Leysia Palen

Unpacking "privacy" for a networked world

Although privacy is broadly recognized as a dominant concern for the development of novel interactive technologies, our ability to reason analytically about privacy in real settings is limited. A lack of conceptual interpretive frameworks makes it difficult to unpack interrelated privacy issues in settings where information technology is also present. Building on theory developed by social psychologist Irwin Altman, we outline a model of privacy as a dynamic, dialectic process. We discuss three tensions that govern interpersonal privacy management in everyday life, and use these to explore select technology case studies drawn from the research literature. These suggest new ways for thinking about privacy in socio-technical environments as a practical matter.

Twitter adoption and use in mass convergence and emergency events

This paper offers a descriptive account of Twitter (a microblogging service) across four high-profile, mass convergence events - two emergency and two national security. We statistically examine how Twitter is being used surrounding these events, and compare and contrast how that behaviour is different from more general Twitter use. Our findings suggest that Twitter messages sent during these types of events contain more displays of information broadcasting and brokerage, and we observe that general Twitter use seems to have evolved over time to offer more of an information-sharing purpose. We also provide preliminary evidence that Twitter users who join during and in apparent relation to a mass convergence or emergency event are more likely to become long-term adopters of the technology.

Chatter on the red: what hazards threat reveals about the social life of microblogged information

This paper considers a subset of the computer-mediated communication (CMC) that took place during the flooding of the Red River Valley in the US and Canada in March and April 2009. Focusing on the use of Twitter, a microblogging service, we identified mechanisms of information production, distribution, and organization. The Red River event resulted in a rapid generation of Twitter communications by numerous sources using a variety of communications forms, including autobiographical and mainstream media reporting, among other types. We examine the social life of microblogged information, identifying generative, synthetic, derivative and innovative properties that sustain the broader system of interaction. The landscape of Twitter is such that the production of new information is supported through derivative activities of directing, relaying, synthesizing, and redistributing, and is additionally complemented by socio-technical innovation. These activities comprise self-organization of information.

Citizen communications in crisis: anticipating a future of ICT-supported public participation

Recent world-wide crisis events have drawn new attention to the role information communication technology (ICT) can play in warning and response activities. Drawing on disaster social science, we consider a critical aspect of post-impact disaster response that does not yet receive much information science research attention. Public participation is an emerging, large-scale arena for computer-mediated interaction that has implications for both informal and formal response. With a focus on persistent citizen communications as one form of interaction in this arena, we describe their spatial and temporal arrangements, and how the emerging information pathways that result serve different post-impact functions. However, command-and-control models do not easily adapt to the expanding data-generating and -seeking activities by the public. ICT in disaster contexts will give further rise to improvised activities and temporary organizations with which formal response organizations need to align.

Crisis in a Networked World

Crises and disasters have micro and macro social arrangements that differ from routine situations, as the field of disaster studies has described over its 100-year history. With increasingly pervasive information and communications technology and a changing political arena where terrorism is perceived as a major threat, the attention to crisis is high. Some of these new features of social life have created changes in disaster response that we are only beginning to understand. The University of Colorado is establishing an area of sociologically informed research and information and communications technology development in crisis informatics. This article reports on research that examines features of computer-mediated communication and information sharing activity during and after the April 16, 2007, crisis at Virginia Tech by members of the public. The authors consider consequences that these technology-supported social interactions have on emergency response and implications for methods in e-Social Science.

Social, individual and technological issues for groupware calendar systems

Designing and deploying groupware is difficult. Groupwareevaluation and design are often approached from a singleperspective, with a technologically-, individually-, orsocially-centered focus. A study of Groupware Calendar Systems(GCSs) highlights the need for a synthesis of these multipleperspectives to fully understand the adoption challenges thesesystems face. First, GCSs often replace existing calendarartifacts, which can impact users calendaring habits and in turninfluence technology adoption decisions. Second, electroniccalendars have the potential to easily share contextualizedinformation publicly over the computer network, creatingopportunities for peer judgment about time allocation and raisingconcerns about privacy regulation. However, this situation may alsosupport coordination by allowing others to make useful inferencesabout ones schedule. Third, the technology and the socialenvironment are in a reciprocal, co-evolutionary relationship: theuse context is affected by the constraints and affordances of thetechnology, and the technology also co-adapts to the environment inimportant ways. Finally, GCSs, despite being below the horizon ofeveryday notice, can affect the nature of temporal coordinationbeyond the expected meeting scheduling practice.

Going wireless: behavior & practice of new mobile phone users

We report on the results of a study in which 19 new mobile phone users were closely tracked for the first six weeks after service acquisition. Results show that new users tend to rapidly modify their perceptions of social appropriateness around mobile phone use, that actual nature of use frequently differs from what users initially predict, and that comprehension of service-oriented technologies can be problematic. We describe instances and features of mobile telephony practice. When in use, mobile phones occupy multiple social spaces simultaneously, spaces with norms that sometimes conflict: the physical space of the mobile phone user and the virtual space of the conversation.

“I'll get that off the audio”: a case study of salvaging multimedia meeting records

We describe a case study of a complex, ongoing, collaborative work process, where the central activity is a series of meetings reviewing a wide range of subtle technical topics. The problem is the accurate repxting of the results of these meetings, which is the responsibility of a single person, who is not well-versed in all the topics. We provided tools to capture the meeting discussions and tools to “salvage” the cap tured multimedia recordings. Salvaging is a new kind of activity involving replaying, extracting, organizing, and writing. We observed a year of mature salvaging work in the case study. From this we describe the nature of salvage work (the constituent activities, the use of the workspace, the affordances of the audio medium, how practices develop and differentiate, how the content material affects practice). We also demonstrate how this work relates to the larger work processes (the task demands of the setting, the interplay of salvage with capture, the influence on the people being reported on and reported to). Salvaging tools are shown to be valuable for dealing with free-flowing discussions of complex subject matter and for producing high quality documentation.

Discovery and Integration of Mobile Communications in Everyday Life

Abstract: We report on the results of a study in which 19 new mobile telephone users were closely tracked for the first six weeks after service acquisition. Results show that novices tend to rapidly modify their perceptions of social appropriateness around mobile phone use, that actual nature of use frequently differs from initial predictions, and that comprehension of service-based technologies can be problematic. We also describe instances and features of mobile telephony practice. When in use, mobile phones occupy multiple social spaces simultaneously, spaces with norms that sometimes conflict: the physical space of the mobile phone user and the virtual space of the conversation.

Finding community through information and communication technology in disaster response

Disasters affect not only the welfare of individuals and family groups, but also the well-being of communities, and can serve as a catalyst for innovative uses of information and communication technology (ICT). In this paper, we present evidence of ICT use for re-orientation toward the community and for the production of public goods in the form of information dissemination during disasters. Results from this study of information seeking practices by members of the public during the October 2007 Southern California wildfires suggest that ICT use provides a means for communicating community-relevant information especially when members become geographically dispersed, leveraging and even building community resources in the process. In the presence of pervasive ICT, people are developing new practices for emergency response by using ICT to address problems that arise from information dearth and geographical dispersion. In doing so, they find community by reconnecting with others who share their concern for the locale threatened by the hazard.