Tactful calling: investigating asymmetric social dilemmas in mobile communications

Recipients of phone calls face a constant dilemma between ignoring calls at the possible expense of offending the caller, missing business opportunities or neglecting family members on one hand; and answering them at the expense of interrupting their train of thought or appearing rude and impolite towards others with whom they share a social activity on the other hand. We studied people's attitudes regarding these dilemmas, with emphasis on their social aspects. In a cross-cultural study, conducted in Israel and in Germany, we surveyed both caller and recipient attitudes towards answering mobile phone calls in various circumstances. The study also assessed the aspects of providing contextual information about a call prior to it being answered, including types of information deemed most valuable. The results emphasise the importance of social norms in affecting respondents’ attitudes towards making or accepting phone calls regardless of role (caller or recipient), gender or culture. We also found that the norms in the physical context (e.g. being in a meeting) prevailed over norms in the virtual context (e.g. the phone call). Cultural and gender differences did not affect the degree to which people were frustrated by insufficient information regarding the other party's context. However, these factors did affect the suggested design solutions to this problem. The research provides insight into the social aspects of the problem of interruptive mobile phone calls and towards designing applications that help users maintain politeness while handling the caller–recipient dilemma.     

Social Loafing in Technology-Supported Teams

This study examines the occurrence of social loafing in technology-supported teams along with methods for diminishing loafing. A controlled laboratory experiment with a 3 × 2 × 2 factorial design is used. The independent variables – feedback, anonymity, and group size – are manipulated experimentally. It was expected that social loafing – a widely observed phenomenon – would indeed occur in technology supported teams. It was also expected that the traditional means of reducing social loafing (i.e., identifiability and feedback) within physical work environments would also have similar effects within technology-supported work environments. As expected, social loafing is found to occur in teams operating in a technology-driven realm. An unexpected finding is that social loafing is measurable only when participants are provided self-feedback. While other forms of feedback have a positive influence on productivity, they fail to reduce this phenomenon, and identifiability of group members is found to have no observable effect on social loafing. Computer Supported Cooperative Work.     

Improving quality and quantity of contributions: Two models for promoting knowledge exchange with shared databases

Shared databases are used for knowledge exchange in groups. Whether a person is willing to contribute knowledge to a shared database presents a social dilemma: Each group member saves time and energy by not contributing any information to the database and by using the database only to retrieve information which was contributed by others. But if all people use this strategy, then the database will be empty and, hence, useless for every group member. Based on theoretical approaches, two models for fostering the information-sharing behavior of database users are presented. One for enhancing the quality of database contents, and one for enhancing the quantity of those contents. The models take into account the following factors: the kinds of rewards the participants obtain for contributing information, the individual costs associated with this contribution, the prospective metaknowledge about the importance of one’s own information to the others, and the retrospective metaknowledge about how much others contributed to and retrieved from the database. These factors enhance the quantity of database contents as well as their quality.     

Group norms,media preferences,and group meeting success: A longitudinal study

Group norms are known to have an effect on group meeting success. But to what extent do these norms affect choice of media for communication of group members, and what role does this effect play, if any, in group meeting success? This paper empirically examines these questions. It takes a novel approach in considering these questions longitudinally to investigate the importance of the formation and affect of norms over time. The study presented here showed that group norms do influence group member media preference and that, over time, these effects grow stronger. Furthermore, a strong positive association between the similarity of group media preferences and group meeting success is revealed. The paper concludes with a discussion of the importance and implications of understanding the effect of group norms on technology use and meeting success.     

Developing an antecedent model of knowledge sharing intention in virtual communities

This study explored the antecedent model of knowledge sharing intention in virtual communities based on social influence theory. A field survey was performed with the participation of 176 college students who were Facebook users. The results indicated that expected benefits (i.e., cognitive benefits, social integrative benefits, personal integrative benefits, and hedonic benefits) significantly and positively influenced social influence factors (i.e., group norms, social identity, and subjective norms). In addition, social influence factors (i.e., group norms, social identity, and subjective norms) significantly and positively influenced knowledge sharing intention in virtual communities. Finally, social influence factors (i.e., group norms, social identity, and subjective norms) fully mediate the effects of expected benefits (i.e., cognitive benefits, social integrative benefits, personal integrative benefits, and hedonic benefits) on knowledge sharing intention. This study identified the antecedents of knowledge sharing intention in virtual communities, and the results could be applied to areas of organization, education, and business.     

