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Introduction 23

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Endnotes

1At present (i.e., August 28, 2003), 1.2 billion people worldwide own a mobilephone according toHS Business & Finance(http://www.helsinkihs.net/news.asp?id=20030828IE7) and to just give an example the total number of telephone users in China has now exceeded 287 million, including 167 million fixed phone users and 120.6 million mobile phone users. China now has the second largest telephone network in the world and it ranks third in the world in terms of information industry. China’s number of mobile phone users has just narrowly surpassed the United

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24 Wiberg

States, whose mobile phone users number 120.1 million. This according to People’s daily (http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200109/04/ eng20010904_79296.html ).

2Almost 10% of the world’s population now has access to the Internet, according to Nua.com, the compiler of Internet statistics. Figures for Internet use had grown to 580.78M people by the end of May 2002, up from 407.1M in December 2000.The Nua study indicates that for the first time ever, Europe has the highest number of Internet users in the world. There are now 185.83M Europeans online, compared to 182.83M in the U.S. and Canada, and 167.86M in the Asia/Pacific region.

3According to a research project at Berkeley university, US that conducts studies of the development of email (http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/ research/projects/how-much-info/internet/emaildetails.html)thetotalnum- ber of electronic mailboxes in the world had soared 83.5% in the past year (i.e., 2000) to 569,171,660 mailboxes; In the U.S., in the year 2000 the number of mailboxes has jumped 73% to 333.5 million mailboxes since the end of 1998. In the rest of the world, the total number of mailboxes has grown 101% to 235.6 million mailboxes in 2000. In the U.S., the average corporate email user has around 1.5 mailboxes, and the average household using email has about four mailboxes. In the year 2000 there where about 89 million Americans using email at work and roughly 50 millionhouseholdsusingemail.

4Source:http://company.icq.com/info/icqstory.html

5For a more detailed discussion of how technology and society is, and have always been, heavily and complexly intertwined (see, e.g., Castells, 1996).

6Although the very concept of “networks” or “networking” has recently become very popular, the idea of “networks” or even “knowledge networks” is rather old. For a throughout discussion of, e.g., networks for knowledge creation and sharing from the perspectives of Leibniz and Hegel see Churchman (1972).

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25

Part I: Practice

Stepping Out into the Fluidity of Interaction

In this first part of this book, entitled “Practice,” the contributing authors enable us to step out into the world and get a grasp of what is currently going on out there. In this part of the book we are provided with some good examples of how this new Interaction Society is evolving and how we can see signs of this everywhere in our everyday lives. The chapters cover, e.g., empirical studies of email and Internet use, studies of edutainment games as interactive environments, and empirical studies aimed at identifying implications for mobile information and communication technology.

Overall, it is already noticeable how this technology both shapes the ways in which we interact with each other, as well as opens up new ways for us to start to interact. While the telephone is one such old technology that has had influence on our communicative behaviors for several decades now, we can start to see how online Internet communication becomes adopted and how it leads to new communicative behaviors. Finally, what kind of new behaviors will emerge from interacting with edutainment games and interaction with and via mobile ad-hoc networks is still an open question. What we do know is that there is a constant interaction stream out there that is ongoing, highly multithreaded, dynamic and heterogeneous. With this in mind, the following chapters enable us to tap into this fluidity of interactions even further and, in doing so, we can get some new insights about us as human beings and how we function as individuals, social beings and group members in this new kind of computer-supported world.

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26 Day

Chapter II

Email:

Message Transmission

and Social Ritual

Eileen Day

RMIT University, Australia and

E-Wordscapes Consulting, Australia

Abstract

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.

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Email 27

Introduction

Electronic mail (email) has emerged as the key application for Internet-based communication in both contemporary organisations and personal domains. As such, it has the potential to be one of the major determinants in shaping the emergence of an interactive society.

Thischapterpresentsanethnographicstoryaboutintraorganisationalemailthat is grounded in my practice-oriented qualitative research. I undertook a case studytofindoutmoreaboutwhatisactuallygoingonwithemailinorganisations. In doing so, I delved deeply into the study participants’ intertwined layers of meaning of, and experiences with, email through their interpretations and descriptions of such experiences.

And while ethnographies remain an alternative to mainstream approaches of knowledge construction in information systems research, increasingly such methodologies are being drawn upon to construct additional understandings (based on real-life examples) around people as social actors and their interactions with the technologies and systems they use (Schultze & Bolard, 2000; Stahl, 2003). A theme which Lamb & Kling’s (2003) recent work directs attention to is the need for information systems research to make more use of this “social actors” metaphor, claiming it “readily expands the scope and scale of the social space of people’s interactions” (p.224).

