Social Issues and Computer Supported Cooperative Work

1. Social Issues and Computer Supported Cooperative Work IST 331.1 Spring 2003 Lecture 11

2. CSCW Issues and Theory • All computer systems have group impact • not just groupware! • Ignoring this leads to system failure • We look at several levels from minutiae to large-scale • face-to-face communication • conversation • text-based communication • group working • organizational issues

3. Face-to-Face Communication • Most primitive and subtle form of communication • Speech • Hearing • Body language • Eye gaze • Often seen as the paradigm for computer mediated communication

4. Face-to-Face Communication • Transfer effect • Carry expectations into electronic media • May cause problems – rudeness • Personal Space when conversing • Eye Contact • Conveys interest and establishes social presence • Video may spoil eye contact but is better than audio only

5. Face-to-Face Communication • Gestures and Body Language • Much of our communication is through our bodies • Deictic reference – ‘this’ or ‘there’ indicated by gestures or eye gaze • Head and shoulders video loses this

6. Face-to-Face Communication • Back Channels – provide information at a level below turn-taking • Nods and grimaces • Shrugs of the shoulders • Grunts and raised eyebrows Alison: Do you fancy that film …er…’The Green’ um …it starts at eight. Brian: Great!

7. Face-to-Face Communication • Restricting media restricts back channels • Video – loss of body language • Audio – loss of facial expressions • Half duplex – lose most voice back channel responses • Text base – nothing left

8. Face-to-Face Communication • Turn-taking • Speaker offers the floor – how? • Listener requests the floor – how?

9. Conversation • Smallest unit is the utterance • Turn taking – utterances usually alternate • Simplest structure – adjacent pair such as • A question and an answer • A statement and an agreement

10. Conversation • Utterances are highly ambiguous • We use context to disambiguate • Two types of context • Internal context – references to a previous part of the conversation • External context – references to the environment, i.e., pointing to something

11. Conversation • Often contextual utterances involve indexicals – ‘that’, ‘this’, ‘he’, ‘it’ • Resolving context requires participants to have a shared knowledge and meaning • Conversation constantly negotiates meaning – grounding

12. Conversation • Utterances are assumed to be • Relevant – furthers the current topic • Helpful – comprehensible to listener • Breakdown and focus recovery Alison: Oh, look at your roses … Brian: Mmm, but I’ve had trouble with greenfly. Alison: They’re the symbol of the English summer. Brian: Greenfly? Alison: No roses silly!

13. Conversation • Breakdowns happen at all levels • Breakdowns are frequent • Redundancy, frequency of turn-taking, back channels – contribute to detection of breakdown and rapid repair • Electronic media may cause more breakdowns and reduce our ability to recover from them

14. Speech Act Theory • Specific form of conversational analysis • Utterances characterized by what they do – they are acts ‘I’m hungry’ – has a certain propositional meaning; feeling hungry May carry the meaning ‘Get me food’

15. Speech Act Theory • Basic conversation acts illocutionary points • Promises, requests, declarations • Speech acts need not be spoken • Silence interpreted as acceptance • Generic patterns of acts can be identified • One example is conversation for action (CfA) • State diagram on pg. 525

16. Speech Act Theory • CfA was basis for groupware product – Coordinator • Structured e-mail system • Users must fit within CfA structure • Theory of communication led the design of the product • Not liked by users

17. Text-based Communication • Most common media for asynchronous groupware • Exceptions: voice mail and answerphones • Familiar, similar to paper letters • In groupware, acting as a speech substitute

18. Text-based Communication • Four types: • Discrete – directed messages like e-mail • Linear – message is added in order to the end • Non-linear – messages linked in hypertext fashion • Spatial – messages arranged on a 2 dimensional surface

19. Text-based Communication • Loss of face-to-face back channels • Difficult to convey • Affective states – happy, sad, angry, humorous • Illocutionary force – urgent demand or a deferential request • E-mail users created tokens of the affective states - :-) :-( ;-)

20. Text-based Communication • Culture of e-mail has replaced: • Formal letters • Memos • Notes • Conversation in the hall • Culture dictates how you respond to an e-mail

21. Text-based Communication • Grounding constraints (Clark & Brennan) • Cotemporality – instant feedback • Simultaneity – send and receive messages at the same time • Sequence – utterances are ordered • These constraints are weaker in text-based interactions when compared to face-to-face interaction • May cause occasional breakdown in communication

22. Text-based Communication • Context is difficult to maintain • Groupware systems strive to maintain WYSIWIS • Can’t use deictic reference ‘that one’ • E-mail systems lack sequentiality – users overcome this by appending to a previous message • Hypertext allows for parallel conversations

23. Text-based Communication Hypertext conversation structure Alison: Brian’s got some lovely roses. Brian: I’m afraid they’re covered in greenfly. Clarise: I’ve seen them, they’re beautiful.

24. Text-based Communication • Pace of conversation – rate of turn-taking • Face-to-face – every few seconds • Telephone – half a minute • Email – hours or days • Lower pace – less feedback; less interactive • Coping strategies tend to increase granularity ( send more with each message)

25. Grouping Dynamics • Work groups constantly change: • In size / membership • In structure • Several groupware systems have explicit roles which prevent flexibility

26. Grouping Dynamics • Physical environment • Face-to-face work radically affected by the layout of the workplace • Thinking takes place in interactions with other people and physical environment - Distributed Cognition

27. Grouping Dynamics • Distributed Cognition – implications for work groups • Importance of mediating representation – drawings on a whiteboard • Group knowledge greater than the sum of the parts – creation of new knowledge • Groupware design focus on external representation

28. Organizational Issues • Organizational factors can make or break groupware • Before installing a system, the designer must understand: • Who will benefit? • Who puts in effort? • Balance of power in the organization. • How will it be affected? • Difficult to measure the success of a system

29. Organizational Issues