Seamless Talk

This chapter approaches sustained car conversations across mobile phones and in-car phone resources as a session management problem. Addressing this problem, the chapter outlines a session management model for user-controlled media switches during ongoing phone conversations. The model makes a distinction between the user and the infrastructure levels of session management. To illustrate and validate the rationale of the model, the chapter presents an in-car mobile phone hands-free system, SeamlessTalk, developed to support sustained car conversations. The user-controlled session management model contributes to current research on session management by addressing the explicit/implicit session management dichotomy in multiple media situations.

Spectator Information Support

In the context of temporary, distributed events such as music festivals and sports, the event is divided in several parts held at different geographical locations at the same time or in a sequence. Thus, the conventional technology used can only provide limited support at portions of the event. This research focuses on the challenges for design concerning information support in the context of distributed events. The chapter reports from three empirical studies and applies two perspectives on context as a background to the fieldwork findings. Within the results, three main contextual requirements are presented that need to be considered when designing information support for spectators in situ. The chapter contributes to existing research in terms of providing descriptions of the interplay between actors, context and the event itself. Among the conclusions regarding design, we find that technology should be shaped to behave and act according to how, where and with whom spectators are situated.

Supporting Proximate Communities with P3-Systems

In this chapter we examine systems that link People-to-People-to-geographical-Places, which we label P3-Systems. Four major P3-Systems design approaches have been identified by an analysis of systems prototyped to date: (1) People Centric P3-System design that use absolute user location, based on awareness of where somebody is located (e.g., Active Badge); (2) People Centric P3-System design based on user co-location/proximity (e.g., Hocman); (3) Place Centric P3-System design based on the use of virtual spaces that contain representations of user’s use of physical spaces (e.g., ActiveMap); and (4) Place Centric P3-System design based on the use of virtual spaces that contain online interactions related to physical location (e.g., Geonotes). This chapter explores how proximate community member interactions can potentially be well supported by P3-Systems through the improved geographical contextualization and coordination of interactions and the identification of previously unidentified location based affinities between community members.

Mobile IT as Immutable Mobiles? Exploring the Enabling Qualities of a Mobile IT Application

This chapter explores the social consequences of mobile IT. Even though the need for better theorizing on the topic has been highlighted recently, most attempts to date have failed not only to properly explore the social consequences of mobile IT, but also in being specific about the technology itself in any detail. A promising approach with which to explore mobile IT and its social consequences may be found in actor network theory (ANT). ANT’s rich methodology embraces scientific realism in its central concept of hybrids that are simultaneously technological and social. The advantages of conceiving mobile IT applications immersed in and a part of a network of hybrids are explored by drawing from a project concerned with mobile IT use in the context of the mobile bank terminal (MBT). It was found that the users were less than enthusiastic over the MBT, and two key problems were identified. First, the poor design of MBT hampered the possibilities for ad-hoc activities. Second, the users felt that ad-hoc activities could be seen as somewhat irresponsible in the context of banking business. To this end, the problems related to the MBT use were both social and technical. We conclude by identifying and elaborating on some aspects of the social consequences of mobile IT use in order to shed new light on the possibilities and challenges that mobile IT use conveys.

Informational and Communicational Explanations of Corporations as Interaction Systems

Whilst many proponents of “interactive communication” and “social interaction” do not see the concept as problematic, they focus attention on practices. I choose to re-examine both “interaction” and “communication,” and to relate these concepts to the concepts of society and organisation/corporation1. The concept of “interaction” is examined, and social interaction is considered as exchange. The patterning of social interaction in markets, bureaucracies, solidarity groupings, and co-operative collectives, and their respective core values are considered. The “organization” is explained as a complex dynamic interaction system. An alternative sociological analysis of the social is compared with that of the social psychology tradition. Communication is discussed as a mode of interaction, to reveal monologic and dialogic conceptions of communication. Conclusions are raised around the themes of “interactive communication,” IT, and dialogue and appreciation in a society constituted by interaction. Interaction, it is concluded, requires presence, whereas ICT allows absence.

