Bryan Semaan

Resilience in collaboration: technology as a resource for new patterns of action

In CSCW, there has been little or no attention given to how people use technology to restore collaborations when there is a major environmental disruption. We are especially interested in studying resilience in collaboration-the extent to which people continue to collaborate with work groups or to socialize despite prolonged disruption. We conducted an empirical study of people living in two countries that experienced prolonged disruption through war in their work and personal lives. We describe how technology played a major role in providing people with alternative resources to reconstruct, modify, and develop new routines, or patterns of action, for work and socializing. People created new assemblages of technological and physical resources. We discuss how the use of new resources in creating new routines led to more of a reliance on virtual work and in some cases to deeper structural changes.

Resilience through technology adoption: merging the old and the new in Iraq

Citizen response to disaster has begun to receive attention in the CHI community but little attention has so far been given to how citizens use technology to adapt when their country is at war. We report on an ethnographic interview study of how technology was adopted and used by citizens to be resilient during wartime. We interviewed 45 Iraqi citizens experiencing the current Iraq war. Based on our data we identified properties of resilience: reconfiguring social networks, self-organization, redundancy, proactive practices, and repairing trust in information. Technology supported people in being resilient by enabling them to control identity, to collaborate in travel, to create an organizational memory, and to provide alternative sources of news and information. As people adopted and used technology to be resilient we found a merging of old and new cultural practices. We discuss these systemic changes and describe implications for how technology can support people in being resilient in disrupted environments.

Technology-mediated social arrangements to resolve breakdowns in infrastructure during ongoing disruption

When societies experience disruption as caused by natural disasters, various official government agencies, relief organizations, and emergent citizen groups engage in activities that aid in the recovery effort—the process that leads to the resumption of normal life. In war environments however, societal trust can be affected and people may develop distrust of the institutions and associated individuals that provide and resolve breakdowns in infrastructure. This article reports on an ethnographic study of the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) by citizens experiencing ongoing disruption in a conflict zone. We conducted 90 semistructured interviews with Iraqi civilians who experienced the 2nd Gulf War beginning in March 2003. We show how citizens used ICTs to continuously resolve breakdowns in infrastructure during ongoing disruption caused by the conflict, by creating new, reliable technology-mediated social arrangements that enabled people to maintain daily routines for travel, education, and obtaining information. We then discuss new ways to think about infrastructure and implications for the disaster relief effort.

Blogging in a region of conflict: supporting transition to recovery

The blogosphere is changing how people experience war and conflict. We conducted an analysis of 125 blogs written by Iraqi citizens experiencing extreme disruption in their country. We used Hoffmans [8] stages of recovery model to understand how blogs support people in a region where conflict is occurring. We found that blogs create a safe virtual environment where people could interact, free of the violence in the physical environment and of the strict social norms of their changing society in wartime. Second, blogs enable a large network of global support through their interactive and personal nature. Third, blogs enable people experiencing a conflict to engage in dialogue with people outside their borders to discuss their situation. We discuss how blogs enable people to collaboratively interpret conflict through communities of interest and discussion with those who comment. We discuss how technology can better support blog use in a global environment.

Designing Political Deliberation Environments to Support Interactions in the Public Sphere

Little is known about the challenges and successes people face when piecing together multiple social media to interact in the online public sphere when: seeking information, disseminating information, and engaging in political discussions. We interviewed 29 US citizens and conducted 17 talk-out-loud sessions with people who were using one or more social media technologies, such as Facebook and Twitter, to interact in the online public sphere. We identified a number of challenges and workarounds related to public sphere interactions, and used our findings to formulate requirements for new political environments that support the interactions in the public sphere. Through evolving requirements generation, we developed a new political deliberation technology, dubbed Poli, which is an integrated social media environment with the potential to enable more effective interactions in the public sphere. We discuss several remaining questions and limitations to our tool that will drive future work.

