Social Navigation Systems: Facilitating Smooth Sailing Through Choppy Organizational Seas

Jason Turner

jmturner@ischool.utexas.edu

University of Texas at Austin, School of Information

INF 385T – Knowledge Management Systems

1. Social Navigation – Why should we care?

1.1. The Productivity Paradox

Management information systems (MIS), information systems (IS), and information technology (IT) related literatures are replete with case studies and research indicating often marginal to sometimes negative productivity growth and economic gain as a result of technology investment (Brynjolfsson, 2004; Landauer, 1995; Kling, 1994). Sadly, there is no automatic link between computerization or automation and improved productivity. What factors contribute to this apparent “productivity paradox”? Given the fact that technology is itself an essential factor in defining and delimiting the identity, advancement, and changes in modern industrialized societies (Weinberg, 1990), why have we not been able to measure such benefits—benefits popular wisdom suggests are conferred by automation and the application of information technology in the workplace?

Answers to this question come in many forms. Some accounts have been prescriptive, suggesting that lack of productivity gains stem from flaws inherent in the IT offerings of the day (Landauer, 1995). Such perspectives provide valuable clues and insight into the design of information systems and technology, making cases for user-centered design and development. However, such an approach also tends to address technology in general as the appropriate unit of analysis. This “black box” notion conceives of IT simply as a featureless “artifact” or “resource” of the production process consumed in the same way regardless of the context or specific implementation. The chief danger in this approach is the possibility of overlooking non-IT related variables that might have important direct, interactive, or moderating effects on the actual variables of interest (Benbasat & Zmud, 2003, p. 192). As we will soon see, those non-IT factors do, in fact, play a major role in the re-imagining—or at the very least, restatement—of the productivity paradox once we change our analytic perspective.

Specifically, other accounts have addressed the ways in which productivity shifts and the organizational value of IT are characterized or measured. Brynjolfsson (2004) summarizes several recent research streams indicating the paradox may simply be an artifact of improper measurement or dependent variable selection; a time lag between when productivity measurements are taken and the actual time required for an organization to re-orient towards, accept, and utilize new technologies; or mismanagement of IT initiatives which actually run counter to increases in productivity. Finally, it has been suggested that the productivity paradox may simply be an inappropriate paradigm to discuss productivity changes across industries in general because the competitive value of IT is conferred more directly on the efficiencies of resource redistribution within organizations (Brynjolfsson, 2004, p. 79). Brynjolfsson & Hitt (2004) later go on to say that the true “value” of information technology might only be realized or described within broader social and organizational contexts, and through consideration of the more intangible value and organizational changes IT may create within a particular organization. Thus, current theory and research suggests the most important variables in the IT-productivity equations may not be production inputs, investment capital, or organizational output, but the unique framework of organizational and social structures, processes, and management practices in which the IT systems are implemented (Kraemer & Dedrick, 2004, p. 88).

1.2. A Social Framework for the Productivity Paradox – What’s in a name?

How do we orient ourselves to these newly recognized, but relatively unexplored, facets of the IT environment? How do we, as practitioners within various knowledge management (KM) disciplines, best assure that the IT systems and applications deployed in organizational settings are a suitable match for the organizational contexts in which they must operate? The answers are simple—all organizations are, by definition, social constructions; therefore, we must consider the interaction between social players, structures, and contexts; and consider the ways in which those factors influence how IT systems and applications are adopted and used in organizational settings. The interplay between such factors and their relation to KM technologies is hereafter referred to using the more generalized—albeit sometimes imprecise—notion of social navigation (Dourish & Chalmers, 1994; Dieberger, 1997).

Dourish and Chalmers (1994) conceived of social navigation much akin to actual movement through information spaces, “provoked as an artefact [sic] of the activity of another or a group of others. So, moving ‘towards’ a cluster of other people, or selecting objects because others have been examining them would both be examples of social navigation” (section 3). Dieberger (1997) is more specific is his characterization, defining the concept of social navigation directly in relation to the specific behaviors of “pointing out” relevant information to other users through various social mechanisms and communications tools. Though these two perspectives may be criticized for differing only as a matter of degree, Dourish and Chalmers’s conceptual framework is typically invoked in research fronts associated with “socially aware” applications en toto while the Dieberger approach has largely come to be associated with social and technological processes supporting recommendations (Wexelblat, Dieberger, Dourish, Höök & Resnick, 1999). However, relevant research in this area often draws from the additional rubric of social computing, social informatics, computer supported cooperative work, or computer mediated communication. For the sake of this analysis, we will consider the broader scope of socially aware technologies embodied in Dourish and Chalmers’s original conception of social navigation. Throughout the following sections, we will trace the evolution and development of social navigation as a subject of interest in its own right, explore various KM systems and technologies which support and facilitate social navigation, and discuss the future trends and implications of such systems and concerns within the KM community.

2. Social Navigation: An Emerging Perspective

2.1. The Changing Faces of Work, Communication, and the Systems Supporting Them

Changes in the intellectual, technological, social and economic landscapes of our society have all played a part in the newfound emphasis on social navigation. In particular, however, it can be argued that the computerization of work is the primary force driving this transformation. Why should the workplace be the crucible for our foundational understanding for the social forces and contexts which arguably affect all aspects of our lives? Marx would argue that the workplace (powers of production) provides the structuring framework for society in general. Regardless of whether the Marxist perspective does provide the best foundational description of our society, it would be difficult to deny that understanding the factors which affect how we work do provide insight into the various structures and contexts influencing our communities, industry, government, family, and personal arenas (Sawyer & Tapia, 2004).