In crafting together the ethnographic data and the theoretical arguments, I discovered a range of interesting and even unexpected interpretations about how the work environment is continually being socially constructed by the social actors present and the multiple significances of email within such constructs. These discoveries provide a vivid and multi-faceted interpretative window on organisational life that indicates some of the fluidity and connectiveness that is happening as we move towards a more interactive society.Thespacesvisiblethroughsuchawindowcanbeviewedfromdifferent perspectives and so it was with my research.

I adapted Carey’s 1989 model: he used the concept that communication could be looked at from two different dimensions, that is, communication as message transmission or communication as social ritual. Although Carey’s research concerned mass communication, I applied the two dimensions of his model to my email research. Numerous themes emerged around email as both message transmission and social ritual and at times, it was difficult to maintain such a dichotomy as specific themes could be considered in association with both dimensions of the model.

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28 Day

In making sense of the interactions around organisational email, I have developed a concept I call “a message web”. The term captures the social and technological forces within evolving forms of organisational communication (incorporating both message transmission and social ritual) while it also highlightstheconnectionsbetweenemergingcommunicativepracticesassociated with virtual space and interactions within organisational culture.

The story I tell in this chapter concentrates on just one aspect of the case study’s message web; that is, the ways that the participants constructed their understandingabout,anduseof,email’sfunctionalitytoduplicateandthendistribute information. Within this theme, the uses of group distribution lists and the practices associated with copying messages emerged as being a significant elementwithintheirinteractions.

In addition, I also embed brief personal reflections into the story to draw attention to the taken for granted aspects of the many voices that are present (although not necessarily always acknowledged) in research activities. “In doing so, I challenge the boundaries of what is acceptable [research] writing and also what it is acceptable to write about” (Day, 2002, para. 8). These reflectionsexposefleetingglimpsesofmythinkinginfacingnumerousdilemmas and indicate the paths I took to resolve them, sometimes referred to as a “confessional genre of representation” (see Schultze, 2000).

Inmakingvisiblesomeofmymeaning-constructionprocesses,Iseektoengage you,thereader,withaninvitationtoalsocritiquemythinkingandmydecisions. I concur with Bochner (2000) when he says, “I want a story that doesn’t just refertosubjectivelife,butinsteadactsitoutinwaysthatshowmewhatlifefeels like now and what it can mean.” Including these reflections allow me to act out someofmyexperienceswhilealsomakingthesituationalandtheconsequential nature of social research visible.

Background and Theoretical Framework

While email-related research has quite a long history, interest in the social aspects appears on the rise. In the mid-1990s, Fulk, Schmitz & Ryu (1995) claimed that, “[n]ew media such as electronic mail are no longer so new in organizations; they have been established features of everyday work environments. Yet there remains a great need to understand how these media are

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Email 29

perceived and used within social and organizational contexts” (p. 259). By 1999, “[a]lthough e-mail does not have the same effect in every organization, researchers agree that e-mail is significantly changing life in organizations” (Minsky & Marin, p. 195). And by 2003, Tyler, Wilkinson & Huberman were arguingthat,“[e]mailhasbecomethepredominantmeansofcommunication… it pervades business, social and technical exchanges and as such it is a highly relevant area for research on communities and social networks” (Introduction Section, para. 1).

Mainstream public commentators provide a more hyped-up view of what is happening, for instance the phenomenon of the Cluetrain Manifesto (Levine, Locke, Searls & Weinberger, 2000) seemed to strike an immediate chord by tappingintoawellspringofexcitementabouttheInternet.Originallycreatedas a document on a website in 1999 and then released as a book in 2000, the Manifesto provides 95 theses which the authors declare to be the key to business success in a digital world. The underlying premise is that markets are conversations: interactive conversations with both customers and staff.

What we are seeing is that over time, a comprehensive and rich picture of email is being constructed. Additional layers of complexity are revealed as email’s varied relationships, interactions and uses unfold as an integral element within organisational life. Ducheneaut & Bellotti (2001) have described email as having become a place where many of us live; “as email captures an increasing share of an organization’s total communication volume, individuals progressivelyappropriatetheiremailclientasahabitatinwhichtheyspendmostoftheir work day” (p. 37).

