Recently in Socio-Technical Category

Bonnie Nardi has a new book out:  My Life as a Night Elf Priest.  The synopsis:

World of Warcraft rapidly became the most popular online world game on the planet, amassing 11.5 million subscribers--officially making it an online community of gamers that had more inhabitants than the state of Ohio and was almost twice as populous as Scotland. It's a massively multiplayer online game, or MMO in gamer jargon, where each person controls a single character inside a virtual world, interacting with other people's characters and computer-controlled monsters, quest-givers, and merchants.

In My Life as a Night Elf Priest, Bonnie Nardi, a well-known ethnographer who has published extensively on how theories of what we do intersect with how we adopt and use technology, compiles more than three years of participatory research in Warcraft play and culture in the United States and China into this field study of player behavior and activity. She introduces us to her research strategy and the history, structure, and culture of Warcraft; argues for applying activity theory and theories of aesthetic experience to the study of gaming and play; and educates us on issues of gender, culture, and addiction as part of the play experience. Nardi paints a compelling portrait of what drives online gamers both in this country and in China, where she spent a month studying players in Internet cafes.

Bonnie Nardi has given us a fresh look not only at World of Warcraft but at the field of game studies as a whole. One of the first in-depth studies of a game that has become an icon of digital culture, My Life as a Night Elf Priest will capture the interest of both the gamer and the ethnographer.

"Ever since the creators of the animated television show South Park turned their lovingly sardonic gaze on the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft for an entire episode, WoW's status as an icon of digital culture has been secure. My Life as a Night Elf Priest digs deep beneath the surface of that icon to explore the rich particulars of the World of Warcraft player's experience."
--Julian Dibbell, Wired

As a former player of WoW and someone who is interested in both as an entertainment experience and a technological experience, I think this book looks fantastic!

Call for Papers : European Journal of Information Systems (EJIS) Special Issue on Information Systems, Identity and Identification

Research into the role of 'identity' in organizations has become increasingly popular in recent years.  Scholars from different organizational and management disciplines have applied the concept to address a wide variety of issues.  Lyon (2009) emphasizes that the topic can include both technological issues of identification and social issues of organizational and personal identity.  The European Journal of Information Systems has published a number of papers in each of these areas in recent years.

The purpose of this special issue is to solicit original research in information systems that studies questions of identity / identification.
Of particular interest will be papers that critically explore the inter-dependencies between technical issues of identification and social issues of identity.  For example, how pseudonymous authentication methods for social networks or organizational intranets can shape what information individuals choose to disclose in these environments, or how attitudes to personalised mobile devices are affected by identification technologies like biometrics, global positioning or RFID.  Furthermore, we encourage submissions that examine the interrelationships between organizational practices, change, information systems, and the shaping and articulation of personal and social identities.

Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• The interrelationship of technology and identity in the context of IS implementation;
• The role of identity in enabling collaboration and coordination across groups and organizations;
• The relationship between identity, power and organizational politics;
• Information systems research issues created by the study of identity;
• Implementation, acceptance and ongoing challenges of access management;
• The role of organizational identity in enabling organizational sustainability;
• The influence of the presentation and perception of identity on information technology use;
• Public sector usage of identity technologies;
• Anonymity, pseudonymity, privacy and security concerns about technologies for identification.

Prospective authors are encouraged to contact the guest editors to discuss their proposals before submission.

Guest Editors for the Special Issue
Uri Gal, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark (ug.caict@cbs.dk) Edgar A.
Whitley, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
(e.a.whitley@lse.ac.uk)

Deadline for submissions 15 January 2011

For more details see here.

The Pew Internet Research Center has just released results from a study they did on sexting behavior.

"The desire for risk-taking and sexual exploration during the teenage years combined with a constant connection via mobile devices creates a 'perfect storm' for sexting," said Lenhart. "Teenagers have always grappled with issues around sex and relationships, but their coming-of-age mistakes and transgressions have never been so easily transmitted and archived for others to see."

In this article on cyber-bulling and sexting, the author speaks straight from the socio-technical school of thought:

There are two schools of thought about how to treat sexting and its more broadly defined cousin, cyber-bullying, which covers everything from hate e-mail to nasty MySpace postings. One is that it's a mistake to focus on the technology at issue, because the hype about it obscures the underlying, long-term trouble: Kids can be incredibly cruel to each other in all kinds of ways. The Internet and the cell phone are just their latest tools. The tactics for addressing cyber-bullying should be the same as the tactics for reducing bullying of all kinds: teach kids to empathize and make sure they have a trustworthy adult to talk to if trouble is brewing.

This makes sense to me. But it's also clear that e-mails and texts and social media have some traits of their own, as the writer Danah Boyd explains. The bar for becoming a cyber-bully, or even a cyber-bully's accomplice, is much lower than the bar for becoming an actual bully. To torment a girl with a nude photo via sexting, you don't have to Xerox her photo and pass it around, or yell a taunt in the cafeteria, or even whisper about it over the phone, explains Robert King, a psychiatrist at the Yale Child Study Center. You can just press one button and forward the message to lots of other kids. And then those kids, one more step removed from the human being at the center of the flaying, can catch the contagion and spread it.

In other words, it's both the social context <i>and</i> the physical properties of the technology that matter.