A Review of: “Computer Mediated Communication: Social Interaction and the Internet”

The Internet has doubled in size every year in recent years and now spans the globe, facilitating the exchange of all matter of digital data. Recent development has been categorized by an explosion in new commercial activity. Despite overwhelming coverage in the popular press, relatively little is understood regarding the impact the Internet is having on firms that use this medium to facilitate commerce. Even less is understood about the impact on small enterprises-the largest segment of U.S., Japanese, and Western European businesses. This article reports the results of an exploratory study examining critical issues surrounding the use of the Internet in emerging enterprises. The survey (1) describes how small businesses develop and use their on-line sales presence, (2) explores factors that motivate firms to invest in electronic commerce, (3) assesses the importance of the expected benefits of an on-line sales presence on the decision to go on-line, and (4) examines some of the barriers that prevent small businesses from further developing their on-line presence.     

Civil Society and the Shaping of Communication–Information Policy: Four Decades of Advocacy

This article initiates exploratory empirical research on how civil society collective action has reacted to and affected communication–information policy (CIP), a policy domain that has been reshaped by technological and industrial change. It reviews the relevant theory on social movements, citizens groups, and interest groups from political science. Data are gathered on two dimensions of the research question: (1) We quantify the number of public interest advocacy groups focused on CIP in the United States from 1961 to the present, using organizational ecology methods. (2) We track the number of U.S. Congressional hearings held each year on CIP issues. The results show that CIP now exceeds other social movement issues (women, civil rights, the environment, human rights) as a major concern of Congressional activity, that the issues are becoming more interdependent, and that modes of citizens advocacy have undergone drastic changes in recent years.     

Content analysis of e-petitions with topic modeling: How to train and evaluate LDA models?

E-petitions have become a popular vehicle for political activism, but studying them has been difficult because efficient methods for analyzing their content are currently lacking. Researchers have used topic modeling for content analysis, but current practices carry some serious limitations. While modeling may be more efficient than manually reading each petition, it generally relies on unsupervised machine learning and so requires a dependable training and validation process. And so this paper describes a framework to train and validate Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), the simplest and most popular topic modeling algorithm, using e-petition data. With rigorous training and evaluation, 87% of LDA-generated topics made sense to human judges. Topics also aligned well with results from an independent content analysis by the Pew Research Center, and were strongly associated with corresponding social events. Computer-assisted content analysts can benefit from our guidelines to supervise every process of training and evaluation of LDA. Software developers can benefit from learning the demands of social scientists when using LDA for content analysis. These findings have significant implications for developing LDA tools and assuring validity and interpretability of LDA content analysis. In addition, LDA topics can have some advantages over subjects extracted by manual content analysis by reflecting multiple themes expressed in texts, by extracting new themes that are not highlighted by human coders, and by being less prone to human bias.     

Information Societies or “ICT Equipment Societies?” Measuring the Digital Information-Processing Capacity of a Society in Bits and Bytes

The digital divide is conventionally measured in terms of information and communication technology (ICT) equipment diffusion, which comes down to counting the number of computers or phones, among other devices. This article fine-tunes these approximations by estimating the amount of digital information that is stored, communicated, and computed by these devices. The installed stock of ICT equipment in the consumer segment is multiplied with its corresponding technological performance, resulting in the “installed technological capacity” for storage (in bits), bandwidth (in bits per second), and computational power (in computations per second). This leads to new insights. Despite the rapidly decreasing digital equipment divide, there is an increasing gap in terms of information-processing capacity. It is shown that in 1996 the average inhabitant of the industrialized countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) had a capacity of 49 kibps more than its counterpart from Latin America and the Caribbean. Ten years later, this gap widened to 577 kibps per inhabitant. This innovative approach toward the quantification of the digital divide leads to numerous new challenges for the research agenda.     

ICT Research,the New Economy,and the Evolving Discipline of Economics: Back to the Future?

Economics-related ICT research has moved from the fringes of the discipline to penetrate all of its branches. It is, therefore, not a separate economics subdiscipline. It is also unlikely to become part of an “ICT or Internet research” proto-discipline. Instead, it should be seen as only one part of a bigger agenda toward a proper “information and knowledge economics” and possibly a future proto-discipline of a “unified theory of information and knowledge” or a meta-discipline of information sciences.     

How can contributors to open-source communities be trusted? On the assumption,inference, and substitution of trust

Open-source communities that focus on content rely squarely on the contributions of invisible strangers in cyberspace. How do such communities handle the problem of trusting that strangers have good intentions and adequate competence? This question is explored in relation to communities in which such trust is a vital issue: peer production of software (FreeBSD and Mozilla in particular) and encyclopaedia entries (Wikipedia in particular). In the context of open-source software, it is argued that trust was inferred from an underlying ‘hacker ethic’, which already existed. The Wikipedian project, by contrast, had to create an appropriate ethic along the way. In the interim, the assumption simply had to be that potential contributors were trustworthy; they were granted ‘substantial trust’. Subsequently, projects from both communities introduced rules and regulations which partly substituted for the need to perceive contributors as trustworthy. They faced a design choice in the continuum between a high-discretion design (granting a large amount of trust to contributors) and a low-discretion design (leaving only a small amount of trust to contributors). It is found that open-source designs for software and encyclopaedias are likely to converge in the future towards a mid-level of discretion. In such a design the anonymous user is no longer invested with unquestioning trust.     