Surely the notions of the emergent “information society” and widespread transitions to “knowledge work” are part of those contexts, yet a common thread running through all popular conceptualizations of modern society is the growing and changing role of the computer. During the past 20 years, the computer itself has been transformed from a mere computational device and number cruncher into a communications platform (Sawyer & Tapia, 2004; Rheingold, 2002). Moreover, the number of people who indirectly use computers (or computing devices) to structure or augment their work has increased nearly 460 percent (56.7 million), almost four times the increase seen for those the National Research Council (as reported in Sawyer & Tapia, p. 94) calls “direct users” of computers, both within and outside the IT sector (7.8 million)!

In short, the modern workplace now features far more people than ever before working with the aid of computers and computer systems, as opposed to working directly on computers and computer systems. Those systems, in turn, provide an unprecedented (and previously inconceivable) degree of connectivity to production processes and products, as well as social connectivity to others involved in the processes of production. The interaction of these factors serves to provide the context in which KM systems are deployed as well as changing the ways in which work itself is accomplished. Consider Rheingold’s (2002) observations of management behavior in Finnish businesses as a result of mobile computing. It seems Finnish managers have taken to leaving their cell phones on all the time because if they cannot be reached, subordinates are often empowered to simply make decisions without their input. Thus, the subtle social factors influencing the ways in which Finnish managers conduct themselves are rooted more in concerns about exercising power and influence over the decisions of others, rather than in more service-oriented concerns of responsiveness to customer inquiries (Rheingold, p. 13).

2.2. Making the Case for Social Navigation in the Workplace

What evidence exists to suggest we will enjoy positive returns on investment for supporting or incorporating social navigation in the workplace? As was mentioned in the introductory sections of this analysis, there is no automatic link between computerization or automation and improved productivity. However, Reed’s Law suggests that the utility of large networks, particularly networks capable of supporting social interaction, increases exponentially with the size of the network. This is due to the mathematical formulae describing how the number of sub-groups that can form in a network of participants grows more rapidly than either the number of participants themselves, or the number of possible connections between any two participants in the network (Reed, 1999; Rheingold, 2002).

We have already introduced the idea of incorporating social contexts and capabilities into the IT-productivity equation. In this light, we can therefore argue that systems or applications which facilitate social navigation help create degrees of utility within a given network; and even if the utility of joining a particular group is very small (on a per-group basis), the net effect of potential group membership becomes the dominant force in the overall economics of the system. Reed’s Law and mathematical relationships help explain why people would continue sharing and contributing to virtual communities, especially in those cases where the likelihood of ever meeting other members of the community face-to-face is slim to none: “social network capital, knowledge capital, and communion—people can put a little of what they know and how they fell into an on-line network and draw out larger amounts of knowledge and opportunities for sociability than they put in” (Rheingold, 2002, p. 30).

Rheingold (2002) also summaries several decades of behavioral research and game theory, all of which inform our question of potential return on investment. His conclusions point to additional benefits of social navigation in terms of competitive advantage. Rheingold notes that social navigation can facilitate the banding together of “cooperators,” actors in a competitive environment who realize it is more profitable to produce public goods for joint consumption while excluding “defectors” (those who would act solely on the principles of self-interest to the determent of all). Yet this realization only develops through the processes of social navigation, recognition of other potential cooperators from a crowd of competitive defectors, and employing various social means to coordinate the efforts between them (Rheingold, p. 46).

2.3. “Front-Line” Perspectives on the Value of Social Navigation

Moving the current analysis from high-level discussions of the workplace to more specific exemplars of KM technologies, there seems no better platform from which to argue the merits of incorporating social variables and perspectives into KM applications than that of the case for e-mail. E-mail is arguably the most successful computer application ever devised (Whittaker & Sidner, 1996), yet many researchers note that users are turning to their e-mail applications to perform functions far beyond those it was originally designed to support. Moving past simple asynchronous communication, people now treat e-mail like a separate “habitat” in which to conduct their knowledge work, using e-mail as a portal to both their own storehouses of personal knowledge, and, more importantly, as a tool to coordinate and collaborate within organizations (Whittaker & Sidner; Ducheneaut & Bellotti, 2001).

Similarly, Kling (1994) and Sawyer & Tapia (2004) summarize the results of several studies in which electronic mail and communications modules of newly fielded information systems were universally valued and readily adopted while many other system facilities went unused (or even actively resisted). These changes in the conceptualization, valuation, and use of e-mail and e-mail facilities underscore the importance of the users’ need for community, needs supported by facilities that expressly address the social and communicative contexts within which deployed information systems operate. Therefore, the concept of social navigation becomes of critical import to system designers as they can no longer assume that the “computational centerpiece” of a new system should necessarily receive the lion’s share of the development effort. Moreover, the design process itself becomes as much an exercise in social inquiry as it is a techno-creative endeavor (Kling, 1994, p. 27).

2.4. The Emergence of Socially Aware Technologies Beyond the Workplace

The preceding discussion framed the merits of social navigation within the confines of the workplace. In summary, those systems or applications designed with considerations of social context in mind, or feature aspects or functionality supporting social navigation, are more likely to create value within an organization or confer competitive advantages within the marketplace, are more likely to be adopted and used by their target audiences, and are more likely to better integrate into the landscape and character of modern knowledge work. However, we would be remiss in our analysis of social navigation if we ignored the simple fact that certain aspects of our society are also reaching out to socially aware technologies and consequently changing the ways in which technology embeds itself in our daily lives and shapes the context of its use.

While perhaps no one has explicitly stated the more far-reaching impacts of social navigation in the following terms, we can nevertheless gain an appreciation for the potential impacts of embedding social navigation within KM systems through Rheingold’s (2002) study of the “smart mob” phenomenon. Among other observations, Rheingold chronicled the fundamental changes he has observed in the wake of burgeoning mobile computing markets, asserting that the “killer apps of tomorrow’s mobile infocom industry won’t be hardware devices or software programs but social practices. The most far-reaching changes will come, as they often do, from the kinds of relationships, enterprises, communities, and markets that the infrastructure makes possible” (p. xii).

