Although privacy is broadly recognized as a dominant concern for the development of novel interactive technologies, our ability to reason analytically about privacy in real settings is limited. A lack of conceptual interpretive frameworks makes it difficult to unpack interrelated privacy issues in settings where information technology is also present. Building on theory developed by social psychologist Irwin Altman, we outline a model of privacy as a dynamic, dialectic process. We discuss three tensions that govern interpersonal privacy management in everyday life, and use these to explore select technology case studies drawn from the research literature. These suggest new ways for thinking about privacy in sociotechnical environments as a practical matter.

The World Wide Web is growing quickly and being applied to many new types of communications. As a basis for studying organizational communications, Yates and Orlikowski (1992; Orlikowski & Yates, 1994) proposed using genres. They de � ned genres as “typi� ed communicative actions characterized by similar substance and form and taken in response to recurrent situations ” (Yates & Orlikowski, 1992, p. 299). They further suggested that communications in a new media would show both reproduction and adaptation of existing communicative genres as well as the emergence of new genres. We studied these phenomena on the World Wide Web by examining 1000 randomly selected Web pages and categorizing the type of genre represented. Although many pages recreated genres familiar from traditional media, we also saw examples of genres being adapted to take advantage of the linking and interactivity of the new medium and novel genres emerging to � t the unique communicative needs of the audience. We suggest that Web-site designers consider the genres that are appropriate for their situation and attempt to reproduce or adapt familiar genres.

The adaptation process for new technology is not yet well understood. This study analyzes how an inter-organizational virtual team, tasked with creating a highly innovative product over a 10 month period, adapted the use of a collaborative technology and successfully achieved its challenging objectives. The study of such a virtual team is especially useful for extending our understanding of the adaptation process as virtual teamshavemoremalleable structures than typical organizational units and controlled group experiments. Data were obtained from observations of weekly virtual meetings, electronic log files, interviews, and weekly questionnaires administered to team members. We found that the team initially experienced significant misalignments among the pre-existing organizational environment, group, and technology structures. To resolve these misalignments, the team modified the organizational environment and group structures, leaving the technology structure intact. However, as the team proceeded, a series of events unfolded that caused the team to reevaluate and further modify its structures. This final set of modifications involved reverting back to the pre-existing organizational environment, while new technology and group structures emerged as different from both the pre-existing and the initial ones. A new model of the adaptation process---one that integrates these findings and those of several previous models---is proposed.

Document management has to be rethinked and clarified in organizations, especially for the coordinated adoption of organization-wide electronic document management systems (EDMSs). This paper reports the identification and evaluation of 11 organizational document genres of an industrial organization by using a framework constituted in an earlier study. The analysis revealed that different features need to be developed for different document genres. The results indicate that universal definitions for a "document " should not be used to envision organizational EDMSs. Rather, organizational document genres and genre systems should be systematically rethinked in collaboration with information systems specialists, organization designers and domain

Abstract: In the information age, lifelong learning and collaboration are essential aspects of most innovative work. Fortunately, the computer technology which drives the information explosion also has the potential to help individuals and groups to learn much of what they need to know on demand. In particular, applications on the Internet can be designed to capture knowledge as it is generated within a community of practice and to deliver relevant knowledge when it is useful. Computer-based design environments for skilled domain workers have recently graduated from research prototypes to commercial products, supporting the learning of individual designers. Such systems do not, however, adequately support the collaborative nature of work or the evolution of knowledge within communities of practice. If innovation is to be supported within collaborative efforts, these domain-oriented design environments (DODEs) must be extended to become collaborative information environments (CIEs), capable of providing effective community memories for managing information and learning within constantly evolving collaborative contexts. In particular, CIEs must provide functionality that facilitates the construction of new knowledge and the shared understanding necessary to use this knowledge

Contemporary challenges for enterprise document management (EDM) include managing a mixture of technologies, recognizing the needs of several user roles and groups, and pursuing effective processes utilizing documents in digital form. Responding to these challenges means gathering and scrutinizing organizational metadata describing the organization's information resources. Despite the volume of metadata research in general, there continues to be a dearth of studies on metadata in the field of digital documents in the organizational context. We suggest that an analysis of organizational metadata for EDM can be based on scrutinizing genres of organizational communication. This paper reports an action research project, in which this approach has its origin. Many of the genres that were identified in the target organization were implicit and implemented by heterogeneous means, i.e. "soft". In general, an organization should be aware of the continuous evolution of its document genres and should not allow an EDM system to freeze future evolution. An explicit organizational genre repertoire including metadata about the genres, is a solid basis for the design of an EDM system. As such, the action research cycle reported here represents the first attempt towards a practice-oriented method for gathering and scrutinizing genre-based metadata for EDM development.

Documents on the Web can be composed of multiple Web pages, suggesting the need to consider how linking between pages affects a document's form. We illustrate this point by considering patterns of linking in a common genre of document, the Frequently Asked Questions file or FAQ. In a sample of 70 FAQs, we found four patterns of linking: no links, links within the page, links to pages on the same host and links to other hosts. We suggest that links that tie together document pieces simply recreate the already accepted FAQ genre, but links that provide navigation within the document or that link to other information sources begin to extend and adapt the FAQ genre to the needs and capabilities of the Web. 1.Introduction The World-Wide Web (or the Web) is an Internet client-server communication system for retrieving and displaying multi-media hypertext documents [1]. The Web's main advantage over earlier Internet systems is its merger of retrieval and display tools, its capacity for hand...

In this paper I examine mixed synchronous and asynchronous text-based conversations that have been carried on in the context of a computer-mediated communication (CMC) system called "Babble", which has been in use by a group of nineteen people for nearly two years. The primary goal is to explore principled ways of analyzing and characterizing conversational activity in such systems using genre theory. After discussing genre theory, and some of the issues that come to the fore when apply genre theory to CMC, the paper analyzes five conversations. It argues that the conversations constitute separate genres, and develops the concept of participatory structure to capture some of their differences. Next, the paper examines the CMC system as a whole: it argues that the CMC system may be viewed as an ecology of conversational genres, and discusses three properties- global pull, topical pull, and conversational impetus- which may be used to characterize the behavior of the ecology. 1.

We hypothesized that the attributes of a document’s genre determine a document’s ability to be identified uniquely. Consequently, recognizing the genre will facilitate effective user-document interaction. In this pilot study, we exposed fifteen participants to a set of paper and digital documents, each converted into two surrogates: one based on form, in which the text was masked leaving only the structure, and another on function, which reduced the document to its semantic content. Our findings indicate that the form attributes of a genre play a significant role in the identification of corresponding documents, and suggest that genre can potentially serve as an interface metaphor.

has been approved for the