<p>With the advent of ubiquitous computing, interaction design has broadened its object of inquiry into how smart computational artifacts inconspicuously act in people's everyday lives. Although user-centered design approaches remains useful for exploring how people cope with interactive systems, they cannot explain how this new breed of artifacts participates in people's sociality. User-centered design approach assumes that humans control interactive systems, disregarding the agency of smart artifacts. </p><p> Based on Actor-Network Theory, this research recognizes that artifacts and humans share the capacity of influencing society and meshing with each other, constituting hybrid social actors. From that standpoint, the research offers a triadic structure of networked social interaction as a methodological basis to investigate how smart devices perceive their social setting and adaptively mediate people's interactions within activities. </p><p> These triadic units of analysis account for the interactions within and between human-nonhuman collectives in the actor-network. The <i>within interactions</i> are those that hold together humans and smart artifacts inside a collective and put forward the collective's assembled meaning for other actors in the network. The <i>between interactions</i> are those that occur among collectives and characterize the dominant relational model of the actor-network. </p><p> This triadic approach was modeled and used to analyze the interactions of participants in three empirical studies of social activities with communal goals, each mediated by a smart artifact that enacted &ndash; signified &ndash; a balanced distribution of obligations and privileges among subjects. </p><p> Overall, the studies found that actor-networks exhibit a <i>social viscosity</i> that hinders people's interactions. This is because when people try to collectively accomplish goals, they offer resistance to one another. The studies also show that the intervention of smart artifacts can facilitate the achievement of cooperative and collaborative interaction between actors when the artifacts enact the dominant moral principles which prompt the <i>preservation of social balance</i>, enhance the network's <i> information integrity</i>, and are located at the <i>focus of activity. </i> </p><p> The articulation of Actor-Network Theory principles with interaction design methods opens up the traditional user-artifact dyad towards triadic collective enactments by embracing diverse kinds of participants and practices, thus facilitating the design of enhanced sociality. </p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Instructional Systems Technology, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-03, Section: A, page: 1062. Adviser: Thomas M. Schwen. Title from dissertation home page (viewed Sept. 30, 2008).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, School of Library and Information Science, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 15, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-12, Section: A, page: 4498. Adviser: Howard S. Rosenbaum.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, San Francisco, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-11, Section: A, page: 4880. Adviser: Carroll L. Estes.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on September 20, 2007) Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

<p> This qualitative study investigated the information culture and beliefs within two United Church of Christ congregations in Northeast Ohio. One congregation was Open and Affirming (ONA), and one congregation was not. ONA refers to a congregation's decision to be listed as a place where LGBT individuals&mdash;in particular&mdash;are welcomed and accepted. Using a purposive sampling technique, 8 focus groups of 4-8 participants each were asked to discuss content derived from three research question areas: participant beliefs, information that participants used to inform these beliefs, and how this information was used.</p><p> Analysis found that both congregations espoused the superiority of their beliefs about inclusivity, thus creating a paradox whereby their inclusivity involved excluding beliefs of exclusion. Because the ONA congregation preferred a personal expression of belief, they were more comfortable with the potential divisions caused by this paradox than the non-ONA congregation, which preferred a communal expression of belief. </p><p> Analysis also found that most participants relied heavily and placed great authority in information from internal sources, e.g., prayer, meditation, and emotion. The ONA congregation reflected the presence of more unique information, indicating that they approached the Bible and other common religious information critically and with more freedom to come to different conclusions than fundamentalists and biblical literalists. </p><p> Despite these differences in belief expression and information type, the analysis found that both groups showed evidence of Chatman's Small Worlds theory. First, participants showed evidence of unmet information needs. Many lacked confidence in the ability to articulate personal beliefs. Second, participants noted the presence of long-term attendees who determined the relevancy of incoming information. Finally, participants tended to guard against disclosing information about personal problems to other congregants, preferring to anonymously seek out answers. </p><p> The research highlights the social nature of belief formation and the impact of religious tradition, pastoral sermons, and external information on these beliefs. It contains important implications for pluralistic communication and the social nature of organizational legitimization. It extends the literature on belief formation and information science by developing mid-range theories about the processes by which individuals in religious communities use information to form beliefs.</p>

