Computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) or computer-supported collaboration is the study of how people utilize technology collaboratively, often towards a shared goal. CSCW addresses how computer systems can support collaborative activity and coordination. More specifically, the field of CSCW seeks to analyze and draw connections between currently understood human psychological and social behaviors and available collaborative tools, or groupware. Often the goal of CSCW is to help promote and utilize technology in a collaborative way, and help create new tools to succeed in that goal. These parallels allow CSCW research to inform future design patterns or assist in the development of entirely new tools. Computer supported cooperative work includes "all contexts in which technology is used to mediate human activities such as communication, coordination, cooperation, competition, entertainment, games, art, and music".
History The development of this field reaches back to the late 1960s and the visionary assertions of Ted Nelson, Douglas Engelbart, Alan Kay, Glenn Gould, Nicholas Negroponte and others who saw a potential for digital media to ultimately redefine how people work. A very early thinker, Vannevar Bush, even suggested in 1945 As We May Think. The inventor of the computer "mouse", Douglas Engelbart, studied collaborative software (especially revision control in computer-aided software engineering and the way a graphic user interface could enable interpersonal communication) in the 1960s. Alan Kay worked on Smalltalk, which embodied these principles, in the 1970s, and by the 1980s it was well regarded and considered to represent the future of user interfaces. However, at this time, collaboration capabilities were limited. As few computers had even local area networks, and processors were slow and expensive, the idea of using them simply to accelerate and "augment" human communication was eccentric in many situations. Computers processed numbers, not text, and the collaboration was in general devoted only to better and more accurate handling of numbers. This began to change in the 1980s with the rise of personal computers, modems and more general use of the Internet for non-academic purposes. People were clearly collaborating online with all sorts of motives, but using a small suite of tools (LISTSERV, netnews, IRC, MUD) to support all of those motives. Research at this time focused on textual communication, as there was little or no exchange of audio and video representations. Some researchers, such as Brenda Laurel, emphasized how similar online dialogue was to a play, and applied Aristotle's model of drama to their analysis of computers for collaboration. Another major focus was hypertext—in its pre-HTML, pre-WWW form, focused more on links and semantic web applications than on graphics. Such systems as Superbook, NoteCards, KMS and the much simpler HyperTies and HyperCard were early examples of collaborative software used for e-learning. The origins of CSCW as a field are intertwined with the rise and subsequent fall of office automation as response to some of the criticisms, particularly the failure to address the impact human psychological and social behaviors can have. Greif and Cashman created the term CSCW to help employees seeking to further their work with technology. A few years later, in 1987, Charles Findley presented the concept of collaborative learning-work. Computer-supported cooperative work is an interdisciplinary research area of growing interest which relates workstations to digitally advanced networking systems. The first technologies were economically feasible, but their interoperability was lacking which makes understanding a well-tailored supporting system difficult. Due to global markets, more organizations are being pushed to decentralize their corporate systems. When faced with the complexities of today's business issues, a significant effort must be made to improve manufacturing systems' efficiency, improve product quality, and reduce time to market.
Audio In the 1990s, the rise of broadband networks and the dotcom boom presented the internet as mass media to a whole generation. By the late 1990s, VoIP and net phones and chat had emerged. For the first time, people used computers primarily as communications, not "computing" devices. This, however, had long been anticipated, predicted, and studied by experts in the field.
Pioneers Other pioneers in the field included Ted Nelson, Austin Henderson, Kjeld Schmidt, Lucy Suchman, Sara Bly, Randy Farmer, and many "economists, social psychologists, anthropologists, organizational theorists, educators, and anyone else who can shed light on group activity." - Grudin.
Politics and business In this century, the focus has shifted to sociology, political science, management science and other business disciplines. This reflects the use of the net in politics and business and even other high-stakes collaboration situations, such as war.
War Though it is not studied at the ACM conferences, military use of collaborative software has been a very major impetus of work on maps and data fusion, used in military intelligence. A number of conferences and journals are concerned primarily with the military use of digital media and the security implications thereof.