Through his analysis of “texters” and other mobile computing users in Japan, Europe, and other locales, Rheingold (2002) notes that computing devices which provide some measure of social navigation (not simply computing devices in and of themselves) are the enablers for social actions and organization on levels never before thought possible. For example, anthropological studies in Japan revealed fundamental changes in notions of “time,” “place” and “identity” in the nation’s youth. These changes have been marked by an uncoupling of the concept of “presence” from physical time and location, and the construction of new portable spaces of intimacy enabled through socio-mobile computing. Additional social changes have been observed in those using technology to enable virtual social relationships that would otherwise be entirely problematic in the physical world for practical or ideological reasons (Rheingold, p. 21). Finally, Rheingold traces the evolution of a number of technologically enabled social and political movements beginning in the early ‘90s through 2001’s momentous “People Power II” demonstration, a bloodless revolt that resulted in the overthrow of President Estrada of the Philippines! In each instance, Rheingold found it was not simply the presence of mobile computing which created social change, but the synergistic interplay between technologies, the people who used them, and the never-before-possible social contracts constructed between actors on the networks. It is this interplay which lies at the heart of social navigation and those systems and applications which foster and support such interplay will be the focus of the latter sections of this analysis.

3. Social Navigation Technologies - Supporters and Enablers

3.1. Social Affordances and the Building Blocks of Social Navigation

Part of the strength and benefits conferred by social navigation systems in organizational settings lay in the social “affordances” these systems provide in the digital domain. Norman (1998) described affordances in terms of perceived or actual qualities of an object that give insight into exactly how the object may be used. In terms of social navigation, such affordances are those characteristics of a system that give an indication as to how action is or may be carried out within various social contexts. Returning again to the revolutionary social changes described in the sections above, Rheingold (2002) noted that some of the affordances critical to enabling such changes were location and context sensitivity, creation and support of virtual identities and spaces (which may or may not coincide with traditional, physical notions of identity and space), and reputation and trust systems that sustain and mediate relationships between physical and virtual personas.

Other authors have identified more fundamental social affordances which are said to form the basis of any “good” socially aware system. For example, Erickson & Kellogg (2000) and Erickson, Halverson, Kellogg, Laff & Wolf (2002) posit that systems which support social navigation (socially “translucent” systems, as they term them) feature three basic capabilities. The first makes socially significant information visible, thus helping users notice and orient towards objects or actors within the system. Second, they support awareness, helping users form knowledge or purposeful cognition of who or what is at work within a system, thus allowing the activation of various social rules and personal evaluations to govern subsequent actions. Finally, mechanisms should be in place to facilitate accountability; essentially, if two actors in a system are aware of each other’s presence and are mutually aware of the other’s awareness of their presence, norms, rules, and customs become effective mechanisms for social control because each can be held accountable for their actions.

Social affordances in technological systems and networks not only serve to provide a social context for the interactions between users, but also a framework for transforming and mediating knowledge sought or gained within the transactions themselves. Knowing who else knows the information (and when) often gives that information additional meaning, and can even change the user’s information-seeking behaviors once seekers know who else is in search of the same information (Harper, 1999; Munro, Höök & Benyon, 1999). We should endeavor to keep all of these affordances in mind as we now move our analysis from the theoretical landscape of social navigation, as a phenomenon of interest in its own right, to the practical landscape of KM technologies in which social navigation is fostered and supported. As we shall see, most successful cases of social navigation are carried out on systems or networks that offer provisions to support at least some of the affordances described above.

3.2. Text-Based Systems for Social Navigation

3.2.1. Newsgroups and Bulletin Boards – Asynchronous Textual Environments

Text-based on-line social environments have been implemented through a number of platforms and applications over the years. Newsgroups provide the oldest example of on-line social communities (Rheingold, 2002, p. 53) and have weathered the many advancements and iterations of computing and Internet technology while exhibiting relatively little change in their implementation. The basic architecture consists of client-server connections whereby news servers provide a central repository for messages (posts) from other users who then access the groups and individual messages using client-side applications similar to e-mail programs. Newsgroup conversational “flow” is asynchronous; messages must be composed, sent to the server, posted, and refreshed in the list of available postings in client-side applications before others can see that a new topic is available for consideration or respond in kind. Common “communities of interest” center around newsgroups of varying subject matter while each group carries with it a unique set of self-governing principles that help define and maintain standards of conduct within the group itself.

From the standpoint of social navigation, newsgroups have a lot to offer. Though postings resemble something akin to public e-mail, they are typically displayed in “threads” which help maintain a sense of conversational persistence. Users can therefore track the evolution and development of a particular topic thread over time, and through the availability of such meta-data as sender, date posted, and subject headings, are able to discern who else has contributed to a particular topic, when such contributions were made, and what, if any, substantive changes may have occurred in the topic of discussion.

Unfortunately, newsgroups are otherwise limited in their ability to provide for more sophisticated social context of the kinds discussed in the sections above. Aside from the subject heading of a particular post or foreknowledge of the general topics of interest typically appearing within the newsgroup, very little context, social or otherwise, for individual conversations is available without spending considerable time reading each and every post in a conversational thread. Bellotti, Duchenueat, Howard & Smith (2003) noted that such threaded conversations are often difficult to follow due to the number of messages comprising each thread and the length of time elapsing between each message in those threads. Thus, users must engage in considerable overhead to organize their thoughts and impressions about such discontinuous activity and make inferences about the intentions and motivations of participants within each conversation.

