Snurb's blog

Tartu
Well, we're basically done - this is the third daily sum-up session, on this last day of CATaC 2006. Whatever 'it' is, Charles Ess says, it seems to have worked (and I would endorse this from my own perspective) - this has been an interdisciplinary conference which has embraced a wide range of perspectives. Culture isn't culture any more, and there has been a very broad range of theoretical backgrounds which people have employed.

Tartu
In this post-lunch session on the final day at CATaC 2006 we're focussing on mobile technologies, and Andra Siibak is the first presenter. She notes the increased scale and magnitude of social interaction through computer-mediated interaction; this also involves youngsters forming their identities and creating favourable impressions of themselves. Despite the wide range of identity portrayals available to them, women still appear to present themselves in what are thought to be the most favourable formats, as Andra found for the Estonian social networking site Rate (and we're focussing here especially on the site's dating aspects) - here people are able to view photos of others and rate them.

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The next session is kicked off by Eileen Luebcke, who outlines a research project on intercultural communication in virtual teams. This is a very underresearched area so far, she suggests. CMC research has a variety of weaknesses here: research tends to focus on culturally homogeneous groups even where they are compared with one another, and often takes place in a laboratory environment - and results from student groups are sometimes posited as being representative for general work groups.

There is a need for diversity research, then, which has already taken place in non-CMC contexts. Here, heterogeneous teams appear to produce a greater number of alternative solutions to problems, but can also be a source of conflict; unfortunately, active use of diversity is often backgrounded in favour of an organisational bias towards male Western employees (this may be institutionalised for example through a focus on oral presentations or Western-style brainstorming sessions). Dichotomies between individualistic and collectivistic cultural orientations have various impacts here - communication for expressing own points of view clashes with communication for maintaining group harmony, for example - and individualistic communication patterns tend to dominate in many group interactions, as they enable individuals to place themselves in central positions.

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The next session starts with a presentation by Veronika Kalmus on equalities in accessing the Internet in Estonia. For a transitional or 'informatising" society and economy like Estonia, such inequalities are critical, of course, and it is shaped by econmic and cultural factors (there is an interaction between structure and agency). Critical aspects of digital inequality and information stratification are issues such as home access to the Internet, socially relevant asects of Internet use, cognitive aspects of information stratification, and cultural attitudes towards technology, gender, and society. This is investigated here from a diachronic perspective spanning 2002-5, and builds on a two-stage survey of 15-74-year-old Estonians in 2002/3 and 2005. Additional data is from surveys of pupils in 2000-2.

Tartu
The final day of CATaC 2006 is upon us, and we're getting started with a session on gender and identity. Marisa D'Mello is the first speaker, focussing on global software organisations in India. How do these firms create an environment for their employees, and how do the workers create an identity for themselves? But what is global software work? It is a form of knowledge work which is highly volatile and dynamic, very diverse in its staffing, location, and project schedules, and it deals with intangible, heterogeneous and mobile products - this creates highly mobile career trajectories for IT workers. (And Marisa worked as an HR manager for such a company herself.)

Tartu
We're now in the preliminary summary session for the second day at CATaC 2006. By the way, in the meantime the CATaC wiki has also been revived, with some additional materials on the presentations also posted up there. In terms of the session I chaired, I found the combination of theory and practice, and of development and definition of collaborative, productive online environments particularly interesting - the direct practical engagement of researchers in the tools and communities they study appears to have a number of benefits. Other session chairs right now seem to present more of a summary of their sessions - but for example, Laurel Dyson points once again to the importance of alternatives to traditional forms of copyright, as well as to the associated traditional view of content producers as individuals: perhaps there is a need for computer technology which also provides for multiple participants, similar to the way computer games already do. Anne Hewling notes the shift in e-learning from a technological to a cultural focus, and a recognition of learning environments as culturally complex and in need of further study.

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Mpine Qakisa Makoe is the first presenter of the post-lunch session. She presents on the ecology of South African distance learners. Usually e-learning studies focus on how it affects learners, but this offers only a limited perspective. Distance learning is especially important in South Africa as this enables universities to deal with a significant backlog of learners especially also in remote locations, who previously did not have access to formal education - and therefore it is also a priority area for government policy. Universities now have to deal with a three- or fourfold increase in students, and many white educators in universities are still coming from the apartheid era, so there are considerable pressures on the sector.

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The next session is kicked off by Jose Abdelnour Nocera, on the politics of technology culture. He notes that information technology has globalised, and has become increasingly affordable to small and medium enterprises. However, this also means that technology produced in one culture may be used in another, leading to a potential for intercultural misunderstandings. Users' cultural frameworks configure their understandings of the systems used, and these are likely to be different from those of the technology producers.

Interpretative flexibility is a key concept in theories of the social construction of technology: the character of technologies is not determined by their technological structure. The usefulness of a system, then, can be described as a social construct - and this is very different from the idea of usefulness as simply indicating (perceived) enhanced performance, or of usefulness as 'practical acceptability' rather than 'social acceptability'. Users 'construct' technology both symbolically in their reading of artefacts as well as literally in the articulation work that is essential before a generic software product can be used as an artefact supporting day-to-day business practices.

The second morning at CATaC 2006 begins with a session I'm chairing, and my own paper is also in this session - so I'll try to blog the other three papers, and to post the slides and text for mine. Chris Newlon and Anthony Faiola are the first presenters, on mega-collaboration. They begin with a focus on Hurricane Katrina, which they describe as exhibiting a pattern of success and failure. The response to the hurricane was a spontaneous gathering and coordination of information resources by private-sector ICT organisations and individuals, but the government failed to effectively make use of this wealth of information. Of course, planning is usually for the expected, but not for the worst imaginable extreme - how, then, to plan for the unexpected? Chaos was the only response in the Katrina case, especially also because of cultural barriers between the different agencies and entities involved in the flood response. At the same time, the use of private ICT resources can be described as a success - socially connected information networks were in clear evidence here, including privately run missing persons databases, as well as blogs, lists, bulletin boards, etc. This builds on a small world principle where most individuals are connected, but where such connection depends on contextual information which points towards the most useful contacts to utilise.

Tartu
Finally today we're in a summary plenary which brings together all the CATaC 2006 sessions we've seen. I'm not completely sure whether this is particularly bloggable, but I'll give it a go. Lelia Green notes that her session was focussing on the relationship of knowledge and the Net - knowledge and bird flu; knowledge of how to attack Websites in the course of information warfare; knowledge of health practices in specific communities, but shared online; and knowledge of how to repair cars as it is shared locally and successfully in Burundi as opposed to knowledge introduced by welfare agencies without a full consideration of all implications.