Voting, Rating, Annotation,
Web4Groups and the Future of Communication on the Internet
International Conference
21-22 Apr 1997
Vienna, Austria

Comments on "Voting and Rating, Perspectives for Information Collection, Decision Making and Collaborative Rating Using Web4Groups" (ftp://ftp.soe.oeaw.ac.at/Web4Groups/RatingVoting/report.rtf)

by John December / my perspective

Summary: the report provides a good articulation of voting and rating procedures as well as recognition of their social context. My overall reaction is that the challenge remains to better articulate the social influences and activity contexts of the voting and rating activities described. More theoretical and conceptual work needs to be done in this area by CMC researchers, but some existing literature provides a framework and units of analysis.

• Provide a better articulation of social influence.
  • CMC literature points increasingly to social context as primary influence on CMC attitudes and behavior, as opposed to inherent properties of the medium (Lea, 1992).
  • Social Influence Model (SIM) (Spears & Lea, 1992) shows that behavior and attitude in CMC environments are influenced by the salient social influence, not a function of the medium.

• More precisely define the activities of the processes and technology use and the contexts in which they occur.
  • Activity Theory (Nardi, 1996) contextualizes users within a community of practice.
  • Use this framework to identify players and recognize non-technological influences to avoid system failure (example: the "Postal Buddy" example in Nardi (1996)).
  • I use the notion of computer-mediated activity in my research (December, 1996) to contextualize user perception.

• I expand on this in my talk, The Matrix of Society and Technology in Computer-Mediated Communication on the Internet

References

• December, J. (1996). Units of analysis for Internet communication. Journal of Communication, 46(1). http://www.usc.edu/dept/annenberg/vol1/issue4/december.html
• Lea, M., Ed. (1992). Contexts of computer-mediated communication. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
• Nardi, B. A., ed. (1996). Context and consciousness: Activity theory and human-computer interaction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Spears, R. & Lea, M. (1992). Social influence and the influence of the 'social' in computer-mediated communication. In M. Lea (Ed.), Contexts of computer-mediated communication (pp. 30-65). New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

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http://www.december.com/present/w4g97com.html

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