The asynchronous communications mechanisms of newsgroups are also problematic from a social perspective—a new post amounts to little more than a “broadcast” to the community at large that a new topic is available for discussion; yet there is no feedback at all to indicate anyone has seen, read or considered the new post unless they go through the trouble of responding in kind with a post of their own. Finally, notions of identity and trust are, at best, only loosely afforded within newsgroups. Especially in the case of self-governing newsgroups, there are no facilities for capturing or visualizing an enduring identity for individual posters. Unless someone includes an extensive signature file or homepage link in their postings to provide some additional context for their actions, associations or opinions, persistent newsgroup “identity” is created only through a tacit and inductive process of searching or studying the public interactions and transactions of other posters over time.

Part of the strength and enduring popularity of newsgroups are their ubiquity within the modern digital landscape. Virtually every e-mail client, web browser or productivity suite also includes some sort of news reader, though it typically takes the form of a separate application. In addition, newsgroup memberships are not enforced; one need only subscribe to a newsgroup to enable viewing, downloading, and posting within the group. Similar in principle, though slightly different in implementation, are bulletin board systems. Bulletin board technical architecture is thinner than newsgroups as no additional client-side applications are required beyond a web browser; a central web server acts in a fashion similar to a news server, providing a repository and re-formatting front-end for postings which are then viewable through the user’s web client.

Bulletin boards often afford greater availability of archival material than newsgroups. Posting longevity is usually limited only to how many messages are stored on the server whereas newsgroup servers are often refreshed daily as the volume of postings changes making some portions of conversational threads unavailable for later retrieval and review. However, many bulletin boards are moderated or sponsored by a hosting web site; therefore, individual conduct and social norms are often subject to the constraints of usage agreements and board-specific rules rather than the self-directed, self-correcting and self-governing collective will of the participants alone (as is the case with newsgroups).

Bulletin boards also differ from newsgroups in the degree of social context they support. While basic client-side filtering and searches can personalize a news reader to keep track of individual conversations or responses from particular authors, popular bulletin board suites such as vBulletin, UBB.x, or ezboard have automated features and sophisticated search capabilities (like support for structured query language) that allow users to subscribe to entire threads, authors, or monitor postings across many active topics. Moreover, the results of these actions can be delivered privately to the user’s e-mail account or displayed as new information (through text bolding and topic ordering or precedence to highlight new posts since the last visit) ready for consumption when users log back into the system. Modern bulletin boards also support features such as polling, emoticons, personal avatars, and searchable user posting histories, all of which help establish persistent and public identities and a more rich social context for online action.

3.2.2. MUDs, MOOs and Chat – Synchronous Textual Environments

Unlike the asynchronous communication environments described above, chat rooms; multi-user dungeons/domains (MUDs); and MUD, Object Oriented (MOOs) provide digital domains in which to conduct synchronous, near real-time communications. In these textual environments, users connect to a central server which acts as a communications relay for messages composed, sent, and read from client-side applications. Signal delay may range from near instantaneous to several minutes depending on network lag and typing speed. Common to such synchronous textual systems is the segmentation of activity into different “rooms” of users, each of which provides a virtual location in which separate discussions may be conducted. Users can typically talk to users in other rooms, create private channels of conversation invisible all those not invited to participate in the discussion (even those already engaged in activity within the same room), or privately page a particular user for a totally isolated discussion (Mynatt, O’Day, Adler & Ito, 1998).

MUDs began as a feature of online role-playing and fantasy gaming before moving into the realm of collaborative KM platforms; MOOs later expanded upon the MUD concept by adding “objects” into the digital environment which can be individually programmed for their own persistent behaviors and characteristics and keep records based on how they are used by community members. Because of the purposes these interfaces were originally designed to support, the types of interactions afforded by MUDs and MOOs were often characterized by a disjuncture between real life and virtual identities for avatars, objects and environments in support of the fantasy game settings (Mynatt et al., 1998, p. 133). Once MUDs and MOOs were transplanted into professional and educational settings, real-world social context levied additional requirements of the systems to have basis in reality between who a person was “in real life” and their on-line persona. Current MUDs and MOOs, like the Pueblo and Jupiter systems (deployed in non-gaming settings), feature identity markers which draw on pre-existing social conventions, video and audio projections, and personally authored descriptors to provide a rich social context for who the network actors are in real life (Mynatt et al.).

MUDs and MOOs provide a number of other salient social cues useful for social navigation. Through the segmentation of all active conversations into different rooms, communal users of the Pueblo system found they could construct different participatory frameworks to support very different levels and styles of classroom participation ranging from silent observation to active involvement ( O’Day, Bobrow, Bobrow, Shirley, Huges & Walters, 1998). MUDs and MOOs also combine the strength of synchronous communication, which more closely resembles face-to-face interaction, with a persistent interface and historical transcripts of individual discussion sessions. The features provided system users a sense of continuity, not only of the virtual places in which the discussions were held, but in the development and evolution of the activity and knowledge within each discussion as chronicled by the artifacts produced by the system (O’Day et al.; Mynatt et al., 1998).

While the multiple communication modes and channels these types of systems afford can be an asset to social interaction, they are also a liability. Attention-getting cues are often insufficient to help participants maintain focus on difficult tasks or peripheral awareness of the activities of other people (O’Day et al., 1998). Online conversations can easily become unfocused in the absence of visual or aural cues normally present during physical interaction (Boyer, 1998). Moreover, even when others are present in the online environment, it may be difficult to see who exactly is present, paying attention, or wishes to speak next. The lack of any social cues to provide a “meta-awareness” of what is happening within the social environment, not just within the interaction itself, has a tendency to produce multi-threaded conversations even when participants don’t intend to create conversational branches simply because it is unclear who is typing, who is waiting for a response, and who is simply observing the activities as they unfold (O’Day et al., Mynatt et al., 1998).