COVID-19 The idea of CSCW or computer-supported cooperative work has become useful over the years since its inception and most especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. The measures to mitigate the virus' spread led to firm closures and increased the rates of remote working and learning. People now share a common workspace, hold virtual meetings, see and hear each other's movements and voices in a common virtual workspace with a group-centered design.
Central concerns and concepts CSCW is a design-oriented academic field that is interdisciplinary in nature and brings together librarians, economists, organizational theorists, educators, social psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and computer scientists, among others. The expertise of researchers in various and combined disciplines help researchers identify venues for possible development. Despite the variety of disciplines, CSCW is an identifiable research field focused on understanding characteristics of interdependent group work with the objective of designing adequate computer-based technology to support such cooperative work. Essentially, CSCW goes beyond building technology itself and looks at how people work within groups and organizations, as well as the impacts of technology on those processes. CSCW has ushered in a great extent of melding between social scientists and computer scientists. These scientists work together to overcome both technical and non-technical problems within the same user spaces. For example, many R&D professionals working with CSCW are computer scientists who have realized that social factors play an important role in the development of collaborative systems. On the flip side, many social scientists who understand the increasing role of technology in our social world become "technologists" who work in R&D labs developing cooperative systems. Over the years, CSCW researchers have identified a number of core dimensions of cooperative work. A non-exhaustive list includes:
Awareness: individuals working together need to be able to gain some level of shared knowledge about each other's activities. Articulation work: cooperating individuals must be able to partition work into units, divide it amongst themselves and, after the work is performed, reintegrate it. Appropriation (or tailorability): how an individual or group adapts a technology to their own particular situation; the technology may be appropriated in a manner completely unintended by the designers. These concepts have largely been derived through the analysis of systems designed by researchers in the CSCW community, or through studies of existing systems (for example, Wikipedia). CSCW researchers that design and build systems try to address core concepts in novel ways. However, the complexity of a domain can make it difficult to produce conclusive results.
Articulation work Articulation work is essentially the work that makes other work exist and possible. It is an effort made to make other work easier, more manageable, and can either be planned or unplanned. Therefore articulation work is an integral part of software process since software processes can sometimes fail or break down. Articulation work is also commonly known as "invisible work" since it is not always noticed. The concept was introduced by Anselm Strauss. He described it as a way to observe the "nature of mutually dependent actors in their division of labour". It was introduced in CSCW by Schmidt and Bannon in 1992, where it would be applied to more realistic work scenarios in society. Articulation work is inherent in collaboration. The idea of articulation work was initially used in relation to computer-supported cooperative work, but it was travelled through other domains of work, such as healthcare. Initially, articulation work was known for scheduling and allocation of resources, but now, extends beyond that. Articulation work can also be seen as the response developers make to adapt to changes due to error or misjudgments in the real world. There are various models of articulation work that help identify applicable solutions to recover or reorganize planned activities. It is also important to note that it can vary depending on the scenario. Oftentimes there is an increase in the need for articulation work as the situation becomes more complex. Because articulation work is so abstract, it can be split into two categories from the highest level: individual activity and collective activity.
With individual activity, articulation work is almost always applicable. It is obvious that the subject is required to articulate his / her own work. But when a subject is faced with a new task, there are many questions that must be answered in order to move forward and be successful. This questioning is considered the articulation work to the actual project; invisible, but necessary. There is also articulation of action within an activity. For example, creating to-do lists and blueprints may be imperative to progressing a project. There is also articulation of operation within an action. In terms of software, the user must have adequate knowledge and skill in using computer systems and knowledge about software in order to perform tasks. In a teamwork setting, articulation is imperative for collective activity. To maximize the efficiency of all the people working, the articulation work must be very solid. Without a solid foundation, the team is unable to collaborate effectively. Furthermore, as the size of the team increases, the articulation work becomes more complex. What goes in between the user and the system is often overlooked. But software process modeling techniques as well as the model of articulation work is imperative in creating a solid foundation that allows for improvement and enhancement. In a way, all work needs to be articulated; there needs to be a who, what, where, when and how. With technology, there are many tools that utilize articulation work. Tasks such as planning and scheduling can be considered articulation work. There are also times when the articulation work is bridging the gap between the technology and the user. Ultimately, articulation work is the means that allows for cooperative work to be cooperative, a main objective of CSCW.
