A major thrust in LIS and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) studies has been to understand the cognitive and emotional processes underlying the individualís problem solving. The focus in this approach is on the individual and the goal is to provide the knowledge necessary to create information systems modeled on the way users think, feel, search, interpret, etc. Such systems possessing a "cognitive identity" will permit more human-like dialogues with users and thus provide information which is more finely tuned to their wants and needs.One of the critiques of this approach (see, e.g., Thomas 1995) has been that all thought is social in nature, and building information systems based on models of users as individuals rather than as social actors will not succeed in providing access in the complex social and interactional environments in which most people must do their problem solving. Rather, information systems should be viewed as "sets of organized practices" (Taylor 1991) by which people coordinate their use of knowledge resources in order to cooperatively solve problems. Much of the research in this area focuses on information needs and behavior in work organizations (although, see also the book by Chatman [1995] on the information needs of retired women). There are several strands of research which take the social approach.
1. Importance of Organization
"Accessibility appears in many studies to be the
single most important variable governing use of information...In almost
all studies of information use among various populations, dependence on
personal sources far exceeds impersonal sources."
Generate an audit trail of information that can
be linked to specific problematic situations.
It is important that information professionals understand that social structure does not simply "cause" individual behaviors.Neither do multiple individual behaviors simply "add up to" social structure. Information is a key component of what the English sociologist Anthony Giddens calls "structuration", an emergent process in which neither structure nor individual action predominates.
Dervin’s research questions the professional practice of defining user groups, e.g., using demographic profiles to define user needs, and emphasizes the necessity of serving the individual. It is how well we communicate with the individual and help him/her to "make sense" that counts, not statistical counts of numbers of pieces of information circulated to groups. The value of information is not objective, but subjective.
She defines three different kinds of "Information":
It also advocates that information professionals abandon the persuasion model of service, in which one job of the professional is to convince potential users of the value of Information1. Instead, the central focus should be on how the information service can intervene usefully in individual sense-making processes.
We'll return later in the semester to the sense-making approach.
Chatman 1987, and Dervin and Greenberg 1972, provide examples of how Way of Life and information behavior interact. Chatman’s study of the information world of university janitors supports other research on the poor. She found that the janitors rely for information on electronic media, especially TV, which rarely provide them with the work information they need to answer their questions, while ignoring printed materials (and libraries). Dervin and Greenberg found, in addition, that the poor tend to rely on close personal or neighborhood networks rather than consulting professionals. In the view of these authors, these life-style traits contribute to the "information poverty" in which the poor live.
You do not have to be poor to avoid consulting
professional help, even when it is free. Numerous studies have documented
an aversion to requesting help from a librarian.
Whatever your perspective on the degree of change, there is no doubt that there is some change, and not all of it is for the good. Landauer (1995) defines a mature technology as one which has "created as many social problems as it has solved". Computerized information technology has certainly, by this definition, "come of age", once again detracting from utopian dreams of a technologically-induced Golden Age. Tenner (1996) provides many examples of what he calls "revenge effects": where a technology, introduced to alleviate one problem, creates new ones.
Information professionals must try, as much as possible, to anticipate and avoid the negative unintended social consequences of its technology. This is easier said than done, given that we cannot anticipate all aspects of the context or changes that may occur after a system is introduced. Adherence to the social approach to understanding user needs can certainly help.
Gergen 1991 warns of social saturation: With today’s answering machine, cellular phone, fax, and email providing an avenue for perpetuating relationships with an ever-widening collection of semiformal acquaintances, individuals can maintain many more relationships and roles of varying types of intensities through the electronic media than could his or her grandparents. But this process changes our understanding of self by eroding standard social arrangements.
Turkle (1995) also notes that virtual social experiences ? such as assuming a new gender role while playing a MUD ? may give people the false impression of "understanding" how other people think and feel or a false sense of intimacy. Kiesler and Hinds (1993) remark that "computer-based communication technology seems to increase the number of weak social ties and to reinforce existing strong social ties." (p. 119)
There has occurred a shift in Western humanist culture from strong, mutual obligation to one where the individual is an isolated part of the natural world. Awareness of the individualís limited control over the world is both created by and compensated for with electronically produced synthetic experience.
Some studies show that technologies such as electronic games and TV promote social interaction in the home; others show the opposite.
Communications technology (talk shows, revivalist shows, dating services, etc.) try to comfort the disconnected by ensuring a feeling of being a part of a community, producing SYNTHETIC COMMUNITIES.
An ever-declining tolerance of boredom and inactivity is compensated by the heightened sense of excitement derived from the electronically produced experience. It satisfies expectations of quick, effective solution to problems, but it also contributes to the misperception of many physical and societal events, thus leading to a superficial understanding of the social environment, e.g., US health care.
Some hold that computers and telecommunications technologies have encouraged the individual to avoid the cognitive processes involved in searching out all sides of an issue to become a truly informed citizen. Yet it is possible that people will actually "bump into" people with views very different from theirs on the Internet for example, a politically liberal person may, in surfing political sites, stumble across a neo-Nazi or KKK site and "listen in" on discussions that, in "Real Life (RL)" they would never hear.
