OnlineCommunities

In the Community Lab project, I have been working with John Riedl, Joseph Konstan and Loren Terveen at the University of Minnesota, Paul Resnick and Yan Chen at the University of Michigan, Brian Butler at the University of Pittsburgh and Sara Kiesler at Carnegie Mellon on research to understand what leads people to become committed and contribute to online communities and how to design these communities to be more successful.

Eveyday use of the Internet

In the HomeNet Project, Sara Kiesler and I have been investigating the way people use the Internet in their daily lives and the effects it is having on them and on their social relationships. Starting in 1995, we have carefully documented how individuals and families use electronic communication and information services, how they are integrating them into their lives and the impact these services are having on their social integration and psychological well-being.

More recently, Jonathon Cummings, Irina Shklovski and I been been investigating how people who are changing residence use the Internet to build and maintain social ties.

Technology and conversation

Managing Attention

As Herb Simon said, in the computer age, "information isn't the scarce resource: human time and attention [are]." Economic markets are the social institution for fairly allocating scarce resources. The goal of this research is to formalize the intuition that markets for attention can efficiently match the interests of information senders and recipients, and to test the value of these markets empirically. This work is being done with Jim Morris, Shyam Sunder, and Rahul Telang. A second stream of this research recognizes that groups need spontaneous, informal communication to effectively collaborate, but that interruptions associated with informal communication disrupt productivity. Laura Dabbish and I are investigating displays that could help groups time their interruptions to be less disruptive.

Coordination in groups

Groups are inherently different from individuals performing the same task because of a need to coordinate. Susan Fussel, Javier Lerch, Alberto Espinosa and I have been looking at coordination in groups in both laboratory and field settings and in groups as diverse as research collaborations, managerial teams, military crews at NORAD, and software development teams. One method teams use to coordinate their work is to develop shared mental models of each other, the tasks they need to perform, their goals, and their environment. These models allow teams to coordinate with less explicit communication. We've recently completed an NSF grant examining shared mental models in work groups.

Computers in organizations

I'm working to understand the role that nationwide computer networks, such as Minitel in France or the Internet in the United States, have on the interrelationships among firms. These networks increase the efficiency with which firms can search for or exchange information, but they also shift the type of information that can easily be exchanged, from personal to quantitative. Charles Steinfield and I have examined how these shifts in the cost and quality of communication may influence interfirm loyalties and market relationships, with both vendors and customers. I have also looked at how the use of computing in organizations changes productivity and the quality of worklife.