Matrix One of the most common ways of conceptualizing CSCW systems is to consider the context of a system's use. One such conceptualization is the CSCW Matrix, first introduced in 1988 by Johansen; it also appears in Baecker (1995). The matrix considers work contexts along two dimensions: whether collaboration is co-located or geographically distributed, and whether individuals collaborate synchronously (same time) or asynchronously (not depending on others to be around at the same time).
Same time/same place – face to face interaction Roomware Shared tables, wall displays Digital whiteboards Electronic meeting systems Single display groupware Group decision support system
Same time/different place – remote interaction Electronic meeting systems Videoconferencing Real-time groupware Messaging (instant messaging, email, chat) Telephoning
Different time/same place – continuous task (ongoing task) Team rooms Large displays Post-it War-rooms
Different time/different place – communication and coordination Electronic meeting systems Blogs Workflow Version control This matrix is an outline of CSCW in different contexts, but it does have its limitations for users who are beginners at understanding CSCW. For example, there is a collaborative mode called multi-synchronous that can not fit the matrix. As the field evolves whether by new social standards or technological development, the simple matrix cannot describe all of CSCW and fields of research within.
Model of Coordinated Action (MoCA) The Model of Coordinated Action, as a framework for analyzing group collaboration, identifies several dimensions of common features of cooperative work that extend beyond the CSCW matrix and allow for more complexity in describing how teams work given certain conditions. The seven total dimensions that constitute the model (MoCA) are used to describe essential "fields of action" seen in existing CSCW research. Rather than existing as a rigid matrix with distinct quadrants, this model is to be interpreted as multidimensional – each dimension existing as its own continuum. These ends of these dimensions' continuums are defined in the following subsections.
Synchronicity This is pertaining to the time at which the collaborative work occurs. This could range from live meetings conducted at exact times to viewing recordings or responding to messages that do not require one or all participants to be active at the time the recording, message, or other deliverable was created.
Physical distribution This covers the distance in which team members could be geographically separated while still being able to collaborate. The least physically distributed cooperative work is a meeting in which all team members are physically present in the same space and communicating verbally, face-to-face. Conversely, technology now allows for more distanced communication that could extend as far as meeting from multiple countries.
Scale The scale of a collaborative project refers to how many individuals comprise the project team. As the number of people involved increases, the division of tasks must become more intricate and complex to ensure that each participant is contributing in some way.
Number of communities of practice A community of practice refers to a group of individuals with shared, common knowledge of a specific subject. This group may be composed of both newcomers and experts. New members will gain knowledge through exposure and immersion and become experts as newer members join, thus expanding the community of practice over time. These groups can be as specific or as broad as their members feel is necessary, as no two people have the same set of knowledge and diversification of perspectives is common.
Nascence Some collaborative projects are designed to be more long-lasting than others, often meaning that their standard practices and actions are more established than newer, less developed projects. Synonymous with "newness", nascence refers to how established a cooperative effort is at a given point in time. While most work is always developing in some way, newer projects will have to spend more time establishing common ground among its team members and will thus have a higher level of nascence.
Planned permanence This dimension encourages teams to establish common practices, terminology, etc. within the group to ensure cohesion and understanding among the work. It is difficult to gauge how long a project will last, therefore establishing these foundations in early stages helps to prevent confusion between group members at later stages when there may be higher stakes or deeper investigation. The notion of planned permanence is essential to the model as it allows for productive communication between individuals who may have different expertise or are members of different communities of practice.