The idea that email is merging into the space where we work (and even live) is the directing framework for the project called Reinventing Email at the Collaborative User Experience (CUE) Research Group, IBM Watson Research Centre. Muller & Gruen (Researchers at CUE) contest the simplistic notion that email only “serves as a tool for communication and collaboration within organizations” and instead they argue that email itself can be “the object of the collaboration.” Using examples such as an executive and their assistant sharing access and responsibility for the same mail, they see users “discovering new,unanticipateduses…[and]byusingthetechnologytonewpurposes,they ‘reinvent’ it” (2003).

This perspective that users can (and do) reinvent the technology has some association with Kiesler’s 1997 claim that there are different types of social effects, i.e., mundane and significant. She claimed that technology could amplify or transform social processes resulting in effects that are either:

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30 Day

•Mundane, where the technology simply amplifies or augments what people have done in the past (by doing it more accurately, more quickly or cheaply) or

•Significant, in that technology can transform how people think about the world and enact their social roles within it.

This two level perspective had earlier been explored by Sproull & Kiesler (1991) in their research using what they termed “first and second level effects” that flow from the introduction of new information and communication technologies.

First level effects are primarily associated with increased efficiency and a reductioninthecostsofsharinginformation.Secondleveleffectsflowfromthe unforeseen variations which the technology makes possible: new ways of workinganddoingbusiness,newwaysoflivingandcreatingacommunity,and especiallynewwaysofthinkingandlearning.Theconsequencesofsecondlevel effects can dramatically extend beyond those of first level efficiency effects (Sproull & Kiesler, 1991).

Peopleareabletodonewthingsthat“leadstothinkinginnewwaysandthereby to fundamental changes in how people work and interact” (Sproull & Kiesler, 1991, p. 35). It is people’s behaviour, not just the attributes of the technology, whichdeterminewhetheratechnologyisamplifyingortransformative(Kiesler, 1997, p. xii). Gómez (1998) explained that, “second level effects are generally unanticipated, slow in emerging, and are related to changes in social patterns and the interdependence among users” (p. 225).

Phillips&Eisenberg(1993,1996)studiedemailuseinanot-for-profitresearch organisation associated with a university. They found that different email strategies, from simple, direct requests to more complex manoeuvrings were being used. In conclusion, they suggested “some of the features of email encourage co-workers (but not so much supervisors) to put pressure on their peers and to use the publicness of the information to force accountability” (Phillips & Eisenberg, 1993).

The notion of users “rethinking” how email can be used and a move towards these second level effects was evident in Kersten & Phillips (1992) early work around email being used to manage impressions. They suggested email users could integrate a range of different goal-directed behaviours that could be

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Email 31

consideredasimpressionmanagementstrategies,forinstanceingratiation,selfpromotionandintimidation.

More recently, O’Sullivan (2000) has also studied how the role of impression managementimpactsofinterpersonalcommunicationtechnologychoice.Even though his study concerned personal relationships rather than interactions at work, his findings support the perspective that views the use of mediated communication channels as a way of managing self-relevant information in pursuit of self-presentational goals (p. 403). He concluded that in situations where positive impressions may be threatened, using a mediated communication channel (such as email) means that self-revelation could be more controlled, which could be advantageous to the sender.

Inamoregeneralstudyofemailusewithinfourdisparateorganizations,Ruggeri Stevens & McElhill (2000) have devised “a multi-dimensional ‘positioning’ modelforpracticalusebymanagers”toexploretheirorganisation’spresentuse of email. The dimension, labelled People Influences, attempts to measure the degree to which email is being used to serve individual needs compared to group/corporate needs. They include the practice of sending copies of messages to managers to force the main recipient into specific actions and the use of email to safeguard a position (which their study respondents referred to as a “Cover Your Backside” tactic) as examples of weaknesses on this dimension (pp. 276-277).

Thepracticeofduplicatinginformationbringsfreshchallengesforbothmanagers and staff with increased potential for mismanagement and abuse. Schwartz (2003) recently studied “the effects of mailing list mismanagement from the user’s perspective at a research and teaching University.” He analysed the impact of an error that resulted in two messages being cross-posted between a voluntary moderated mailing list of 6,100 subscribers in 67 countries and a much smaller mandatory unmoderated list consisting of 352 faculty members. In the 11 days after the error, 31,680 unnecessary email messages passed between the 352 members of the smaller list. Schwartz concluded that if you assume “that each member spent only 45 seconds to download, read, and delete each message, there were a total of 396 work-hours wasted.”

Thepossibilitiesthatemailopensupwithinorganisationallifeappeartobeboth significant and multifaceted and much remains to be discovered.

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