Internet review

Citation

Crowston, K. (2000), "Internet review", Information Technology & People, Vol. 13 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/itp.2000.16113dag.001

Internet review

Two of the articles in this issue touch on issues that have been widely discussed on the Internet. First, J. Martin Corbett proposes a more social psychological theory of organizational memory. This topic is of interest because of the various proposals to use Internet-enabled information systems to support collective memory. For example, Mark Ackerman (http://www. ics.uci.edu/~ackerman/) developed a system called AnswerGarden to help a group grow an organizational memory. His site includes a number of publications describing this and more recent systems.

A number of researchers have created bibliographies of work in this area. Ackerman has one, though it is not particularly up to date (http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ackerman/ombib.ackerman.html). From the University of Cape Town, South Africa comes a text-only Bibliography on Social Memory, part of a social psychology course (http://www.uct.ac.za/depts/psychology/psy400w/social~2.html). Ralf Klamma of the University of Aachen offers a hotlist of sites related to organizational memory (http://www-i5.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/rkl/OMS/oms-bib-net.html).

By the way, if you are looking for computer science preprints, a very useful site is the ResearchIndex from NEC Research (http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs). For example, a search in this database for "organizational memory" retrieved 191 citations (you can also search by author or title). The retrieved works are ranked by number of citations within the database; full-text is available for some, and you can find the citing work and publications that cite similar citations. In fact, this site is itself an interesting example of a system for supporting the collective memory of the scientific community.

In addition to papers on this topic, the Web holds in its collective memory records of workshops, seminars and the like. For example, a workshop was held at ECSCW 95 on "Collective learning and collective memory for coping with dynamic complexity". The Web site (http://www.vision-nest.com/btbc/kgarden/clearning/) preserves brief descriptions of the papers presented and of the discussion of each.

"Archives, documentation, and the institutions of social memory" (http://www.umich.edu/~iinet/asc/archives/archives_info.html), is a year-long seminar series offered in 2000-2001 by the Bentley Historical Library and the International Institute, both at University of Michigan. The series focuses in particular on the role of archives in preserving cultural memory. In contrast to the previous example though, this site only provides an overview of the theme and lists of the presenters and titles of talks (a bibliography is "under construction").

Of course, interest in collective learning predates the Web. One interesting example is a paper entitled "Societal learning and the erosion of collective memory" by Anthony Judge of the Union of International Associations (http://www.uia.org/infodocs/uninfo.htm). This paper, from 1980, discusses problems in the use of international documentation to support societal learning.

The article by Chen, Wigand and Nilan is potentially more controversial, since it raises questions about the positive and negative effects of Web usage. Chen et al. apply Csikszentmihalyi's ideas about flow experiences to explain why using the Web can be so engrossing. Csikszentmihalyi's home page can be found at http://www.ccp.uchicago.edu/faculty/Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi/html/, though there is not much there about flow. The Flow Network (http://www.flownetwork.com/welcome.htm) includes a lot more information about flow, a bio of Csikszentmihalyi, books for sale, conference announcements, etc.

Chen et al. contrast their focus on the positive flow experiences to the findings of the CMU HomeNet project (http://homenet.hcii.cs.cmu.edu/), in particular the conclusion that "greater use of the Internet was associated with declines in participants' communication with family members in the household, declines in the size of their social circle, and increases in their depression and loneliness" (Kraut et al., 1998). HomeNet's publication page (http://homenet.hcii.cs.cmu.edu/progress/research.html) provides links to this and other papers, as well as to press coverage and even raw data in case you want to check their work.

Of course, Chen et al.'s finding regarding the motivating features of Web use are not necessarily in contradiction with HomeNet's findings. Indeed, a number of sites raise the spectre of Internet addiction, in which use of the too-motivating Internet displaces other pursuits. According to an article by Anne Federwisch (1997), Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) was first described by Dr Ivan Goldberg as a parody of the language of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. A copy of his original posting can be found at http://web.urz.uni-heidelberg.de/Netzdienste/anleitung/wwwtips/8/addict.html and an article about Goldberg's role in spreading the term can be found at http://www.psycom.net/iasg.html.

However, once created, IAD took on a life of its own. For example, the Centre for On-Line Addiction (http://www.netaddiction.com/) offers information about Internet addiction and sells consulting, tests, etc. A skeptical counterpoint is offered by Dr John Grohol's Internet Addiction Guide (http://psychcentral.com/netaddiction/). Federwisch's article does a good job summarizing the history of this topic.

If concern about IAD has not dampened your interest in a little Web surfing, you can avoid having to retype the URLs mentioned in this column by starting from the on-line version at http://crowston.syr.edu/itp/

Kevin Crowston

References

Federwisch, A. (1997), Internet Addiction? In Nurseweek (Web page), 8 August. Available on-line: http://www.nurseweek.com/news/1996.html (Accessed 27 September 2000).

Kraut, R., Patterson, M., Lundmark, V., Kiesler, S., Mukophadhyay, T. and Scherlis, W. (1998), "Internet paradox: a social technology that reduces social involvement and psychological well-being?, American Psychologist, Vol. 53 No. 9, pp. 1017-31. Available on-line: http://www.apa.org/journals/amp/amp5391017.html (Accessed 27 September 2000).