Awareness of Presence - Good or Bad Thing in a Working Tool?
Imagine a professionally successful Baby Boomer who works for a higher education
institution and who probably got their start in information technology working
with punch cards or early terminals, some of their early work was probably in
programming. This is the kind of person who checks their e-mail twice a day
- once in the morning and once in the afternoon, and also checks and answers
voice mail on schedule. They learned early on that the best way for them to
be productive is to shut out the rest of the world and focus, to concentrate
on the task at hand.
This same person is in a position of decision making about whether to support
or suppress what may well be the preferred method of communication among Americans
who are under the age of 21 - instant messaging? Yikes. That would be like me
having the power to decide that amusement parks don't need roller coaster rides
and, in fact, that amusement parks needn't really even exist, despite the fact
that many people enjoy them and that they are a thriving, valid industry.
Did I tell you that a completely fail to comprehend what others enjoy from
roller coaster rides?
From here, I could rant a bit about how we need to be careful not to shut down
someone else's favorite tool, or not to make possibly invalid judgments about
their productivity. I could go on about how one of the very simplest ways to
make an IT staffer's job easier is to tightly control what our users can do,
to limit their choices based on our own needs and working styles and assumptions,
and about how wrong that would be.
But instead, briefing up on this earlier, I came across some pretty interesting
articles and found that there are academicians who are studying up on instant
messaging and that they have a vocabulary that provides words and phrases for
some of what I have perceived in IM. It's useful to have a common vocabulary
about things, so the gist of my piece this week is to share a few important
words or phrases that can be used to discuss the qualities of instant messaging
and perhaps make discussion about it more productive.
To be perfectly frank, I really like and enjoy instant messaging and find it
perhaps my most useful working tool, especially in light of the spam epidemic
that is creating chaos in my in box. So, if you're a cranky old guy who came
up through the ranks via programming and you're inclined to want to just shut
off instant messaging in the dorms . . . don't read this . . . let the folks
who agree with me learn the words and phrases that might just make their next
argument with you more persuasive.
My favorite paper from the literature, so far, is one called "Theorizing
the Unintended Consequences of Instant Messaging for Worker Productivity,"
by a couple of researchers at Case Western Reserve University. (A link to that
PDF is available as a reference, below.) Julie Rennecker and Lindsey Godwin,
draw from the works of others and from their own creativity and describe some
features of IM as follows.
IM has presence awareness - this means that when you are running IM
there is a presence perceivable to you of "others" who are available
to you. Your buddy list tells you who is online, whether they are idle or away,
and more. You can use this to estimate how likely it is you can make contact
with someone. Whenever you are online and IM is turned on, you are part of the
social swarm.
IM has pop-up recipient notification - it's kind of like a telephone
that's in your face, has caller ID, and in addition, when it comes on you can
already see, instantly what the conversation's going to be about.
IM has within-medium polychronic communication - polychromic communication
means multiple communications going on at once, which we often do in other media,
like listening to NPR on Saturday morning while chatting with your partner in
the kitchen. Unlike jumping back and forth between two conversations on a single
telephone with multiple lines however, IM allows you to view and juggle many
discussions in the single medium. (My own personal record is seven current meaningful
IM chats at a single time.)
IM has silent interactivity - that means that except for the clicking
of the keyboard, it's relatively non-obtrusive to other things going on, like,
say, a relatively boring staff meeting. (Although you quickly come to recognize
the bursts of chattering fingers with a rhythm that tells you IM is happening.)
Not only can you ask an assistant to bring you the document that you need but
forgot to bring to a meeting, without interrupting the meeting and admitting
that you forgot the document, you and one or two others can strategically analyze
and even possible control the flow of a group discussion by "passing notes"
via IM. (Been there, done that.)
IM has ephemeral transcripting - by this the authors mean that under
ordinary usage there is no permanent transcript or record of the conversation.
This is changing, with newer versions, especially of enterprise IM, that offer
automatic recording and logging, but it's still part of the nature of IM to
be ephemeral. I recall the first time I saw my own "chat" recorded
by having been cut and pasted into someone else's e-mail message. And almost
daily I forget and close a window that contained a phone number or an e-mail
address someone had shared with me in IM, and have to ask them for it again.
So, with these five characteristics of IM, we have some terms for our ongoing
conversations about it. I recommend reading the Rennecker and Godwin article,
even though I disagree with their overall findings. Another article to read
that discusses the need for "listening to the learner" about what
learning technologies a learner wants is "The Impact of Technologies on
Learning," by Kimberly Gustafson. A link to a PDF of that article, published
online especially for readers of this column, is also referenced below.
I think we're just beginning, still, to see the tip of that proverbial iceberg
with regard to transformation of our working and learning technologies. I saw
a news item last week, and of course I've lost the reference, where two European
cities each have a virtual communications kiosk. Users in each city can stand
in front of the kiosk and see and hear each other as though the other was just
"on the other side" of the apparently mirrored surface of the kiosk.
They can then communicate with full audio and visual cues as though each is
"present" in the other's space. That reminds me just a little bit
of the "presence awareness" of IM, and I see a tantalizing glimpse
in there of a floating presence that hovers around me and moves with me wherever
I go in the future, linking me upon demand to anyone and any information, at
any time.
I know, I know, there will be readers who say that "Working with an open
instant messenger window is like working while riding a roller coaster."
To them I say, "If that excites you, cool, at least as long as you get
your work done. You ride the roller coaster and I'll IM!"
http://www.scup.org/knowledge/gustafson04.pdf
Gustafson, Kimberly 2004 "The Impact of Technologies on Learning,"
Planning for Higher Education, 32:2, December 2003-February 2004, pp. 37-43.
http://interruptions.net/literature/Rennecker-Sprouts03.pdf
Rennecker, Julie and Lindsey Godwin 2003 "Theorizing the Unintended Consequences
of Instant Messaging for Worker Productivity," Sprouts: Working Papers
on Information Environments. Systems and organizations, Vol. 3, Summer.