Synchronous textual systems often lack the ability to support a distinct class of social navigation: pointing and showing. Because so much collaborative activity is based on information exchange (two-way transactions vice one-way), people often have a need to share knowledge embedded in other files and formats: web sites, documents, images. Current chat, MUD, and MOO clients require additional effort to cut and paste relevant information into the message before forwarding the information on to others, who must then read the message and launch the appropriate application to view or retrieve the referenced information. This process makes information sharing somewhat cumbersome (especially when the relevant information is buried in the middle of a document or web page).

The Juggler system (Dieberger, 1997) was a collaborative text-chat system that made early attempts to incorporate automatic URL parsing, meta-information support, and application launch into its client-side application. Instead of cutting and pasting pieces of a file’s relevant information into an open chat window, users could manipulate icons, keywords, and entire files in the native applications, launch or share those files in the same formats and applications on another user’s computer, all while keeping an overarching chat thread active in the Juggler client—the transition from the virtual text environment to the collaborative “work space” was thus accomplished much more quickly and seamlessly. Current MOO clients have since incorporated URL recognition and JAVA-based applets that run on the open web browser have removed one layer of separation between the separate chat client and the network interface (Dieberger, p. 823). Unfortunately, such systems only work when the users wish to point out or share other web pages and they invite the dangers of unwanted, and certainly unexpected, “pop ups” when information is shared while users are otherwise engaged in their own online activities.

3.3. Graphical Systems for Social Navigation

Despite some of the weaknesses associated with various text-based social navigation systems, it would be foolish to abandon their functionality entirely for it would be difficult, if not impossible, to completely divorce online social transactions from the languages which support them. As such, graphical systems offering facilities for social navigation often create metaphors for social interaction and environmental variables to augment knowledge production, transmission and sharing through otherwise traditional text-based means and systems. These graphical interfaces provide visual and spatial cues that feed into our tacit understanding of the physical and environmental cues present in real-world social interactions to help improve our appreciation of the social context surrounding our activities in the digital domain.

We typically find three schools of thought at work in the construction of graphical socially aware KM systems. The first is a literal representation of the social context, typically accomplished via video-teleconferencing, often augmented with other collaborative tools such as virtual whiteboards, file sharing or chat clients. Such solutions are relatively straightforward, yet the technological limits of this methodology constrain its usefulness for producing more subtle cues necessary for social navigation. Contextual information is entirely limited to the camera’s field of view and such systems are still relatively cumbersome and time-consuming to implement as opposed to “always-on” collaborative clients running over active network connections in the users’ offices or workplaces. Finally, video-teleconferencing quickly becomes unwieldy when too many users vie for network attention at the same time, especially in numbers endemic of Internet-enabled collaborative work where tens to hundreds of users may be accessing the system at the same time (Erickson & Kellogg, 2000).

The second representational approach tries to capture physical social cues as literally as possible in the digital domain. This approach is exemplified by the early work of Benford, Bowers, Fahlén, Mariani & Rodden (1994) where virtual environments and avatars of varying realism mimicked the physics and physiological responses of objects and actors in the physical world. Despite the advances of graphical MUDs and MOOS and the power of VRML to model physical entities in virtual spaces, these systems typically suffer from poor resolution, unable to successfully model the more subtle nuances of human behavior we naturally use to make contextual inferences in social settings. Much like video-teleconferencing, such systems are cumbersome when they are scaled to large numbers of users due to the complex representations of every actor and their activities in the network environment. Perhaps this limitation explains why early fervor over 3D virtual “shopping malls” and other literal translations of physical locations have all but died away from the popular consciousness of online activity—users actually required more time to navigate through information rich virtual environments than they did for the real thing! Most importantly, however, these literal translations introduce additional overhead on system users because such detailed social cues must be consciously produced via users manipulating their avatars. Unfortunately, many of the cues necessary for social navigation are produced unconsciously and indirectly, making their translation and implementation on an explicit interface problematic at best (Erickson & Kellogg, 2000).

The third and more popular representational approach is to create abstractions of social presence within a virtual environment, modeling only some of the relevant social cues using text and minimalist graphic representations to communicate the identities and actions of system users. The Loops system is a web-based application that combines asynchronous communication functions, akin to news group and bulletin board systems, with a synchronous chat client and graphical “social proxies” to communicate the current and historical activities, contributions, and topics of interest of other actors on the network (Erickson, Halverson, Kellogg, Laff, Sussman & Wolf, 2002). Rankin & Spence’s (1999) StarCursor visualization is a multi-function cursor interacting within a 3D “ContentSpace” where the walls project video abstractions of an individual’s “information landscape.” Multimedia cues and visual indicators such as color, direction of gaze and motion provide affordances for social browsing, personal disclosure, focus of attention, and commonality between the profiles of other users’ StarCursors operating in or near the same subject domain abstractions. McGrath & Munro (1999) discuss an even more complex and sophisticated abstraction of shared information spaces in terms of the Knowledge Garden. Within this social visualization system, documents, files and search results are depicted as branching plants on the periphery of a circular “garden”; these plants are persistent and available for inspection and analysis, the results of which alters (cultivates) the plants with each new iteration or refinement. The center of the garden represents a synchronous interactive workspace where user avatars interact using both movement and proximity for social awareness cues as well as active collaboration via text, speech, audio, whiteboard and application sharing.

