM that highlight aspects of communication which are not part of current media theorizing. They pertain to communicative processes people use to connect with each other and to manage communication, rather than to information exchange. We call these processes "outeraction." We discuss how outeractional aspects of communication affect media choice and patterns of media use. Keywords Instant messaging, media theory, informal communication, computer-mediated communication, outeraction. INTRODUCTION Recent empirical work has shown the importance of informal workplace communication for effective collaboration. By informal we mean interactions that are generall...

A fundamental problem in text data mining is to extract meaningful structure from document streams that arrive continuously over time. E-mail and news articles are two natural examples of such streams, each characterized by topics that appear, grow in intensity for a period of time, and then fade away. The published literature in a particular research field can be seen to exhibit similar phenomena over a much longer time scale. Underlying much of the text mining work in this area is the following intuitive premise --- that the appearance of a topic in a document stream is signaled by a "burst of activity," with certain features rising sharply in frequency as the topic emerges.

Mixed empirical results about the value oflT investments are an invitation to seek better theory. Recently, a number of researchers have proposed theoretical models that trace the path IT investment inputs take on the way to creating business value. Despite substantive differences, the theoretical models share some common elements-- n particular, all of them contain a cause-effect argument of the "necessary, but not sufficient " form that characterizes process theories. In this paper, we attempt our own process theory synthesis of these models, resolving some of their apparent contradictions, to serve as a platform for future research. One important implication of our process model is to highlight IT use and kalowhow as intermediate outcomes requiring much further research. 1.

this paper. MISQ Review articles survey, conceptualize, and synthesize prior MIS research and set directions for future research. For more details see http://www.misq.org/misreview/announce.html The associated web site for this paper is located at http://misq.org/misreview/teeni.shtml communication to a view that assesses the balance between medium and message form. There is also a need to look more closely at the process of communication in order to identify more precisely any potential areas of computer support

The paper questions three common assumptions (1) that electronic forums will certainly strengthen pre-existing face-to-face territorial (and other intact) communities; (2) electronic forum will replace them with comparably pro-social forms and (3) "market forces" will naturally foster electronic forums that are prosocial. It proposes a strong research program that examines how the social design/organization of electronic forums strengthen or weaken group life in workplaces and communities. KEYWORDS: Electronic forums, community, social capital, communication. THE COMPLEX RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN ELECTRONIC FORUMS AND COMMUNITY LIFE.

E-commerce strategists advise companies to create virtual communities for their customers. But what does this involve? Research on face-to-face communities identifies the concept of “sense of community: ” a characteristic of successful communities distinguished by members ’ helping behaviors and members’ emotional attachment to the community and other members. Does a sense of virtual community exist in online settings, and what does it consist of? Answering these questions is key, if we are to provide guidance to businesses attempting to create virtual communities. The paper explores the concept of sense of virtual community in a newsgroup we call Multiple Sports Newsgroup (MSN). We first demonstrate that MSN does indeed have a sense of virtual community, but that the dimensions of the sense of community in MSN differ somewhat from those reported for physical communities. The nature of these differences is plausibly related to the differences between electronic and face-to-face communication. We next describe the behavioral processes that contribute to the sense of virtual community at MSN—exchanging support, creating identities and making identifications, and the production of trust. Again, these processes are similar to those found in non-virtual communities, but they are related to the challenges of electronic communication. Lastly, we consider the question of how sense of community may come about and discuss the implications for electronic business.

Abstract. CSCW has long been concerned with the distribution of activities in time and in space, but the problems of distributed work have often taken analytic and technical precedence. In this paper, we are interested in the issue of temporality in collaborative work. In particular, we want to examine how the temporal organization of action is experienced by those who are involved in it. To investigate this phenomenon, we conducted a field study of medical workers in a surgical intensive care unit. Through this study, we highlight the temporal organization of the work. In particular, we introduce and describe three temporal features – temporal trajectories, temporal rhythms, and temporal horizons – that emerge from and influence the work of healthcare providers as they attempt to seek, provide, and manage information during the course of their daily work. Key words: collaborative work, medical work, information seeking, temporality 1.

E-commerce strategists advise companies to create virtual communities for their customers. But what is involved in establishing and maintaining virtual communities? This paper addresses two questions: Does a sense of community similar to that sometimes observed in physical communities also occur in virtual settings? And how is a sense of virtual community maintained? These questions are examined in an intensive study of an established virtual community called MSN. MSN members experienced a sense of community, but the dimensions of sense of community differed somewhat from those reported for physical communities in ways plausibly related to the differences between electronic and face-toface communication. The experienced sense of community in MSN was actively maintained through the social processes of exchanging support, creating identities and making identifications, and the production of trust. Again, these processes are similar to those in non-virtual communities, but related to the challenges of electronic communication. The findings suggest a process model of sense of virtual community creation and maintenance that is simpler and more powerful than previous theories.

The widespread practice of forwarding is a distinct aspect of the electronic mail ecosystem with implications for security, knowledge management, and the design of email interfaces. Forwarded email messages have increased or decreased credibility or significance depending on the sender’s reputation. They provide information about an individual’s social network, and function as a personal news clipping service. To date, there has been minimal research published on email forwarding behaviors and we hope to add to the research community’s knowledge in this area. In this paper we explore email forwarding in terms of gift giving within a social network, and the collective action dilemmas present in each decision to forward or not forward and to read or not read (and act on or not act on) any piece of email that could be sent to one or more recipients. 1 Forwarded Message Characteristics Forwarded messages are written by someone other than the person who sends them and are sent to someone who was not the original recipient; by definition they are not original works. As people encounter new information that may have relevance for others in their social network, they may decide to forward some or all of the content of interest. Forwarding can be understood in terms of the concept of gift exchange. In the “gift economy ” model forwarded messages can be viewed as low cost tokens that are exchanged in order to maintain both weak and strong social ties. Just as people once regularly clipped articles from print publications and mailed them to friends and colleagues, forwarded email is often based on clippings

Abstract—E-communication in businesses has been the target of intense research. The media richness hypothesis has been influential in some e-communication research circles and has also been strongly attacked by social theorists. It is argued in this paper that this theoretical polarization involving advocates of the media richness hypothesis and social theorists is due to two problems. The first is that there is a wealth of empirical evidence that provides direct support for the notion that human beings prefer the face-to-face medium for a variety of business tasks that involve communication, which seems to provide support for the media richness hypothesis. The second problem is that the media richness hypothesis is built on a vacuum, as no underlying explanation was ever presented by media richness theorists for our predisposition toward rich (or face-to-face) media. The main goal of this paper is to offer a solution to these problems by providing an alternative to the media richness hypothesis, referred to here as media naturalness hypothesis, developed based on Darwin’s theory of evolution. The media naturalness hypothesis argues that, other things being equal, a decrease in the degree of naturalness of a communication medium (or its degree of similarity to the face-to-face medium) leads to the following effects in connection with a communication interaction: (1) increased cognitive effort, (2) increased communication ambiguity, and (3) decreased physiological arousal. Like the media richness hypothesis, the media naturalness hypothesis has important implications for the selection, use,