doi 10.1287/isre.1080.0193

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: We thank the senior editor on the manuscript, V. Sambamurthy, and the anonymous associate editor and reviewers for their many insightful suggestions on earlier

Virtual environments, such as online games and web-based chat rooms, increasingly allow us to alter our digital self-representations dramatically and easily. But as we change our self-representations, do our self-representations change our behavior in turn? In 2 experimental studies, we explore the hypothesis that an individual’s behavior conforms to their digital self-representation independent of how others perceive them— a process we term the Proteus Effect. In the first study, participants assigned to more attractive avatars in immersive virtual environments were more intimate with confederates in a self-disclosure and interpersonal distance task than participants assigned to less attractive avatars. In our second study, participants assigned taller avatars behaved more confidently in a negotiation task than participants assigned shorter avatars. We discuss the implications of the Proteus Effect with regards to social interactions in online environments.

The Internet is widely valued for distributing control over information to a lateral network of individuals, but it is not clear how these networks can most effectively organize themselves. This paper describes the distributed networks of volunteers that emerged online following Hurricane Katrina. Online communities responded to the disaster by facilitating the distribution of donated goods from ordinary people directly to hurricane survivors. These “connected giving ” groups faced several challenges: establishing authority within the group, providing relevant information, developing trust in one another, and sustaining the group over time. Two forms of computer-mediated connected giving were observed: small blog communities and large forums. Small blog communities used a centralized authority structure that was more immediately successful in managing information and developing trust, but over time, blog communities were difficult to sustain. Larger and more decentralized forums had greater difficulties focusing the community’s communication and developing trust but sustained themselves over a long period of time.

In our empirical study of a small geographically-dispersed software development team, we examine the role and importance of communication norms in facilitating effective distributed coordination. Our longitudinal investigation of the ongoing communication engaged in by team members within multiple media highlights the creation and emergence of a number of key norms that were critical to helping the team get its distributed work done. Please do not cite or distribute without permission 1 Acknowledgments: We would like to thank the members of Little Company (LC) who generously provided the data and their time for this study. Special thanks also to Stephanie Woerner for her extensive research support on

Synchronous online discussions are being increasingly used in higher education in order to facilitate learning and group interaction between on-campus and off-campus students. In response to calls from the engineering community to integrate humanities studies into the engineering curriculum, English and Engineering faculty at a large urban university collaborated to design an online literature discussion course for first-year engineering students. Students were assigned two works of literature that dealt with ethical and professional development issues in engineering. The online discussions took place outside class in a Multiuser Object Oriented (MOO) environment, where all discussions were logged. As researchers examined the transcripts of these discussions, the theme of community formation emerged. The transcripts were coded and then used to identify the varying levels of community formation during the course of the semester as well as the students ’ development of professional identity. Results suggest that behaviors of the mentor, negotiation of group knowledge, and exclusion of late arriving members characterized communities. The results also suggest that through reading and discussion of professional issues, students may begin to view themselves as members of the

As a partial review of the field of communication and technology, this essay revisits

Within social networks, relationships are “enacted. ” They grow or decline through communication and the exchange of social resources. Although geographic distance can inhibit enactment, telecommunication technologies (e.g., phone, e-mail, IM) are increasingly being used to maintain relationships over long distances. In this paper, we examine the role these technologies play in maintaining friendships. Taking advantage of a natural situation in which friendships are at risk of ending, we follow students in their transition from high school to college. When students move away from home, they reduce both their communication with their old high school friends and their sense of psychological connection to them. Longitudinal analyses show that communication slows the decline in psychological closeness, but psychological closeness does not slow the decline in communication. E-mail and IM are telecommunication technologies that are especially useful among these students for maintaining friendships. The usefulness of these technologies may stem from arbitrary pricing decisions, which allow students to use them frequently, rather than from their intrinsic features, such as media richness. Unlike the phone, pricing of e-mail and IM does not depend on either message length or the distance the message must travel. 810

Abstract: Creating online communities of practice involves much more than creating software. Software houses online communities of practice activities but social interactions also depend on who is involved, what their goals are, their personalities and the community’s norms and policies. By paying attention to these sociability issues, community members can influence how their community develops. Norms that lead to good online etiquette, empathy and trust between community members provide stepping-stones for social capital development.

Abstract. Norms are expected to make significant contributions towards enabling discourse in cyberspace among people of different backgrounds, just as they do in the physical world. Yet many distributed, electronically mediated groups fail to form norms successfully. Causes range from open discord to the more insidious lack of comfort people experience in groups that fail to openly address disagreements about what constitutes appropriate behavior in the online environment. We present a case study of the evolution of norms about what constitutes appropriate posts to an online discussion forum for a newly forming group. We trace the discussion sparked by a critical incident and show how a design of an online environment that promotes visibility of participants contributed towards overcoming the forces for dissolution and promoted progress towards coalescing as a group with a shared identity. 1