Turnover This dimension is used to describe the rate at which individuals leave a collaborative group. Such events may occur at various rates depending on the impact one's departure may have on the individual and the group. In a well-established collaborative action or a group with a small scale, a team member leaving may have detrimental effects, whereas temporary projects with open membership may have high turnover rates covered by the project's high scale. Crowdsourcing, such as the means by which Wikipedia creates its articles, are an example of an entity with high turnover rates (e.g. a Wikipedian contributes only to one article at one time) that does not face impactful consequences due to the high scale of the collaborative work.
Considerations for interaction design
Self-presentation
Self-presentation has been studied in traditional face-to-face environments, but as society has embraced content culture, social platforms have generated new affordances for presenting oneself online. Due to technological growth, social platforms, and their increased affordances, society has reconfigured the way users self-present online due to audience input and context collapse. In an online setting, audiences are physically invisible which complicates the users ability to distinguish their intended audience. Audience input, on social platforms, can range from commenting, sharing, liking, tagging, etc. For example, LinkedIn is a platform who encourages commentary where positive feedback outweighs negative feedback on topics including career announcements. Conversely, audience input can be unwarranted which can lead to real-life implications, especially for marginalized groups who are prone to both warranted and unwarranted commentary on public posts. Context collapse is when separate audiences join together and make curated content for an audience which is visible to unintended audiences. The likelihood of context collapse is especially challenging with the surge of proprietary software which introduces a conflict of interest for the users who have an ideal audience, but the platforms algorithm has a differing one. Collapsed context influences self-presentation when previously separate audiences are merged into one.
Affordance
As media platforms proliferate, so do the affordances offered that directly influence how users manage their self-presentation. According to researchers, the three most influential affordances on how users present themselves in an online domain include anonymity, persistence, and visibility. Anonymity in the context of social media refers to the separation of an individual's online and offline identity by making the origin of their messages unspecified. Platforms that support anonymity have users that are more likely to depict their offline self accurately online (i.e Reddit). Comparatively, platforms with less constraints on anonymity are subject to users that portray their online and offline selves differently, thus creating a "persona". Facebook, for example, requires its users to abide by its "real-name" policy, further connecting their offline and online identities. Furthermore, being able to unequivocally associate an online persona to a real-life human contributes to how users present themselves online honestly. Platforms which have "content persistence" store content so it may be accessed at a later point in time. Platforms including Instagram and Facebook are highly persistent with their ability to make content available until deleted. Whereas, Snapchat has lower persistence because content is ephemeral causing users to post content that represents their offline self more accurately. This affordance strongly affects users' self-presentation management because they recognize content can be openly accessed on platforms that are highly persistent. On social platforms, visibility is created when information is acquired with search of a word or phrase or even topic name, an example being a hashtag. When content is visible, users become aware of their self-presentation and will adjust accordingly. However, some platforms give their users leverage in specifying how visible their content is, thus affording for visibility control. For example Snapchat and Instagram both allow users to build a "close friends list" and block specific people from viewing content. Nonetheless, intended audiences are never guaranteed. Facebook is an example of a platform that shares content to both primary (e.g. direct friends) and secondary viewers (e.g. friends of friends). The concern of visibility with Facebook's algorithm is notably challenging for marginalized groups because of such blurred visibility mechanisms. In addition, users face privacy concerns relative to visibility given the current era of screenshotting.
Boundary object
A boundary object is an informational item which is used differently by various communities or fields of study and may be a concrete, physical item or an abstract concept. Examples of boundary objects include:
Most research libraries, as different research groups may use different resources from the same libraries. An interdisciplinary research project, as different business sectors and research groups may have different goals for the project. The outline of a U.S. state's boundaries, which may be drawn on a roadmap for travelers or on an ecological map for biologists. In computer-supported cooperative work, boundary objects are typically used to study how information and tools are transmitted between different cultures or communities. Some examples of boundary objects in CSCW research are:
Electronic health records, which pass health information between groups with different priorities (such as doctors, nurses, and medical secretaries). The concept of a "digital work environment", as used in Swedish political debate.
