This is a submission to the "Interrogating the social realities of information and communications systems pre-conference workshop, ASIST AM2006 ==> This project investigates how, why and with what effects children and young people are using mobile telephony in Australia. The aim of the project is to work closely with young users on a longitudinal basis to describe accurately the impact of mobile phones, without either over-determining or underestimating the social effects of this powerful technology. We also have a desire to assist our policy partner to respond to concerns and fears raised by young people about mobile communication. The project also responds to the current state of academic research in media and communication technologies, where aspects of media use theory suggest productive ways forward for conceptualising social activity with respect to contemporary technological superstructures of communication. With pilot testing complete, we are about to embark on the main study. It will involve young people and pre-teens from a variety of socio-political backgrounds as co-researchers in a 3-year review of the role of mobile communications in the development of social structures and friendship networks. We plan to pay particular attention to the impact of communicative mobility on disadvantaged sectors of the community, and on the ways in which social and educational information is deployed and used through mobile phones to support social cohesion and to pursue group advantage. Our project integrates information systems, cultural research and media inquiry to ask questions about the impacts of the mobile phone in relation to the social experience of young people. In particular it seeks to describe and model the ways in which social behaviours are informed and/ or supported by the presence and availability of mobile phones in young lives. The project hypothesises that such behaviours may be characterised as both positive and negative; with phones operating as tools for personal security management, for friendship building, but also for bullying and intimidation. There are several influential trends in thinking about mobility and technology in social contexts, all of which need to be noted in pursuing the current project. Briefly, these can be summed up through four trajectories: a) networks; b) the management of knowledge [through computational power]; c) the compression of time and space through ubiquity of contact; and d) the commercial imperative in application design. These factors have contributed to a communications paradigm where telecommunications has transformed from one-to-one, voice-to-voice, and point-to-point to one in which many people may be involved in a number of a variety of communication acts from a number of (known or unknown) locations. Moreover, the purpose of the telecommunications device is changing to include new practices including surveillance, security, demonstrations of status or belonging or community, entertainment, direct marketing, and forms of web-based mass communication such as broadcast media and blogging. The project methodology will test and reinforce child-centred, participatory research practices and outcomes. It is designed to elicit and interpret young peopleâ s and pre-teenâ s views on their communicative environment and to understand the mechanisms through which social relationships, information conduits, and knowledge networks are built and sustained. It is our intention, through the dissemination of our findings, to bring young people, educators and interested government agencies into a productive dialogue on the benefits and dangers of this pervasive technology.

"This is a submission to the 3rd Annual Social Informatics SIG Research Symposium: The Social Web, Social Computing and the Social Analysis of Computing" This paper follows Wellmanâ s (2002) typology and aims at identifying new module of virtual communities. How does sense of community that used to mark virtual community differ from the concept of networked individualism? Who are those with high sense of community and/or networked individualism? Does the type of networked individualism supplant or supplement sense of community in community identity building? This case study indicated networked individualism did not supplant sense of community. In the contrary, they coexist in virtual community. Web 2.0 related social community has gradually gained its popularity in nowadays, this study implies that accessibility of these kinds of community resources is no more depends on sense of belonging and community consensus, in alternative, building instrumental networks, maintaining autonomous relationship with certain community members and shifting roles across networks become the key to mobilize network resources.

No description available.

This is a submission to the 3rd Annual Social Informatics SIG Research Symposium: The Social Web, Social Computing and the Social Analysis of Computing. To date the no empirical research has been done to visualize the discipline of social informatics. This work presents the early stages of a domain analysis of social informatics in terms of its authors. The names of those most frequently cocited with Rob Kling from 1974 to 2007 were retrieved from Social Scisearch via Dialog. The top 48 authors were submitted to author cocitation analysis.

This is a submission to the "Interrogating the social realities of information and communications systems pre-conference workshop, ASIST AM 2006."

This is a submission to the "Interrogating the Social Realities of Information Systems" Preconference Symposium at ASIST 2006. This abstract describes an investigation of the changing access and use rights of licensed scholarly digital resources, particularly the rights associated with digital works protected by technological protection measures (TPM â also known as digital rights management systems or DRM)

A distributed coalition consisting of a Head Start program, its youth activities program development director, rural youth, an art gallery and its curators, a graphic designer, and a university department are collaborating to design, build, and populate a user controlled content management system to bring the youthsâ work to a global audience, enable computer mediated interaction, provide a venue for exploring artistic expression, and introduce information and communications technologies (ICTs) to the youth and other project participants. Using a project-based approach combined with implicitly constructed scenarios and the iterative and informal processes associated with free / libre / open source software development, the geographically and organizationally distributed project team created the first release of the Growing Tennessee Web site to coincide with a photo exhibition held at a not-for-profit art gallery. The project will build upon its previous accomplishments and introduce additional media and their supporting technologies to rural youth.

This paper presents an evolving framework of human information behavior. The framework emerges from theories and empirical studies from a variety of research traditions, including information science, communication, sociology and psychology, that inform our understanding of human information behaviour. First, fundamental concepts, such as context, situation, and social networks, are discussed. Using these concepts, a series of propositions that strive to elucidate, that is, prove a framework for exploring, human information behaviour are proposed. Information exploration, seeking, filtering, use and dissemination, are included (to varying degrees) in the framework. The framework also incorporates cognitive, social and system perspectives. A key concept in the framework is the notion of an "information horizon" in which individuals can act. Information horizons, which may consist of a variety of information resources, are determined socially and individually, and may be conceptualized as densely populated solution spaces. In a densely populated solution space, many solutions are assumed, and the information retrieval problem expands from determining the most efficient path to the best solution, to determining how to make possible solutions visible--to an individual(s) and to other information resources.

No description available.

This is a submission to the 3rd Annual Social Informatics SIG Research Symposium: The Social Web, Social Computing and the Social Analysis of Computing. To date the no empirical research has been done to visualize the discipline of social informatics. This work presents the early stages of a domain analysis of social informatics in terms of its authors. The names of those most frequently cocited with Rob Kling from 1974 to 2007 were retrieved from Social Scisearch via Dialog. The top 48 authors were submitted to author cocitation analysis.