These methods for supporting social navigation have the benefit of being relatively easy to produce and manipulate as simple graphics and text-based systems tend to have low overhead and effort required for development, implementation, support and user training. Text-based artifacts and graphic representations can also be made to persist over time, leaving traces for later analysis and interpretation that can be further accessed and transformed with search and visualization engines (Erickson & Kellogg, 2000). Unfortunately, the levels of abstraction and social metaphors created within graphical social navigation systems vary between settings and applications (as illustrated in the preceding examples); therefore, each such implementation is subject to its own unique architecture and technical requirements. Despite the benefits inherent in creating KM systems which afford the cultivation of natural social behavior and contextual cues in the virtual domain, no such graphical system has, as yet, enjoyed the kind of ubiquity or popularity as seen with the adoption and use of newsgroups, bulletin board systems, or even basic chat and instant messaging clients for the support of social navigation.

Part of this lack of market penetration may simply be a byproduct of the myriad of choices available for graphical social navigation systems. Though news readers, for example, come in many flavors, the basic functionality remains the same from client to client. Graphical systems, by way of contrast, offer many options and possibilities for a wide (or narrow) range of social behaviors and affordances they support. Because no one application can be all things to all people in all situations, each implementation which must therefore be considered separately within each unique organizational context as well as the unique KM activities and requirements the system is deployed to support (Orlikowski & Barley, 2001). Without such consideration, mismatches often occur between the functionality provided by a particular system and the social processes that system was designed to augment—mismatches which eventually lead to user ambivalence or outright rejection of the system, as was observed at IBM with Babble, the precursor to the Loops systems discussed earlier (Bradner, Kellogg & Erickson, 1999).

Another potential explanation for the lack of ubiquity in graphical social navigation systems relates to what Sawyer & Tapia (2004) call “omnipresent articulation,” the fact that computerization alters or removes some work, but often supplants it with other work, typically added cognitive load or workflow changes. In short, graphical systems with too many social abstractions or manipulations may require more time, effort and resources to accommodate and integrate into knowledge work (beyond that of transient initial training) than simpler text-based systems to support the same, or similar, degrees of social navigation. In a related concern, research has often noted that lack of integration or common task-focus between such tools often results in the “compartmentalizing” of KM-related activities, subsequently reducing the benefits of any single system due to the added constraints of having to operate within several unique systems or environments, each of which may support different degrees of functionality of social navigation (Boardman, Sasse & Spence, 2002).

4. Future Trends and Issues

4.1. Trust and Reputation

As the scope and degree and internetworking grows in both formal and informal organizational settings, the generation of trust relationships are crucial to supporting online collaboration and cooperation (Rheingold, 2002). Current recommender systems and collaborative filtering technologies have already drastically reduced the marginal transaction costs of knowledge sharing in networked environments, thus helping facilitate trust and mutual cooperation between members of online communities. Agent-like social filtering services such as the SOaP, GroupLens and Information Tapestry systems can surreptitiously (or overtly) gather, cluster and analyze the web activities or recommendations of individual users to provide others with navigational cues indicating the presence and location of important information in the environment of which they might not otherwise be aware. Recommender systems such as Amazon’s “more like this” feature and Google’s priority ranking of web pages, based on the degree to which other sites point to that page, are also examples of social navigation affordances built on engendering or transmitting notions of trust in online transactions (Rheingold).

Affordances for building and conveying perceptions of reputation are also key issues for social navigation. The most successful example of a reputation manager is eBay’s feedback system, a virtual constraint guiding the online behavior of millions of trading partners helping to ensure the collective engages in self-governing, self-correcting, and self-policing activities despite the potential for a dramatic increase in the costs of an error in judgment (Rheingold, 2002). Rheingold suggests that social affordances for reputation are especially powerful because they tap directly into the biological mechanisms responsible for human cooperative behavior and mesh with our natural expectations for persistence of the transactional consequences over time (p. 125). Though we have very few other exemplars of successful reputation systems upon which to base future research and development effort, it is clear that systems designed to facilitate successful social navigation should include at least some functionality necessary to manage or communicate perceptions of both reputation and trust.

What challenges face such development efforts in the coming years? The most obvious is that of transportability—what does reputation in one system mean in another? Is there any way to reconcile or communicate a “composite” reputation profile from the various slices of reputation built or earned in disparate virtual communities? Rheingold (2002) hints at such systems, currently in their infancy, yet it is interesting to note that the effort is proceeding at all.

Consider the various personas people use and pass through during the course of a single day. Would we necessarily want our “reputations” in professional, academic, familial or romantic circles to mix with those of our reputations as consumers, citizens or other group memberships? For the sake of improved social navigation, sometimes the answer might be yes, but that affordance also may come at the expense of personal privacy, another serious issue which will be addressed in short order.

Another interesting development hurdle concerns deceptive practices in networked environments. While certainly related to social navigation issues of trust building, deception requires a slightly different analytic focus as we are not so much concerned with ensuring we can trust another person or the information they recommend, but instead are capable of spotting the intentionally deceptive practices in others. In fact, studies indicate we are notoriously poor at recognizing deception (50 percent or less on average) and even worse at recognizing it in computer mediated communication, even in cases where users are forewarned of the potential for deception (Burgoon, Marett & Blair, 2004)! How can we create socially aware systems that account for and convey the complexities of human communication, and then hope to simultaneously recognize when those complexities are intentionally misleading? Is there is a middle ground where social affordances of KM systems can reliably indicate deception (perhaps with enough fidelity to implement automatic filters or sanctions against it) but still capture the rich contextual nuances of online social interaction? Such are the questions which must be addressed in the coming years, especially as more personally and socially relevant information is moved online and the nature knowledge work requires even greater degrees of cooperation.