Standardization vs. flexibility in CSCW Standardization is defined as "agile processes that are enforced as a standard protocol across an organization to share knowledge and best practice." Flexibility, on the other hand, is the "ability to customize and evolve processes to suit the aims of an agile team". As CSCW tools, standardization and flexibility are almost mutually exclusive from each other. In CSCW, flexibility comes in two forms, flexibility for future change, and flexibility for interpretation. Everything that is done on the internet has a level of standardization due to the internet standards. In fact, Email has its own set of standards, of which the first draft was created in 1977. No CSCW tool is perfectly flexible, and all lose flexibility in the same three levels. Either flexibility is lost when the programmer makes the toolkit, when the programmer makes the application, and/or when the user uses the application.
Standardization in information infrastructure Information infrastructure requires extensive standardization to make collaboration work. Since data is transferred from company to company and occasionally nation to nation, international standards have been put in place to make communication of data much simpler. Often one company's data will be included in a much larger system, and this would become almost impossible without standardization. With information infrastructure, there is very little flexibility in potential future changes. Due to the fact that the standards have been around for decades and there are hundreds of them, it is nearly impossible to change one standard without greatly affecting the others.
Flexibility in toolkits Creating CSCW toolkits requires flexibility of interpretation; it is important that these tools are generic and can be used in many different ways. Another important part of a toolkit's flexibility is the extensibility, the extent to which new components or tools can be created using the tools provided. An example of a toolkit that is flexible in how generic the tools are is Oval. Oval consists of four components: objects, views, agents, and links. This toolkit was used to recreate four previously existing communication systems: The Coordinator, gIBIS, Lotus Notes, and Information Lens. It proved that, due to its flexibility, Oval was able to create many forms of peer-to-peer communication applications.
Applications
Applications in education There have been three main generations to distance education, starting with the first being through postal service, the second through mass media such as the radio, television, and films, and the third being the current state of e-learning. Technology-enhanced learning, or "e-learning", has been an increasingly relevant topic in education, especially with the development of the COVID-19 pandemic that has caused many schools to switch to remote learning. E-learning is defined as "the use of technology to support and enhance learning practice". It includes the utilization of many different types of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and is limited to the use of intranet and internet in the teaching and learning process. The development of content is mainly through using learning objectives to create activities through Virtual Learning Environments, Content Management Systems, and Learning Management Systems. These technologies have created massive change in their use as CSCW tools, allowing students and teachers to work on the same platforms and have a shared online space in which to communicate in. The delivery of content can be either asynchronous, such as email and discussion forums, or synchronous, like through chat or video conferencing. Synchronous education allows for much more equal interaction between students and instructors and better communication between students for the facilitation of group projects and assignments.
Community of inquiry framework E-learning has been explained by the community of inquiry (COI) framework introduced by Garrison et al. In this framework, there are three major elements: cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence.
Cognitive presence in this framework is the measure of how well meaning is able to be constructed from the content being taught. It assumes that students have access to a large network from which to gain information from. This includes peers, instructors, alumni, and practicing professionals. E-learning has allowed this network to be easily accessible through the internet, and these connections can be made synchronously through video, audio, or texts. Social presence in the community of inquiry framework is how well participants can connect with one another on a social level and present themselves as "real people". Video conferencing has been shown to increase social presence within students. One study found that "social presence in VC [Virtual Conferencing] can have a positive effect on group efficacy and performance by amplifying group cohesion". This information is greatly useful in designing future systems because it explains the importance of technology like video conferencing in synchronous e-learning. Groups that are able to see each other face to face have a stronger bond and are able to complete tasks faster than those without it. Increasing the social presence in online education environments helps facilitate in the understanding of the content and the ability for the group to solve problems. Teaching presence in the COI framework contains two main functions: creation of content and the facilitation of this content. The creation of content is usually done by the instructor, but students and instructors can share the role of facilitator, especially in higher education settings. The goal of teaching presence is "to support and enhance social and cognitive presence for the purpose of realizing educational outcome". Virtual educational software and tools are becoming more readily used globally. Remote educational platforms and tools must be accessible for various generations, including children as well as guardians or teachers, yet these frameworks are not adapted to be child-friendly. The lack of interface and design consideration for younger users causes difficulty in potential communication between children and older generations utilizing the software. This in turn leads to a decrease in virtual learning participation as well as potential diminished collaboration with peers. In addition, it may be difficult for older teachers to utilize such technology, and communicate with their students. Similar to orienting older workers with CSCW tools, it is difficult to train younger students or older teachers in utilizing virtual technology, and may not be possible for widely spread virtual classrooms and learning environments.