Cheating, beguiling, and misleading information exist all around us; understanding deception and its consequences is crucial in our information environment. This study investigates deception in phishing emails that successfully bypassed Microsoft 365 filtering system. We devised a model that explains why some people are deceived and how targeted individuals and organizations can prevent or counter attacks. The theoretical framework used in this study is Anderson's functional ontology construction (FOC). The methodology involves quantitative and qualitative descriptive design, where the data source is the set of phishing emails archived from a Tier 1 University. We looked for term frequency-inverse document frequency (Tf-idf) and the distribution of words over documents (topic modeling) and found the subjects of phishing emails that targeted educational organizations are related to finances, jobs, and technologies. Also, our analysis shows the phishing emails in the dataset come under six categories; reward, urgency, curiosity, fear, job, and entertainment. Results indicate that staff and students were primarily targeted, and a list of the most used verbs for deception was compiled. We uncovered the stimuli being used by scammers and types of reinforcements used to misinform the target to ensure successful trapping via phishing emails. We identified how scammers pick their targets and how they tailor and systematically orchestrate individual attack on targets. The limitations of this study pertain to the sample size and the collection method. Future work will focus on implementing the derived model into software that can perform deception identification, target alerting and protection against advanced email phishing.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 250-274).

Made available in DSpace on 2015-04-16T15:23:41Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 7049152 bytes, checksum: 29ce429b184ef1794fbd9ed9b36196b8 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-02-27 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / Information Science (IS) is field of knowledge which investigates about functioning of the processes of appropriation, organization, dissemination, access, use and democratization of information in all the fields of knowledge, sectors and members of society. Thus, this study analyzed how take place the processes of dissemination, and preservation of democratization Ethnic-racial information in the organization of black women (Bamidelê) in State of Paraíba/Brazil. Also it verified how Ethnicracial information is disseminated and democratized by the black women; and identified the actions used by Bamidelê Organization to preserve the cultural memory of the black population. For this, the methodological path was based on the qualitative approach of the research, descriptive and exploratory perspectives. The locus of Research was Bamidelê Organization, and the subjects of Research were black women coordinators of this Organization, beyond a group of women who were who is users of Organization (women who participate in any activity undertaken by the Organization) who also follow the Bamidele's Facebook Profile. The semistructured interviews and the Collective Subject Discourse (CSD) technique were the instruments used to data collection. The results inferred that appropriation, democratization, dissemination and preservation of Ethnic-racial information by Bamidelê Organization seeks to reach various sectors, as well as different audiences of society, ranging from more traditional sources of information to the most contemporary. The concluding remarks of the study show that the work begun by Bamidelê Organization significantly changed the Paraiba scenario, especially in the fight against racism and sexism. In this sense, the SI as field of knowledge plays an important role in the dissemination, democratization, and preservation Ethnic-racial information. The SI needs to open your theoretical and practical scope, because it may enable the emergence of new interdisciplinary spaces / A Ciência da Informação (CI) é uma área do conhecimento que, por essência, realiza investigações sobre o funcionamento dos processos de apropriação, organização, disseminação, acesso, uso e democratização da informação para todas as áreas, setores e pessoas da sociedade. Este trabalho, por sua vez, analisa como ocorrem os processos de apropriação, disseminação, democratização e preservação da informação étnico-racial na organização de mulheres negras da Paraíba (BAMIDELÊ), objetivando, especificamente, traçar o perfil das mulheres que compõe a Bamidelê; compreender como essa instituição se apropria da informação étnico-racial; descrever os processos de disseminação da informação étnico-racial utilizados pela Organização de Mulheres Negras da Paraíba; verificar como a informação étnico-racial é disseminada e democratizada para as mulheres negras; e, identificar as ações adotadas pela Bamidelê para a preservação da memória cultural da população negra. Para isso, o percurso metodológico fundamentou-se na abordagem qualitativa de pesquisa, de caráter descritivoexploratório. O universo da pesquisa foi a BAMIDELÊ, e os sujeitos foram as mulheres negras que compunham sua coordenação, além de um grupo de mulheres que são usuárias (participam ou participaram de alguma atividade desenvolvida pela entidade) que também, seguem o perfil da ONG no Facebook. Os instrumentos para coleta dos dados foi constituída por entrevistas semiestruturadas e a técnica para analisá-las se deu por meio do Discurso do Sujeito Coletivo (DSC). Os resultados mostraram que a apropriação, disseminação, democratização e preservação da informação étnico-racial pela Bamidelê busca atingir vários setores e públicos distintos da sociedade, que vão desde as fontes de informação mais tradicionais até as mais contemporâneas. As considerações finais do estudo revelam que o trabalho iniciado pela Bamidelê mudou significativamente o cenário paraibano, principalmente na luta contra o racismo e o sexismo. Nesse sentido, a CI desempenha um papel importante na disseminação, democratização e preservação da informação étnico-racial e precisa abrir seu escopo teórico-prático, pois, o mesmo possibilitará o surgimento de novos espaços interdisciplinares