The development of information technology is more strongly shaped by social forces than technological considerations per se. (Case 1994).
Case provides an example of this rule in his study of the development of videotex services. He demonstrates how a "technological momentum developed from the organizations and people committed by various interests to the system: Manufacturing corporations, public and private utilities, industrial and government research laboratories, investment and banking houses, sections of technical and scientific societies, departments in educational institutions, and regulatory bodies." In the absence of unbiased and thoroughgoing analysis of users’ needs, such a technological momentum can lead to financial disaster, as in the case of videotex.
Davenport and Prusak (1993) provide a good picture of how information professionals’ roles are changing in organizations. While their example deals with the corporate library, information professionals in many environments are finding it necessary to step out from behind their desks, leave their offices and even their institutions, and reach out to new clients or to new services for existing customers. Information professionals still find, filter, organize, evaluate and present information, but far less emphasis is placed on collecting and warehousing the actual information objects. Under that warehouse model, information professionals stayed in the library space and clients came to them. But new technology has made it possible to decentralize information. So the information professional can get out of the library too. Increasingly, information professional’s must:
The focus of an information professional should
be on the person with whom they’re working, and their sense making activities
(Thomas, Clark, and Gioia (1993). In order to make sense of the information
available to them, users must interpret the information and relate it to
things that they know about the organization and environment in which they
operate. Information users may scan the available information, and the
information professional could support this activity by providing executive
summaries, headlines of important journals, clippings of important stories
so the user doesn’t have to read the entire newspaper. They may summarize
statistical reports to give the user the bottom line. The information professional
can help with this activity by making historical statistics available and
by looking for similar events/opportunities in the organization’s history.
Focusing on people does not mean that the information professional can avoid the technology. They need to work with the information technology professionals to place CD-ROMs on the network, to distribute electronically strategic bits of information, to get the right information to the right people at the right time.
An excellent example of focusing on how clients make sense and helping them to do so can be found in the Harvard Medical Library, where library staff have completely revised their mission statement and service philosophy so as to bring them more in line with the sense making needs of medical faculty and students. The library had been operating on a warehouse model and discovered that faculty were simply bypassing the library in order to get and distribute the information they needed for their research. Rather than use the library, faculty were writing information services into their research grants. The library’s budget was shrinking through lack of support from the faculty. The library now goes out to faculty and finds out how they can collaborate with them to create the forms of information needed for a particular project, such as innovative medical imaging databases linked to web sites. Instead of information funds bypassing the library, it now benefits from being integral partners in the research funds.
The information professional has to look for
ways to get information out of the library and into the hands of users.
In an organization, people do not usually work alone. They collaborate
with and share information with other people inside and outside of the
organization in order to do their work. So as you work with them, you have
to find out what the user’s role is in the organization, with whom they
have to share information, for whom they have to prepare reports, etc.
A good example of entrepreneurial information specialists
shaping services to meet the needs of the way clients actually use information
is the LETRS center, in the IU-Bloomington Main Library. In this case,
academic librarians studied how humanist scholars and students use information
and then created a new service to meet these needs. This center, with its
customized IT and individualized help from librarians in the form of training
and consulting, reaches out to humanists and helps them to get their work
done in the way that they are comfortable with. Rather than forcing
humanists to use tools designed for scholars in other fields, who approach
research and learning in a different way, the LETRS center helps develop
tools which are specially designed for them.
Boynton, Galis, and Blackburn (1993) talks about
not how managers spend much of their time in very uncertain situations.
They have to make important decisions with limited information in time-sensitive
situations which they can not control. They face many threats such as lawsuits,
lively competition, changes in customer demands, and hostile take-overs.
To decrease this uncertainty, managers must increase their use of good
quality information. This means that the organization needs to build/acquire/use
information systems that can deal with this uncertainty and with these
threatening situations. The study by Thomas, Clark, and Gioia presents
results that indicate that individuals in an organization that pay attention
to a wide range of information are more likely to see events as positive
and controllable. They found a definite link between individuals having
information and skills to scan and interpret information and their ability
to choose appropriate actions for the organization.
Chen notes (1994) that cooperative work means that many people with shared goals are working to exchange information and ideas. An example of this might be our own need for a project archive to document the work that teams are doing, for later use by people who want to mount the sites and need to know why the paper prototypes are done the way they are. Technology can be used to make that exchange more productive. It can let users record the process of making decisions to be shared with others in the organization for all to benefit from the new insights the group members arrived at. Such a record is also good to refer back to if there are questions about the decision, because all of the context and associated discussions are right there. Using an L503 project archive would help improve the community network. None of the decisions or scenarios which you work on would be lost over time. People do not have to rely on their memories or scribbled notes. Twidale (1995) reports on how important it is for searchers in a digital library to be able to record their searchers for later reference and to use when asking questions of support people and information professionals.