Applications in gaming Collaborative mixed reality games modify the shared social experience, during which players can interact in real-time with physical and virtual gaming environments and with other multiplayer video gamers. This may be done through any means of communication, self-representation, and collaboration.
Communication systems The group members experience effective communication practices following the availability of a common platform for expressing opinions and coordinating tasks. The technology is applicable not only in professional contexts but also in the gaming world. CSCW usually offers synchronous and asynchronous games to allow multiple individuals to compete in a certain activity across social networks. Thus, the tool has made gaming more interesting by facilitating group activities in real-time and widespread social interactions beyond geographical boundaries.
Self-presentation HCI, CSCW, and game studies in MMORPGs highlight the importance of avatar-mediated self-presentation in player experience. These studies have put together known two components of self-presentation in games. First, through personal choice and personalization of avatars, various social values (such as gender roles and social norms) are integrated and reflected in the player's self-image. Second, self-presentation in games conjointly options experimentation of fully new identities or reaffirmation of existing identities. This includes cross-gender play and queerness gameplay. Computer-mediated communication in gaming settings takes place across different channels, which can consist of structured message systems, bulletin boards, meeting rooms, and shared diaries. As such, the players can hold conversations while proceeding with the game to create a lively experience. Thus, the features of video games offer a platform for users to openly express themselves.
Collaborations and game design in multi-user video games The most collaborative and socially interactive aspect of a video game is the online communities. Popular video games often have various social groups for their diverse community of players. For example, in the quest-based multiplayer game World of Warcraft, the most collaborative and socially interactive aspect of the game are the "Guilds", which are alliances of individuals with whom players must join forces. By incorporating Guilds, World of Warcraft creates opportunities for players to work together with their team members who can be from anywhere in the world. WOW players who are associated with a Guild are more likely to play and do quests with the same Guild mates each time which develops a strong bond between players and a sense of community. These bonds and friendships formed from playing with Guild mates, not only improves collaboration within the game, it also creates a sense of belonging and community which is one of the most important attribute of online gaming communities. When it comes to designing a multi-user collaborative game, it involves positive interdependence, personal accountability, and social skills. Positive Interdependence is the dependence of collaboration from members of a group in order to accomplish a task. In video games, this is the idea of players on a team or in a group understanding that working together is beneficial, and that the success and failure of the group is shared equally if all members participate. An example of including a positive interdependence aspect to a video game is creating a common shared goal for the team to increase collaboration. The next guideline is personal accountability, which is the idea that each individual in a group must put forth their best effort for the team's overall success. Personal accountability might be incorporated into video games by including an incentive system where individual players are rewarded with additional points for completing an objective or an action that improves the team's chances of success. The final guideline, social skills, is the most important to consider when designing a collaborative game. An example of developing player social skills through a video game can be creating in-game situations where players have to assign roles, plan, and execute to solve the problem. By following these guidelines, game makers can create gaming-environments which encourage collaboration and social interaction between players.
Applications of mobile devices Mobile devices are generally more accessible than their non-mobile counterparts, with about 41% of the world's population as per a survey from 2019 owning a mobile device. This coupled with their relative ease of transport makes mobile devices usable in a large variety of settings which other computing devices would not function as well. Because of this, mobile devices make videoconferencing and texting possible in a variety of settings which would not be accessible without such a device. The Chinese social media platform WeChat has is utilized to facilitate communication between patients and doctors. WeChat is able to enhance healthcare interactions between patient and doctor by allowing direct communication of the patient's symptoms.