Behavior‐Based Propagation of Trust in Social Networks with Restricted and Anonymous Participation

Increasing interactions and engagements in social networks through monetary and material incentives is not always feasible. Some social networks, specifically those that are built on the basis of fairness, cannot incentivize members using tangible things and thus require an intangible way to do so. In such networks, a personalized recommender could provide an incentive for members to interact with other members in the community. Behavior‐based trust models that generally compute social trust values using the interactions of a member with other members in the community have proven to be good for this. These models, however, largely ignore the interactions of those members with whom a member has interacted, referred to as “friendship effects.” Results from social studies and behavioral science show that friends have a significant influence on the behavior of the members in the community. Following the famous Spanish proverb on friendship “Tell Me Your Friends and I Will Tell You Who You Are,” we extend our behavior‐based trust model by incorporating the “friendship effect” with the aim of improving the accuracy of the recommender system. In this article, we describe a trust propagation model based on associations that combines the behavior of both individual members and their friends. The propagation of trust in our model depends on three key factors: the density of interactions, the degree of separation, and the decay of friendship effect. We evaluate our model using a real data set and make observations on what happens in a social network with and without trust propagation to understand the expected impact of trust propagation on the ranking of the members in the recommended list. We present the model and the results of its evaluation. This work is in the context of moderated networks for which participation is by invitation only and in which members are anonymous and do not know each other outside the community. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Forming relationship commitments to online communities: The role of social motivations

Although administrators of online communities (OCs) may focus on improving their OCs through upgrading technology and enhancing the usability of their OCs to attract additional users, the level of OC participation may be associated with social motives. The purpose of this study is to understand how social motivations (that is, network externalities and social norms) affect members committed to OCs. This study tests the hypotheses on data collected from 396 undergraduate students. Data analyses show that network externalities and social norms directly influence social interaction ties, which subsequently results in commitment toward a community. Social norms also directly influence relationship commitments to a community. The results provide insights into how social motivations lead to commitment to an OC, reminding OC administrators to encourage member commitment to the OC from the perspective of social motivations.     

Local Groups Online: Political Learning and Participation

Voluntary associations serve crucial roles in local communities and within our larger democratic society. They aggregate shared interests, collective will, and cultivate civic competencies that nurture democratic participation. People active in multiple local groups frequently act as opinion leaders and create “weak” social ties across groups. In Blacksburg and surrounding Montgomery County, Virginia, the Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV) community computer network has helped to foster nearly universal Internet penetration. Set in this dense Internet context, the present study investigated if and how personal affiliation with local groups enhanced political participation in this high information and communication technology environment. This paper presents findings from longitudinal survey data that indicate as individuals’ uses of information technology within local formal groups increases over time, so do their levels and types of involvement in the group. Furthermore, these increases most often appear among people who serve as opinion leaders and maintain weak social ties in their communities. Individuals’ changes in community participation, interests and activities, and Internet use suggest ways in which group members act upon political motivations and interests across various group types.      

Group awareness and self-presentation in computer-supported information exchange

A common challenge in many situations of computer-supported collaborative learning is increasing the willingness of those involved to share their knowledge with other group members. As a prototypical situation of computer-supported information exchange, a shared-database setting was chosen for the current study. This information-exchange situation represented a social dilemma: while the contribution of information to a shared database induced costs and provided no benefit for the individual, the entire group suffered when all members decided to withhold information. In order to alleviate the information-exchange dilemma, a group-awareness tool was employed. It was hypothesized that participants would use group awareness for self-presentational purposes. For the examination of this assumption, the personality variable ‘protective self-presentation’ (PSP) was measured. An interaction effect of group awareness and PSP was found: when an awareness tool provided information concerning the contribution behavior of each individual, this tool was used as a self-presentation opportunity. In order to understand this effect in more detail, single items of the PSP-scale were analyzed.     

Applying a critical approach to investigate barriers to digital inclusion and online social networking among young people with disabilities

Despite the seeming ubiquity of young people's Internet use, there are still many for whom access to the Internet and online social networking remains inequitable and patterned by disadvantage. The connection between information technology and young people with disabilities is particularly under‐researched. This article contributes to the field of critical information systems research by exposing significant barriers and facilitators to Internet accessibility for young people with disabilities. It uses Bourdieu's critical theory to explore how the unequal distribution of resources shapes processes of digital inclusion for young people with disabilities. It highlights access needs and experiences that are both disability and non‐disability related. The article draws on interviews in South Australia with 18 young people aged 10–18 years with a physical disability (such as cerebral palsy) or acquired brain injury and with 17 of their family members. Interviews evaluated participants' and parents' reflections on the benefits of a home‐based, goal‐oriented intervention to increase the young person's Internet use for social participation purposes. The Bourdieuian analysis demonstrated how varying levels of accrued individual and family offline capital resources are related to digital/online resources and disability‐specific online resources. This revealed how unequal resources of capital can influence technology use and hence digital inclusion for young people with disabilities. Our study demonstrates that young people with particular types of disabilities require intensive, personalised and long‐term support from within and beyond the family to ‘get online’. We conclude that Internet studies need to more frequently adopt critical approaches to investigate the needs of users and barriers to information technology use within sub‐groups, such as young people with disabilities. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd     

