Awareness of Presence - Good or Bad Thing in a Working Tool?

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Awareness of Presence - Good or Bad Thing in a Working Tool?

2/12/2004

By Terry Calhoun

Imagine a professionally successful Baby Boomer who works for a higher education institution and who probably got their start in information technology working with punch cards or early terminals, some of their early work was probably in programming. This is the kind of person who checks their e-mail twice a day - once in the morning and once in the afternoon, and also checks and answers voice mail on schedule. They learned early on that the best way for them to be productive is to shut out the rest of the world and focus, to concentrate on the task at hand.

This same person is in a position of decision making about whether to support or suppress what may well be the preferred method of communication among Americans who are under the age of 21 - instant messaging? Yikes. That would be like me having the power to decide that amusement parks don't need roller coaster rides and, in fact, that amusement parks needn't really even exist, despite the fact that many people enjoy them and that they are a thriving, valid industry.

Did I tell you that a completely fail to comprehend what others enjoy from roller coaster rides?

From here, I could rant a bit about how we need to be careful not to shut down someone else's favorite tool, or not to make possibly invalid judgments about their productivity. I could go on about how one of the very simplest ways to make an IT staffer's job easier is to tightly control what our users can do, to limit their choices based on our own needs and working styles and assumptions, and about how wrong that would be.

But instead, briefing up on this earlier, I came across some pretty interesting articles and found that there are academicians who are studying up on instant messaging and that they have a vocabulary that provides words and phrases for some of what I have perceived in IM. It's useful to have a common vocabulary about things, so the gist of my piece this week is to share a few important words or phrases that can be used to discuss the qualities of instant messaging and perhaps make discussion about it more productive.

To be perfectly frank, I really like and enjoy instant messaging and find it perhaps my most useful working tool, especially in light of the spam epidemic that is creating chaos in my in box. So, if you're a cranky old guy who came up through the ranks via programming and you're inclined to want to just shut off instant messaging in the dorms . . . don't read this . . . let the folks who agree with me learn the words and phrases that might just make their next argument with you more persuasive.

My favorite paper from the literature, so far, is one called "Theorizing the Unintended Consequences of Instant Messaging for Worker Productivity," by a couple of researchers at Case Western Reserve University. (A link to that PDF is available as a reference, below.) Julie Rennecker and Lindsey Godwin, draw from the works of others and from their own creativity and describe some features of IM as follows.

IM has presence awareness - this means that when you are running IM there is a presence perceivable to you of "others" who are available to you. Your buddy list tells you who is online, whether they are idle or away, and more. You can use this to estimate how likely it is you can make contact with someone. Whenever you are online and IM is turned on, you are part of the social swarm.