4.2. Privacy

Undoubtedly, one of the most commonly cited central concerns in the relationship between computing and society is privacy. The issues associated with privacy are too numerous to list here as they range from legal, economic and policy concerns; to technological factors such as ubiquitous computing, record keeping and surveillance; to fundamental and metaphysical notions of identity and self in the digital world (George, 2004). Consider the question of who has the right to assemble, see, or own the composite picture of our digital selves, especially if our activities leave “digital footprints” in every system we visit or inhabit? Suffice it to say, in the realm of social navigation, the issue is no less thorny, having implications for both individual privacy as well as system design.

Consider that the primary social affordance for collaboration must, by definition, be mutual awareness of presence and activity in virtual space. How then should we build technical mechanisms to provide privacy in social navigation systems when doing so would also eliminate very fundamental capabilities for social navigation, such as opportunities for participants to show that they may be trusted, or to rely on others to respect their own privacy? How are we to protect personal privacy when another enabler for social navigation is the digital persistence of both online identities and transactional spaces? There are no easy answers to these questions, nor can we reasonably expect a universal answer to be suitable in all situations—privacy concerns for interactions within private organizations are undoubtedly different than those for larger, open cooperative systems such as the Internet; yet in each case, the individual has not changed, only the context has. Ultimately, each social and collaborative context, and social navigation system to be deployed within them, will have to be considered individually against the larger backdrop of governing privacy policies, concerns and organizational goals (Orlikowski & Barley, 2001).

4.3. Implicit Versus Explicit Support for Social Navigation

One of the remaining challenges facing designers of social navigation systems for the foreseeable future concerns decisions regarding how much agency individual users will be afforded as they move through virtual environments. Social navigation in physical settings often involves the processing of social cues that are produced largely unconsciously, such as facial expressions, body language, orientation or movement. Moreover, the mechanisms by which we respond to such cues can also be largely unconscious, a natural byproduct of the social nature and biological drives towards “the commons” inherent in all human beings (Rheingold, 2002). Attempts to imbue virtual environments with digital representations of the same, or similar, social information and context must, therefore, be artificial activities, ones for which humans are not naturally predisposed (Hyde & Mitra, 2000).

In response to this situation, choices for social navigation systems can take one of two perspectives. First, such systems can embrace the artificiality of the online environment, putting control in the user’s hands so that any constructions of social “reality” reflect information purposefully injected into the system. Such systems have the power and appeal of letting users manage their own “faces” in online environments. The other is to make such information implicit—post-hoc artifacts of the transactions and interactions themselves. In such systems, one need not articulate his or her own socially relevant information or context for the sake of cooperation or collaboration; and any constructions of social context are inferred by each user based on his or her own perceptions of actions unfolding in virtual space. Given the already problematic issues of information overload, and the difficulties in obtaining relevance in information retrieval activities amidst ever-expanding sources of information, I believe the future of successful social navigation systems must lie in tapping more of the natural social processing mechanisms mentioned above. Consequently, I believe we will see two particularly important features appear more prominently in future incarnations of social navigation systems.

First, because users tend to employ information systems in ways they were not originally designed or intended to support (Sawyer & Tapia, 2004; Whittaker & Sidner, 1996), social navigation systems will focus on representing actions of users in virtual environments rather than interpretations of their actions. Under such constraints, we may gain an awareness of when users are typing, moving between files or pages, or sending documents to others; but the system will not explicitly interpret those actions for us, asserting when other users “ants the floor,” are recommending information sources, or are inviting other participants to join a conversation—such contextual interpretations should be facilitated by the system, but not produced by them.

Second, because social contexts are constructions based on the interactions that occur, or have already occurred, over time, they are necessarily comprised of constituent parts that are both persistent and ephemeral. Consequently, social navigation systems will support both low-level (specific) and high-level (aggregate) visualizations or analyses—transient changes in the activities of individuals may be just as telling as the collective patterns of the whole which emerge over time. Many graphical social navigation clients already offer such functionality, but most text-based systems are still limited to presenting only search or filter results.

5. Parting Remarks

With relatively few exceptions, knowledge creation is not an individual endeavor. Even in those cases where new knowledge is produced in a flash of individual insight, “knowledge” itself cannot grow unless that insight is shared with others. As prospective practitioners and researchers within the KM discipline, we must therefore be sensitive to the complex interaction of social contexts and social information which influence the ways in which such knowledge is generated and shared within and between organizations. Social navigation systems and the affordances they support are just some of the ways in which we can manage those social contexts in virtual environments. By understanding the benefits they can confer and issues which must be addressed—both sociologically and technologically—we may finally be able to start closing the gap in the productivity paradox that has long since made the development, acquisition and implementation of new KM systems so costly and problematic.

Bibliography

Bellotti, V., Duchenueat, N., Howard, M. & Smith, I. (2003). Taking email to task: The design and evaluation of a task management centered email tool. Proceedings of ACM CHI 2003 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1, 345-352.

Benbasat, I. & Zmud, R. W. (2003). The identity crisis within the IS discipline: Defining and communicating the discipline’s core properties. MIS Quarterly, 27(2), 183-194.

Benford, S., Bowers, J., Fahlén, L. E., Mariani, J. A. & Rodden, T. (1994). Supporting cooperative work in virtual environments [Electronic version]. The Computer Journal, 37(8), 653-668.

Boardman, R., Sasse, M. A. & Spence, R. (2002, November). Life beyond the mailbox: A cross-tool perspective on personal information management. Paper presented at the CSCW 2002 Workshop: Redesigning Email for the 21st Century.

Bradner, E., Kellogg, W. A. and Erickson, T. (1999). The adoption and use of ‘Babble’: A field study of chat in the workplace. Paper presented at the European Conference on Computer-Supported Collaborative Work (ECSCW), September, 1999. Retrieved February 24, 2004 from http://www.pliant.org/personal/Tom_Erickson/AdoptionOfBabble.html.

