Annenberg  

 School  

 for  

 Communication 

 University 

 of 

 Southern 

 California 

concepts
keyword

Add a Link
Message Board
Newsletter
Abstracts
Editors
To Submit
The CiteSite
To Subscribe
Acknowledgments

Issue Index

Collab-U  (1, 1)
CMC Play  (1, 2)
E-Commerce  (1, 3)
Symposium (1, 4)
Net Law, I  (2, 1)
Net Law, II  (2, 2)
Info Spaces  (2, 3)
Usenet  (2, 4)
Net Study  (3, 1)
VE’s, I  (3, 2)
VE’s, II  (3, 3)
VO’s  (3,4)
O-Journal (4,1)
Higher Ed, I (4,2)
Higher Ed, 2 (4,3)
Conversation (4,4)
Cyberspace (5,1)
WebCommerce (5,2)
CM Markets (5,3)
Visual CMC (5,4)
Internet Research (6,1)

Views of the Net (6,2)

June 1999  Margaret McLaughlin and Sheizaf Rafaeli, Editors

---

Volume 4, Number 4 Papers from the 1999 Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences

Persistent digital conversations may be searched, browsed, replayed, annotated, visualized, restructured, and recontextualized.    Two explanations are proposed to account for the popularity of CMC despite its relative incoherence: the ability of users to adapt to the medium, and the advantages of loosened coherence for heightened interactivity and language play.

Stories of Web use contributed by users over a period of 40 months, since the Web Storybase began operation in December 1994, are analyzed.    A study of visitors to The Guardian's web site shows that despite the flexbility offered by this new mode of interaction, the traditional publisher-contributor relationship remains preferable to both users and developers.    Using application oriented conceptual maps to categorize the group discussion would be an advancement in the design of CMC systems to allow much larger groups to collaborate productively. The group meta communication process should allow the group to modify and evolve these templates.

Chat Circles and Loom reveal the social structure of digital conversation by visualizing bursts of activity, the arrival of new members, or the evolution of conversational topics.    PAVE supports synchronous and asynchronous interactions. A capture facility enables playback and augmentation of meeting interactions by non-collocated group members.    Analysis of IRC logfiles reveals a highly structured relationship between participants’ social positions on a channel and the linguistic variants they use..

Guest Editor: Thomas Erickson, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center