The Mobile Workplace

This chapter discusses how truly mobile occupational groups relate to locations in a vast working area when collaborating with each other. It brings forth two ethnographic studies on mobile professionals working on the road. Their work setting has predominantly been described from a perspective where they are isolated in the driver’s seat. However, seeing that the environment in which they drive through constitutes their workplace, the chapter examines their relation to the surroundings when performing their tasks. The empirical data illustrates the importance of mutual understanding of locations to successfully perform collaborative tasks. For example, coordinates supplied by a GPS receiver are not sufficient in the performance of their tasks. It is rather the mutual understanding of locations, being in proximity or other visual clues that are of importance. We argue the need for a detailed understanding regarding the use of locations to succeed in the development of future mobile position-based services.

Fluid Interaction in Mobile Work Practices

This chapter discusses the increasing fluidity of interaction that workers perform in contemporary work settings. Everyday working life is increasingly constituted of a heterogeneous mélange where people, work objects and symbols, as well as their interactions, are distributed in time, space and across contexts. When considering interaction where participants, work, and interactional objects are mobile, the challenges of supporting the fluidity of interaction in collocated settings are immense. This chapter outlines mobile interaction in terms of the fluid topological metaphor and analyses the dimensions of struggling with fluid mobile interaction based on a framework characterising interactional asymmetries.

Social Exile and Virtual Hrig

This chapter explores ways in which computer-mediated interaction and cybercafé culture are appropriated by individuals and groups in Morocco. It argues that computer-mediated communication mediates the construction of cybernetic identities and promotes the rehearsal of invented social and gender relations. This inventive accommodation of the Internet (known among young Moroccan Net communicants as “virtual hrig”) makes computer-mediated interaction, especially through the discursive forum of chatrooms and email discussion groups, act as a backtalk to dominant patriarchal and conservative power structures. By using a qualitative ethnographic approach while sounding the depth of the “cultural noises” and incrustations, which are accompanying the expansion of cyber culture, the author also hopes to foreground the prospective implications of New Media and Information Technologies in a non-Western environment. While it is too early to draw conclusions on the extent of the impact of new media technologies on individual subjectivities and group identities, the point is made that cyber interaction is contributing to the expansion of the public sphere in Morocco.

Email - Message Transmission and Social Ritual

In considering the implications of what it means to be moving towards an Interaction Society, my research into intraorganisational email illuminates some of the inherent social complexity and the subtle nuances of its use within organisational life. A range of significant insights emerged through a deep hermeneutic understanding of the ways that people within the study were constructing email as an everyday part of their workplace. As a consequence, I have constructed a new concept, message web to encapsulate the social interaction and human sense-making activities around email in association with its technical capabilities as daily life is being played out within organisational cultures today. In this chapter, I tell an ethnographic story concerning just one strand of the case study organisation’s message web: the copying function of email. And being an ethnographic story, I’ve also embedded reflective glimpses of my research processes.

Introduction - The Emerging Interaction Society

Recently it has been argued that there is a need for computer science, and related fields of research, to shift its focus from user tasks, their requirements, applications or computing, to issues concerning interaction, mutual awareness, and ubiquity (e.g., Dourish, 2001). Overall, it is a shift from the Information Society, with its focus on information, storage and processing of data and transactions, to the Interaction Society, with related issues including, e.g., work as ongoing and fluid networks of connections (Sproull & Keisler, 1998) interaction overload (Ljungberg & Sørensen, 2000), interaction management (Whittaker et al., 1997), contact management (Whittaker et al., 2002), session management (Edwards, 1994), time management, etc. This general shift has also highlighted the need to acknowledge issues such as attention management in relation to the fluidity of work (e.g., Hudson et al., 2002; Davenport & Beck, 2001).