Go with the flow

Citation

Schwartz, D.G. (2010), "Go with the flow", Internet Research, Vol. 20 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/intr.2010.17202baa.001

Go with the flow

Article Type: Editorial From: Internet Research, Volume 20, Issue 2

Flow with whatever is happening and let your mind be free. Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate (Zhuangzi).

Championship athletes are said to experience intense flow while immersed in their competition finding the perfect challenge-skill balance (Jackson and Csikszentmihalyi, 1999). Can the same be said of the sports fan experiencing the website of their favourite team? That is one of the fascinating questions raised by O’Cass and Carlson in “Examining the effects of website induced flow in professional sporting team websites”.

A different kind of flow is sought when our eyes traverse the headlines and articles of both print and online newspapers. Determining the optimal layout of news items in a webpage is a non-trivial task, and one for which Ulutas and Islier find inspiration from the field of manufacturing facility layout. In “A novel attribute-based dynamic content area layout for internet newspapers” they introduce a layout procedure for internet newspapers based on article content and facilities optimization algorithms.

Of course one type of flow that we can all use more of is the smooth flow of our morning and evening traffic. As an increasing number of vehicles begin to bear their own IP address and become part of massive distributed traffic networks; and as the deployment of video imaging and other traffic sensors becomes more economical, a new generation of internet-based traffic control systems will emerge. In “Internet in the development of future road-traffic control systems”, Barrero, Toral, Vargas, Cortés, and Milla give us one of the first looks at the potential benefits internet connectivity can bring to the flow of our daily commute.

When the parts of a procurement system do not flow, users feel it right away and vote with their feet – or rather with their keyboards. In “User acceptance of a G2B system: a case of electronic procurement system in Malaysia”, Sambasivan, Wemyss, and Rose report on some of the causes leading to low adoption of G2B procurement systems and in doing so extend user acceptance modelling to cover the idiosyncrasies of the burgeoning field of e-government.

Also in this issue of Internet Research, Constantinides, Lorenzo-Romero, and Gómez present the “Effects of web experience on consumer choice: a multicultural approach. In this bi-national study of Spain and The Netherlands, we are treated to an analysis of how cultural background impacts web experience, decision processes, and online purchasing behaviour. Finally, we have Yen asking “Can perceived risk affect the relationship of switching costs and customer loyalty in e-commerce?” Early conventional web wisdom stated that the ease of “moving” from site to site would result in an untethered, free-flowing form of consumer behaviour in which surfers would indiscriminately and in a frictionless way abandon websites for the most trivial of reasons. But it appears that even that expected flow is not without its barriers. There are indeed a growing number of switching costs emerging that bind the e-commerce shopper and influence a new form of customer loyalty.

When we go with the flow, we become more accepting of others, more immersed in our present, more in touch with those around us, and more appreciative of all that life has to offer. Whether we are competing, reading, or simply driving to work, we could all use a little more flow.

David G. Schwartz