Navigating Imagined Audiences: Motivations for Participating in the Online Public Sphere

Little is known about why and how people use multiple social media platforms for political participation, or about the contexts through which social media is appropriated. This paper reports on a qualitative interview study of social media use by politically interested citizens. We interviewed 27 residents of the state of Hawaii who integrated one or more social media tools into their daily lives to participate in the online public sphere. Different social media environments offer both different affordances for action and different audiences, and we describe how media choice is driven by the match between motivations and affordances, and also by the imagined audience. We identified a number of motivations including understanding different viewpoints, formulating perspectives, engaging in positive discourse, repairing Hawaiis image, increasing political awareness and improving civic engagement. We discuss how these goals relate to both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Finally, we examine how social media choice and satisfaction were tied to the physical world context and peoples sense of the audience within any particular medium.

Creating a context of trust with ICTs: restoring a sense of normalcy in the environment

This paper reports on an ethnographic study of the technology-enabled behavior that took place amongst a citizen population living in a conflict zone. We interviewed 65 Iraqi citizens who experienced the current Gulf War beginning in March 2003. In the context of a disrupted environment, trust in people and institutions can erode. We find that trust is contextual-as aspects of the physical world change, conceptions of trust can also change. We show how people were able to create a context of trust in the environment by using ICTs to manage their public identity, to conduct background checks, and to develop collaborative practices that relied on those with whom interpersonal trust previously existed. These new practices, in turn, enabled people to maintain work collaborations, to determine whether or not to continue interacting with others in public, to be able to travel safely, and to find trustworthy jobs. In developing these new practices we argue that technology enabled people to restore a sense of normalcy in an environment that had radically changed.

Military Masculinity and the Travails of Transitioning: Disclosure in Social Media

Research suggests that the disclosure of struggles and the connection with sympathetic others are critical during periods of transition. Whereas disclosure has been studied in various contexts, the disclosure strategies of USA (US) veterans transitioning back into civil society has not been explored. Through a qualitative study with 15 veterans re-integrating into civil society, we find that the culture of hyper-masculinity learned and performed during military service leads to challenges to disclosure, or non-disclosure, post-service, negatively impacting how military veterans navigate the transition back into civil society. We explore the disclosure issues and strategies of veterans in both offline and online contexts, finding that veterans used online platforms to navigate the challenges limiting disclosure and connect with supportive resources. We conclude by introducing the concept of delayed disclosure--when people postpone making their struggles known in transition--and provide implications for policy, design and future work to help veterans manage their transitions.

A Sociotechnical Mechanism for Online Support Provision

Social support can significantly improve health outcomes for individuals living with disease, and online forums have emerged as an important vehicle for social support. Whereas research has focused on the delivery and use of social support, little is known about how these communities are sustained. We describe one sociotechnical mechanism that enables sustainable communities to provide social support to a large number of people. We focus upon thirteen disease-specific discussion forums hosted by the WebMD online health community. In these forums, small, densely connected cores of members who maintain strong relationships generate the majority of support for others. Through content analysis we find they provide informational support to a large number of more itinerant members, but provide one another with community support. Based on these observations, we describe a sociotechnical mechanism of online support that is distinct from non-support oriented communities, and has implications for the design of self-sustaining online support systems.

A Confucian Look at Internet Censorship in China

China’s Internet censorship practices are sophisticated and pervasive. Academic research and media reports have examined the Chinese government’s varied, expansive methods of censorship and Chinese citizens’ techniques of subverting them, but little attention has been paid to understanding how Chinese citizens think about censorship in their everyday lives. We conducted a qualitative study of Chinese mainland citizens who circumvented censorship. We found seemingly contradictory attitudes and practices among our participants. They showed proficiency at bypassing censorship, but were sometimes comfortable with censored information. They were willing to share sensitive information with others, but saw the benefits of limiting the public’s access to information under certain circumstances. We examine how the complex, nuanced attitudes toward censorship resonate with the classic teachings of Confucianism, China’s traditional philosophical and ethical system.