The Internet could change the lives of average citizens as much as did the telephone in the early part of the 20th century and television in the 1950s and 1960s. Re-searchers and social critics are debating whether the Internet is improving or harming participation in com-munity life and social relationships. This research exam-ined the social and psychological impact of the lnternet on 169 people in 73 households during their first i to 2 years on-line. We used longitudinal data to examine the effects of the Internet on social involvement and psycho-logical well-being. In this sample, the Internet was used extensively for communication. Nonetheless, greater use of the Internet was associated with declines in partici-pants'communication with family members in the house-hold, declines in the size of their social circle, and in-creases in their depression and loneliness. These findings have implications for research, for public policy, and for the design of technology. F ifteen years ago, computers were mainly the province

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this paper examines these relationships in more detail, and asks whether contributions, perceived benefits, and the relationships among them were different for owners of the lists (formal leaders), active posters, and lurkers of the groups, and for nonwork-related and work related groups. To test our hypotheses, we conducted repeated measures ANOVAs with respondent role (owner or other member) and group type (non-work or work-related) as fixed effects, and group size and content volume as covariates. Building 18 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 1 . T o t a l T i m e 1 . 0 0 2. Infrastructure Maintenance . 6 8 * * 1 . 0 0 3. Social Control .29** .28** 1.00 4. Social Encouragement .42** .29** .47** 1.00 5. External Promotion .31** .33** .29** .32** 1.00 6. Content Provision .87** .65** .29** .36** .28** 1.00 7. Audience Engagement .39** .11* .12* .16** .06 . 24** 1.00 9. Information Benefits .16** .05 -.10 .13* .00 .06 .15** .24** 1.00 10. Social Benefits .33** .17** .20** .35** .22** .28** .17** .30** .30** 1.00 11. Altruistic Benefits .28** .23** .10 .34** .15** .26** .13* .32** .28** .49** 1.00 12. Work-Related Group -.06 .07 -.09 .04 -.02 -.03 -.02 .28** .08 -.12* .09 1.00 13. Log (Group Size) -.01 -.11 -.02 .02 -.09 -.11* .10 .07 .20** -.08 -.05 .17** 1.00 14. Log (Message Volume + .01) .19** -.04 .08 .13* -.03 .08 .13* .06 .21** .08 .09 -.18** .52** 1.00 15. # of Members Known Outside the Group .14** .20** .06 .08 .07 .31** -.01 .06 -.06 .02 .12* .05 -.07 .01 Pairwise Ns range from 325 to 385 * p <= 0.05; ** p <= 0.01 Table 3: Correlations among measures 19 RESULTS A premise of this research is that community building requires significant expenditures of time and effort on the part of members. The descriptive analysis presented below shows that members reported inv...

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Collaboration plays a vital role in today's new business environment. Knowledge that resides within people's heads has become an invaluable resource. Many formal tools, such as e-mail or teamrooms, have been introduced to support formal collaboration and have been studied extensively. However, support for informal communication is still in its infancy. Much work has been done to analyze the functions that informal communication plays in the workplace. Recently, several studies have evaluated the roles that instant messaging (IM) plays in similar settings. Research shows that in the workplace, IM is used primarily for work-related purposes and accelerates the completion of important business tasks. Clearly, new tools that combine both formal and informal interaction can bring organizations tremendous rewards. ReachOut is a tool for semipersistent collaboration and peer support developed by the Collaboration Technologies Group at the IBM Haifa Research Lab. This paper studies the role ReachOut plays in the workplace. We analyzed the collaboration activity of the community of IBM Haifa Labs employees who used ReachOut for a period of two months. As a result, we summarize the important functions played by tools that bridge between formal and informal communication in a workplace-based community.

Topic management is the task of gathering, evaluating, organizing, and sharing a set of web sites for a specific topic. Current web tools do not provide adequate support for this task. We created and continue to develop the TopicShop system to address this need. TopicShop includes (1) a web crawler/analyzer that discovers relevant web sites and builds site profiles, and (2) user interfaces for information workspaces. We conducted an empirical pilot study comparing user performance with TopicShop vs. Yahoo™. Results from this study were used to improve the design of TopicShop. A number of key design changes were incorporated into a second version of TopicShop based on results and user comments of the pilot study including (1) the tasks of evaluation and organization are treated as integral instead of separable, (2) spatial organization is important to users and must be well supported in the interface, and (3) distinct user and global datasets help users deal with the large quantity of information available on the web. A full empirical study using the second iteration of TopicShop covered more areas of the World Wide Web and validated results from the pilot study. Across the two studies, TopicShop subjects found over 80 % more high-quality sites (where quality was determined by independent expert judgements) while browsing only 81 % as many sites and completing their task in 89 % of the time. The site

This study examines the use of integrated communication and engineering design tools in a distributed learning environment. We examined students' attitudes toward the technology using two different approaches. First, we utilized the technology acceptance model to investigate the attitude formation process. Then, to investigate how attitudes changed over time, we applied social information processing model using social network analysis method. Using the technology acceptance model, we were able to demonstrate that students' initial expectation affected the perceptions of, attitudes toward, and use of the system. With social network analysis, we found that one's attitude change was significantly influenced by other students' attitude changes. We discussed the uniqueness of distance learning environments in the context of social influence research and how studies of distance learning could contribute to the research on the social influence of technology use. Keywords Technology acceptance model, Social influence, Network analysis, Attitude, Distance learning

Online communities depend upon a core of committed members who participate, contribute, and stick with the group. To encourage commitment, community design has to accommodate people’s motivations for being in the community and unleash the social forces that cause people to feel attached to the community, to feel responsibility for the community, and to experience net benefits for staying in the community. By designing with these social forces in mind, we can increase members ’ attachment and loyalty to the community and build a committed core. 1.

This is a perspective paper on community networks --- sociotechnical infrastructures supporting villages, towns, and neighborhoods. Community networking is well-established, world wide, and addresses critical societal issues, such as the "crisis of community" and the sociality of the Internet. However, community network projects have not emphasized evaluation. Relatively little is known about the economic, social, and psychological consequences of community networks for the individuals, groups, and communities served. Evaluating community networks is a momentous mutual opportunity for the development of CHI evaluation methodologies and for bringing technical CHI expertise to bear on societal issues. Keywords Community networks, evaluation, social impact