Brynjolfsson, E. (2004). The productivity paradox of information technology. In J. F. George (Ed.), Computers in society: Privacy, ethics and the Internet (pp. 56-73). Upper Saddle River , NJ : Pearson Education.

Brynjolfsson, E. & Hitt, L. M. (2004). Beyond the productivity paradox. In J. F. George (Ed.), Computers in society: Privacy, ethics and the Internet (pp. 74-83). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.

Boyer, C. (1998). Building community online. Retrieved February 23, 2004, from the IBM Think Research Online Web site: http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/wwwr_thinkresearch.nsf/pages/babble498.html.

Burgoon, J. K., Marett, K. & Blair, J. P. (2004). Detecting deception in computer-mediated communication. In J. F. George (Ed.), Computers in society: Privacy, ethics and the Internet (pp. 154-166). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.

Dieberger, A. (1997). Supporting social navigation on the World Wide Web [Electronic version]. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 46(6), 805-825.

Dourish, P. & Chalmers, M. (1994). Running out of space: Models of information navigation. Paper presented at the British Computer Society’s HCI ’94. Retrieved 10 March, 2004, from ftp://parcftp.xerox.com/pub/europarc/jpd/hci94-navigation.ps

Ducheneaut, N. & Bellotti, V. (2001). E-mail as habitat: An exploration of embedded personal information management [Electronic version]. Interactions, 8(5), 30-38.

Erickson, T. & Kellogg, W. A. (2000). Social translucence: An approach to designing systems that support social processes [Electronic version]. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 7(1), 59-83.

Erickson, T., Halverson, C., Kellogg, W. A., Laff, M., Sussman, J. & Wolf, T. (2002). The design of Loops: A web-based environment for persistent conversation and community. Retrieved February 27, 2004 from http://www.pliant.org/personal/Tom_Erickson/LoopsForCSCW02.pdf

Erickson, T., Halverson, C., Kellogg, W. A., Laff, M. & Wolf, T. (2002). Social translucence: Designing social infrastructures that make collective activity visible [Electronic version]. Communications of the ACM, 45(4), 40-44.

George, J. F. (2004). Privacy. In J. F. George (Ed.), Computers in society: Privacy, ethics and the Internet (pp. 167-170). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.

Harper, R. H. R. (1999). Information that counts: A sociological view of information navigation. In A. J. Munro, K. Höök & D. Benyon (Eds.), Social navigation of information space (pp. 80-89). London: Springer-Verlag.

Hyde, M. J. & Mitra, A. (2000). On the ethics of constructing a face in cyberspace: Images of a university. In V. Berdayes & J. W. Murphy (Eds.), Computers, human interaction, and organizations: Critical issues (pp. 161-188). Westport, CT: Praeger.

Kraemer, K. & Dedrick, J. (2004). The productivity paradox: Is it resolved? Is there a new one? What does it all mean for managers? In J. F. George (Ed.), Computers in society: Privacy, ethics and the Internet (pp. 84-92). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.

Kling, R. (1994). Organizational analysis in computer science. In C. Huff & T. Finholt (Eds.), Social issues in computing: Putting computing in its place (pp. 18-37). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Landauer, T. K. (1995). The trouble with computers: Usefulness, usability, and productivity. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

McGrath, A. & Munro, A. (1999). Footsteps from the garden: Arcadian knowledge spaces. In A. J. Munro, K. Höök & D. Benyon (Eds.), Social navigation of information space (pp. 250-274). London: Springer-Verlag.

Munro, A. J., Höök, K. & Benyon, D. (1999). Footprints in the snow. In A. J. Munro, K. Höök & D. Benyon (Eds.), Social navigation of information space (pp. 1-14). London: Springer-Verlag.

Mynatt, E. D., O’Day, V. L., Adler, A. & Ito, M. (1998). Network communities: Something old, something new, something borrowed…[Electronic version]. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 7(1-2), 123-156.

Norman, D. A. (1988). The design of everyday things. New York: Doubleday.

O’Day, V., Bobrow, D., Bobrow, K., Shirley, M., Huges, B. & Walters, J. (1998). Moving practice: From classrooms to MOO rooms [Electronic version]. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 7(1-2), 9-45.

Orlikowski, W. J. & Barley, S. R. (2001). Technology and institutions: What can research on information technology and research on organizations learn from each other? [Electronic version]. MIS Quarterly, 25(2), 145-166.

Rankin, P. & Spence, R. (1999). A contrast between information navigation and social navigation in virtual worlds. In A. J. Munro, K. Höök & D. Benyon (Eds.), Social navigation of information space (pp. 174-194). London: Springer-Verlag.

Reed, D. P. (1999). That sneaky exponential: Beyond Metcalfe's Law to the power of community building. Retrieved 11 March, 2004, from http://www.reed.com/Papers/GFN/reedslaw.html

Rheingold, H. (2002). Smart mobs: The next social revolution. Cambridge, MA: Basic Books.

Sawyer, S. & Tapia, A. (2004). The computerization of work: A social informatics perspective. In J. F. George (Ed.), Computers in society: Privacy, ethics and the Internet (pp. 93-109). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.

Weinberg, N. (1990). Computers in the information society. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Wexelblat, A., Dieberger, A., Dourish, P., Höök, K. & Resnick, P. (1999). Social navigation: What is it good for? [Electronic version]. CHI ’99 extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems (pp. 89-90). New York: ACM Press.

Whittaker, S. & Sidner, C. (1996). Email overload: Exploring personal information management of email [Electronic version]. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: Common ground (pp. 276-283). New York: ACM Press.