Accountability and the Framing Power of Visual Technologies: How Do Visualized Reconstructions of Incidents Influence Public and Political Accountability Discussions?

In this article visual technologies and their use in three reconstructions after an incident are linked with accountability issues. Conclusions are drawn on the relation between administration, the choice of technology to create and distribute visual occurrences, and society and how visualizations are used to frame accountability issues.     

Minding the communications gap: How can universities signal the availability and value of their scientific knowledge to commercial organizations?

We posit that a communications gap exists between universities and commercial organizations, attributed to their idiosyncratic goals, interests, and incentives. To bridge this gap, universities need to recognize and leverage observable differences in the strength of signals and the width of channels used to disseminate their scientific knowledge externally. We explore these ideas by analyzing knowledge dissemination and academic engagement activities in 133 UK universities in the period 2011–2019. Our analysis shows that universities with a lower scientific impact have a higher intensity of collaborative research, contract research, and consultancy activities if they communicate that impact through more prominent scientific outlets. In turn, universities with a higher scientific impact have a lower intensity of interaction with commercial organizations if they communicate their scientific impact through less prominent scientific outlets. We further reveal that universities with a higher economic impact show a higher intensity of collaborative research. At the same time, we find no evidence that the social impact generated by universities is linked to the intensity of university-industry interaction, no matter the channels through which that impact is communicated. Using these findings, we draw implications for practice and policy.     

How to describe and evaluate “deception” phenomena: recasting the metaphysics,ethics, and politics of ICTs in terms of magic and performance and taking a relational and narrative turn

Contemporary ICTs such as speaking machines and computer games tend to create illusions. Is this ethically problematic? Is it deception? And what kind of “reality” do we presuppose when we talk about illusion in this context? Inspired by work on similarities between ICT design and the art of magic and illusion, responding to literature on deception in robot ethics and related fields, and briefly considering the issue in the context of the history of machines, this paper discusses these questions through the lens of stage magic and illusionism, with the aim of reframing the very question of deception. It investigates if we can take a more positive or at least morally neutral view of magic, illusion, and performance, while still being able to understand and criticize the relevant phenomena, and if we can describe and evaluate these phenomena without recourse to the term “deception” at all. This leads the paper into a discussion about metaphysics and into taking a relational and narrative turn. Replying to Tognazzini, the paper identifies and analyses two metaphysical positions: a narrative and performative non-dualist position is articulated in response to what is taken to be a dualist, in particular Platonic, approach to “deception” phenomena. The latter is critically discussed and replaced by a performative and relational approach which avoids a distant “view from nowhere” metaphysics and brings us back to the phenomena and experience in the performance relation. The paper also reflects on the ethical and political implications of the two positions: for the responsibility of ICT designers and users, which are seen as co-responsible magicians or co-performers, and for the responsibility of those who influence the social structures that shape who has (more) power to deceive or to let others perform.     

How to deal with corruption? Examining the roles of e-government maturity,government administrative effectiveness,and virtual social networks diffusion

The role of e-government in combating corruption is an active area of research in Information Systems (IS). Drawing on the value framework for assessing e-government impact, and grounding our discussion on three theoretical perspectives, namely, (1) technological determinism theory, (2) general deterrence theory, and (3) Habermas’ public sphere perspective, we seek to explore how the diffusion of virtual social networks (VSNs) influences the relationships among e-government maturity, government administrative effectiveness, and corruption in a country. Our analyses based on publicly available archival data substantiate the (1) indirect relationships between e-government maturity in a country and corruption in three branches of its government (i.e., legislature, executive, and judiciary) through government administrative effectiveness, (2) interaction effect of VSN diffusion on the relationship between e-government maturity in a country and its government administrative effectiveness, and (3) interaction effects of VSN diffusion on the relationships between government administrative effectiveness in a country and its corruption dimensions. The key contributions of this research include the establishment of the (1) role of e-government in combating corruption in three branches of the government, and (2) idea of the public sphere in the context of VSN diffusion, and the subsequent exploration of its effects on e-government outcomes of a country.     

How and when information proactiveness leads to operational firm performance in the banking sector of Pakistan? The roles of open innovation,creative cognitive style,and climate for innovation

Utilizing the assumptions of the Resource-based theory, this study examined how and why new, rare, and inimitable resources in the form of information proactiveness motivation influence operational firm performance. We hypothesized open innovation as a mediator between information proactiveness motivation and operational firm performance. We also hypothesized the interactive effects of an individual’s creative cognitive style and information proactiveness motivation on open innovation whereas climate for innovation and open innovation jointly influence operational firm performance. A temporally segregated data (n = 260) was collected in three-time intervals from employees working in the banking sector of Islamabad, Pakistan. Utilizing the PROCESS approach, the findings of the study indicate that open innovation mediates the relationship between information proactiveness motivation, and operational firm performance. Moreover, the creative cognitive style was found to moderate the relationship between information proactiveness motivation and open innovation whereas climate for innovation emerged as a moderator between open innovation and operational firm performance. This research focused on unique information and contextual resources which directly and indirectly play significant roles in promoting the firm's open innovation and subsequent operational firm performance.