Kicking out the trolls – Antecedents of social exclusion intentions in Facebook groups

When contributing to groups on social networking sites (SNS), not all group members necessarily adhere to the group's norms (i.e., its explicit or implicit rules); in other words, they show norm-deviant behavior. Despite the popularity of groups on SNS and the frequency of norm-deviant behavior within them, research has to date rarely investigated how members of online groups react to those behaviors. This article introduces a model based on the social identity approach regarding the responses to norm-deviations in Facebook groups and reports an experiment testing this model. In this experiment, deviant members were perceived as questioning what the group stands for (i.e., as subverting the group's identity). Perceptions of identity subversion, in turn, motivated group members to derogate and exclude the deviate. Furthermore, participants were found to ignore the deviate's contributions (i.e., not to recall them after reading the group's timeline). Taken together, the results suggest that group members perceive a deviate's behavior as questioning their group's image. This, however, does not seem to lead to a group's decay, but rather promotes a “natural purification” within the group through elimination of negative influences.     

The provision of online public goods: Examining social structure in an electronic network of practice

Electronic networks of practice are computer-mediated social spaces where individuals working on similar problems self-organize to help each other and share knowledge, advice, and perspectives about their occupational practice or common interests. These interactions occur through message postings to produce an on-line public good of knowledge, where all participants in the network can then access this knowledge, regardless of their active participation in the network. Using theories and concepts of collective action and public goods, five hypotheses are developed regarding the structural and social characteristics that support the online provision and maintenance of knowledge in an electronic network of practice. Using social network analysis, we examine the structure of message contributions that produce and sustain the public good. We then combine the results from network analysis with survey results to examine the underlying pattern of exchange, the role of the critical mass, the quality of the ties sustaining participation, the heterogeneity of resources and interests of participants, and changes in membership that impact the structural characteristics of the network. Our results suggest that the electronic network of practice chosen for this study is sustained through generalized exchange, is supported by a critical mass of active members, and that members develop strong ties with the community as a whole rather than develop interpersonal relationships. Knowledge contribution is significantly related to an individual's tenure in the occupation, expertise, availability of local resources and a desire to enhance one's reputation, and those in the critical mass are primarily responsible for creating and sustaining the public good of knowledge. Finally, we find that this structure of generalized exchange is stable over time although there is a high proportion of member churn in the network.     

Measuring individual learning performance in group work from a knowledge integration perspective

Evaluation is an important part of the teaching-learning process, and it becomes more difficult when individuals are developing a joint project and individual marks have to be assigned to the group members. Different strategies can be used to perform this task. In this work, an approach that combines the global group results and the individual performance is presented. This approach makes use of a semantic framework to rank the individual participation of each group member and to compare their results with those they should have obtained to achieve the final mark. An experiment performed in real settings is also reported in this paper.     

Loafing in the digital age: The role of computer mediated communication in the relation between perceived loafing and group affective outcomes

Virtual work has become an increasingly central practice for the organization of the 21st century. While effective virtual workgroups can create synergies that boost innovation and performance, ineffective workgroups become a great burden for organizations. Empirical research has shown that some negative behaviors, such as social loafing, negatively influence a group’s affective outcomes, in both collocated (face-to-face) and virtual workgroups. In this study, we explore if working through low fidelity computer mediated communication (CMC) increases the negative impact of perceived loafing over cohesion and work satisfaction. On this rationale, we conducted a laboratory study with 44 groups of four members each, who worked on a project in four sessions over a one-month period, in either face-to-face or low fidelity CMC conditions. Results show that the communication media condition moderates the effect of perceived loafing in the expected direction, meaning that, in the low fidelity CMC condition perceived loafing had an increased negative effect on group cohesion and satisfaction with the work process and its results.     

Democratic group signatures with collective traceability

Recently, democratic group signatures (DGSs) particularly catch our attention due to their great functionalities, i.e., no group manager, anonymity, and individual traceability. In existing DGS schemes, individual traceability says that any member in the group can reveal the actual signer’s identity from a given signature. In this paper, we strengthen the security notions of DGS by taking insider attack against anonymity into account, and present a concrete DGS construction with collective traceability. The idea behind collective traceability is that a sender can first choose (ad-hoc) a set of n members (including himself), and then sign a message by using the public keys of all the members, in such a way that his identity would be recovered, in case of disputes, if and only if all n members collectively cooperate. The security properties of our scheme are formally proved under reasonable assumptions.     