Another use of information is to create and enhance organizational memory. Ackerman (1994) describes such a project, done as a field study of one on-line organizational memory system called Answer Garden. Such systems increase what an organization knows by recording what it has learned. In most organizations, most knowledge is locked inside the heads of workers. They have made decisions and only they know what factors were involved in making that decision. Workers have learned little "tricks" to do their jobs more efficiently. They have learned who in other organizations can be helpful. All this information can be placed into an organizational memory system. Think of it has a historic database designed to make recorded knowledge more easily retrievable. Using it increases an organization’s expertise by sharing information with more people in the organization. As Ackerman says, "Simply put, the likelihood that a perceived problem will find an organizational solution increases as the organization has additional resources to find previously created solutions or to create new solutions." (1994, p. 243). This type of system might also be described as an expert system to support decision making.Twidale mentions the following kinds of collaboration in a computer center:
People generate messages and other people read those messages. The computer helps with the transfer, storage, and display of messages. An exchange of email is an example of CMC. The listserv that we use to pass around information in this class is a CMC example. Our listserv gives you the opportunity to share information when it is convenient for you at 3 in the morning if you are a real night owl. You do not have to wait for a face-to face-meeting or compete for attention. You can write out your entire thought in one message without anyone interrupting you.
Computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), a type of computer mediated communication, occurs when cooperative work is helped along with the use of computers and other technology. CSCW can be especially useful for what some authors call virtual teams groups of people pulled together from throughout the organization to work just on a particular project. They can quickly set up email lists, conference areas on-line, etc. to speed up information sharing. You might also see this type of software called groupware. Here are some examples of CSCW:
- They could create a database which they share.
- New technology is making it possible for users to chat on the web and have a shared work area, often called a white board like the dry eraseboards, to put notes and illustrations on that they can both see and interact with.
- Other software supports collaborative writing where individual users can mark up a document and others users can see the original and all the layers of comments.
The collaborative work might also take place asynchronously or at different times. An email discussion would be an example. The focus of the software and technology is to enhance the work process of the users ? again, we return to the principle of focusing on the people.
Functions that might be included in this type of software include:
- a group secretary that records the on-line sessions and handles email for the group
- what you see is what I see capabilities so everyone has same view of the materials being discussed
- support for different tasks such as word processing, project planning, spreadsheets, drawing and illustrating, editing multimedia files, etc.
Chen et al. (1992)describe integrated collaborative research systems (ICRS) which might be used in academic departments or perhaps research units in business. Academics working on a paper may not teach at the same school. Using ICRS they can carry on productive work ? from a distance and at times convenient to themselves. Even researchers located at the same school often find it difficult to arrange times to work together. ICRS can help manage the systems and make time management a little easier. These systems would help with:
Gatekeepers may be another factor affecting information use. They are people who control the flow of information and contacts and who influence opinions. They use their interpersonal networks and many means of communication to get information. They filter that information and then pass it on to others to whom it might be relevant. Social change can be best effected if one works through these gatekeepers. The gatekeeping role can be positive if it helps the user find and use information more effectively. This could be done by filtering out irrelevant information or by bringing important sources to their attention. These positive gatekeepers function as intermediaries, brokers and facilitators of the dissemination of information. However, gatekeeping can be a negative experience if the gatekeeper prevents important information needed to make a decision from reaching the user.
The president of an organization usually has a personal secretary who screens phone calls and meeting requests decides what they think is important enough. That secretary is serving as the gatekeeper. The president may not have explicitly assigned that role to the personal secretary. They may take it upon themselves to "protect" their employer from bothersome employees. The office manager in a congressman’s office is a formal gatekeeper - information screening and managing is part of their job description. That person sees all mail and phone messages before they go to the congressman. All appointment requests are screened with the office manager. Even the office staff has to go to the manager if they want/need to see the congressman.
Workers often find their jobs "deskilled" ? automated, simplified, monitored by the introduction of information technology? or eliminated altogether. Indiana University, for example, has steadily decreased the number of clerical staff members who support faculty activities, as faculty have acquired personal computers and taken on many of the tasks formerly done by secretaries. Almost everyone in an organization may find that their work and communications are monitored by computers, and management often does not let workers know that this kind of surveillance is being done. The pace of work may also increase as information technology is introduced, as workers are expected to be more productive when provided with information technology. This raises worker stress levels and decreases their quality of life at work. This is especially true if information technology is imposed from above with no worker input on tasks that will be automated or the kinds of support that will be needed. Positive effects of information technology in the workplace include giving workers more control over a broader range of activities, making it easier for employees to get critical information about the organization (e.g., salespeople can access company databases in seconds while on the road).
With the introduction of computers and other information technology, it is not necessary for many types of workers to come to the physical office. They can telecommute from anywhere they have a terminal and a connection. Companies could have entire staffs made up of telecommuters. In this situation, computer mediated communications systems can be used to create a sense of community and belonging to the organization that workers who come to the organization’s offices gain by chatting face-to-face with other co-workers. The culture of the organization needs to adapt to include the telecommuters in decisions, office gossip, celebrations, news of promotions and new projects, etc. It also needs to recognize that it must screen employees to see which ones are likely to thrive outside normal work settings, and that it must provide adequate training as well as equipment for telecommuters.
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