Applications in social media Social media tools and platforms have expanded virtual communication amongst various generations. However, with older individuals being less comfortable with CSCW tools, it is difficult to design social platforms that account for both older and younger generational social needs. Often, these social systems focus key functionality and feature creation for younger demographics, causing issues in adaptability for older generations. In addition, with the lack of scalability for these features, the tools are not able to adapt to fit evolutional needs of generations as they age. With the difficulty for older demographics to adopt these intergenerational virtual platforms, the risk of social isolation is increased in them. While systems have been created specifically for older generations to communicate amongst one another, system design frameworks are not complex enough to lend to intergenerational communication.
Applications to ubiquitous computing
Along the lines of a more collaborative modality is something called ubiquitous computing. Ubiquitous computing was first coined by Mark Weiser of Xerox PARC. This was to describe the phenomenon of computing technologies becoming prevalent everywhere. A new language was created to observe both the dynamics of computers becoming available at mass scale and its effects on users in collaborative systems. Between the use of social commerce apps, the rise of social media, and the widespread availability of smart devices and the Internet, there is a growing area of research within CSCW that how come out of these three trends. These topics include ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA) within social media, ubiquitous computing, and instant message based social commerce.
Ethnomethodology and synchronicity In You Recommend I Buy: How and Why People Engage in Instant Messaging Based Social Commerce, researchers on this project analyzed twelve users of Chinese Instant Messenger (IM) social commerce platforms to study how social recommendation engines on IM commerce platforms result in a different user experience. The study was entirely on Chinese platforms, mainly WeChat. The research was conducted by a team composed of members from Stanford, Beijing, Boston, and Kyoto. The interviewing process took place in the winter of 2020 and was an entirely qualitative analysis, using just interviews. The goal of the interviews were to probe about how participants got involved in IM based social commerce, their experience on IM based social commerce, the reasons for and against IM based social commerce, and changes introduced by IM based social commerce to their lives. An IM-based service integrates directly with more intimate social experiences. Essentially, IM is real-time texting over a network. This can be both a synchronous or asynchronous activity. IM based social commerce makes the user shopping experience more accessible. In terms of CSCW, this is an example of ubiquitous computing. This creates a "jump out of the box" experience as described in the research because the IM based platform facilitates a change in user behavior and the overall experience on social commerce. The benefit of this concept is that the app is leveraging personal relationships and real-life networks that can actually lead to a more meaningful customer experience, which is founded upon trust.
Embeddedness A second CSCW paper, Embeddedness and Sequentiality in Social Media, explores a new methodology for analyzing social media—another expression of ubiquitous computing in CSCW. This paper used ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA) as a framework to research Facebook users. In brief, ethnomethodology studies the everyday interactions of people and relates how this pertains to forming their outlook of the world. Conversational analysis delves into the structures of conversations so as to extract information about how people construct their experiences. The team behind this research, hailing from University of Nottingham and Stockholm University, recognized that "moment-by-moment, unfolding, real-time human action" was somewhat missing from the CSCW literature on social media. The significance of this is they felt that by exploring EMCA, it could provide different insights on collaborative social network systems, as opposed to relying solely on recall. Here is a formal definition for EMCA:For EMCA, the activities of everyday life are structured in time—some things routinely happen before others. Fundamentally there is a 'sequentiality' to activity, something that has been vital for developing understanding of the orderly nature of talk and bodily interaction.In other words, EMCA pays attention to the sequence of events, so as to reveal some sort of underlying order about our behavior in our day-to-day interactions. In the bigger picture, this work reveals that time, as one of the dimensions to consider within collaborative systems design, matters. Another major factor would be distance. Does Distance Still Matter? Revisiting the CSCW Fundamentals on Distributed Collaboration is another research article that, as the title suggests, explores under what circumstances distance matters. Most notably, it mentions the "mutual knowledge problem." This problem arises when a group in a distributed collaborative system experiences a breakdown in communication due to the fact that its members lack a shared understanding for the given context they are working in. According to the article, it matters that everyone is in alignment over the nature of what they are doing.
Co-loc