Exploring and mitigating social loafing in online communities

The motivation to share members’ knowledge is critical to an online community’s survival and success. Previous research has established that knowledge sharing intentions are based on group cohesion. Several studies also suggested that social loafing behavior will seriously corrode group cohesion. Therefore, social loafing is a key obstacle to fostering online community development. Although substantial studies have been performed on the critical factors that affect social loafing in the learning group, those on online communities are still lacking. By integrating two perspectives, social capital and perceived risk, a richer understanding of social loafing behavior can be gained. In the research model, social ties and perceived risk have been driven by anonymity, offline activities, knowledge quality, and media richness. Social ties and perceived risk are hypothesized to affect social loafing in the online community, which, in turn, is hypothesized as negatively affecting group cohesion. Data collected from 323 online users in online communities provide support for the proposed model. The study shows that social loafing is a significant negative predictor of the users’ group cohesion. The study also shows that social ties and perceived risk are important components of social loafing. Anonymity, offline activities, knowledge quality, and media richness all have strong effects on social ties and perceived risk in the online community. Implications for theory and practice and suggestions for future research are discussed.     

BuddyBeads: techno-jewelry for non-verbal communication within teenager girls groups

The extremity in teenagers’ attitudes and actions coupled with the opportunities of mobile communication creates new behaviors and re-shapes existing ones. But, however meaningful the phone is in teenagers’ lives, it is not designed to support their need for emotional communication and group identity. The BuddyBeads project suggests alternative communication forms among teenagers, which emphasize their social structures, behaviors and needs. BuddyBeads are techno-jewelry items that facilitate non-verbal and emotional communication among group members, through codes and signals which the group decided upon together. Each group member has a matching jewelry piece and can use it to communicate her emotional state to the other group members.     

Design of a Mobile Social Community Platform for Older Chinese People in Urban Areas

The increasing proportion of the older population and changes in the Chinese family structure make older Chinese people more vulnerable to social isolation than they previously were. This article illustrates the development of a mobile social application for older people in urban areas in China. The application facilitates the organization of leisure‐time activities between older people with similar interests living in adjacent areas. Preliminary social requirements of older people were collected through user interviews, and the major functions and features for the application were determined from the results of the interviews. Usability considerations for user interface design for older people were collected from literature and were integrated in the prototype of the mobile application. Older people's acceptance of the application was assessed by demonstrating the prototype to and interviewing 100 older people living in Beijing. The results highlight the critical impact of perceived benefits or relevancy on older people's adoption of new technology. Implications for the mobile social application for older Chinese people are discussed.     

移动群体感知中基于社会关系的路由算法

移动群体感知技术最大的特点是人的参与,而人们进行日常社会活动严重受社会关系的影响,为使得感知数据能够更高效地传输,本文提出一种移动群体感知中基于社会关系的路由算法RASR(Routing Algorithm Based on Social Relations)。该算法根据个体间的接触概率利用G-N算法将整个网络划分为聚集性较强的社团,然后采用中介中心性和相似性两个特性度量个体的社会性。在数据传输的过程中,当前个体在相遇个体中选择与目标个体接触概率或者相对社会性效用较大的个体充当中继个体并复制当前数据,直至传输至目标个体。实验结果表明：RASR算法在保证传输成功率、减少平均传输延时的同时减少了数据副本量,从而降低了路由开销。     

"Tsunagari-kan" Communication: Design of a New Telecommunication Environment and a Field Test with Family Members Living Apart

In this article, a new telecommunication environment for tsunagari-kan communication that enables users to exchange situational cues continuously and interactively via a network is described. In face-to-face communication or when communicators share one space physically, people exchange many situational cues. These cues allow one to sense or "feel" the other person, and they evoke emotional responses such as smiles and feelings of happiness. This tsunagari-kan communication aims at evoking thoughts about others in users' minds from cues or signs and at engendering tsunagari-kan (a sense of closeness to others), even when the individuals are in separate locations. This new style of telecommunication offers people comfort as if they are together, and it eventually helps them keep and foster their personal relationships. As the first step in verifying this concept, a communication terminal for family members living apart was developed, and a field test was run. This terminal facilitates the exchange of data about people's unconscious presence/motion cues and conscious touch signs. With an analysis of the field test results, the validity of this concept was confirmed.