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From I-Awareness to We-Awareness in CSCW

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Abstract

Awareness is one of the central concepts in Computer Supported Cooperative Work, though it has often been used in several different senses. Recently, researchers have begun to provide a clearer conceptualization of awareness that provides concrete guidance for the structuring of empirical studies of awareness and the development of tools to support awareness. Such conceptions, however, do not take into account newer understandings of shared intentionality among cooperating actors that recently have been defined by philosophers and empirically investigated by psychologists and psycho-linguists. These newer conceptions highlight the common ground and socially recursive inference that underwrites cooperative behavior. And it is this inference that is often seamlessly carried out in collocated work, so easy to take for granted and hence overlook, that will require computer support if such work is to be partially automated or carried out at a distance. Ignoring the inferences required in achieving common ground may thus focus a researcher or designer on surface forms of “heeding” that miss the underlying processes of intention shared in and through activity that are critical for cooperation to succeed. Shared intentionality thus provides a basis for reconceptualizing awareness in CSCW research, building on and augmenting existing notions. In this paper, we provide a philosophically grounded conception of awareness based on shared intentionality, demonstrate how it accounts for behavior in an empirical study of two individuals in collocated, tightly-coupled work, and provide implications of this conception for the design of computational systems to support tightly-coupled collaborative work.

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Notes

  1. We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for the phrase “the aggregation of myriad atomic acts” as a gloss on what we had been trying to express.

  2. The organization name is anonymized, as are the employee names.

  3. We use the term transaction to denote the relationship between people at work. This recognizes that relations and conversations cannot be reduced to the independent but interacting contributions of individuals but instead mutually implicate each other (Roth and Jornet 2013). This approach is consistent with the analytic stance described below of taking turn pairs as the minimum analytic unit.

  4. We use the following notational conventions for the transcripts, standard in conversation analysis (see as well Appendix A of (Roth 2013)). Unless modified, all words are written with lowercase letters. A number in parentheses indicates the length of a pause in the speech in seconds, while a period inside parentheses indicates a hearable pause of less than 0.1  s. Descriptions in double parentheses are transcriber’s comments. Colons indicate lengthening of a phoneme, about 0.1  s per colon. Square brackets in consecutive lines by different speakers indicate overlap of speech between these speakers. Speech within angle brackets preceded by “p” (or “pp”) standing for piano (or pianissimo) indicates lower (or much lower) speech volume than normal, as in “<<pp > scavenger hunt > .” Speech within angle brackets preceded by “len” (or “all”) indicates lento (or allegro), i.e. slower (or faster) than normal speed. A word inside parentheses ending with “?” indicates difficulty in hearing the word on the recording and that the word in parentheses is the closest approximation. A question mark inside a parenthesis is a word that could not be approximated. Capital letters indicate speaker’s emphasis using a change in speech volume. An equal sign at the end of a word indicates that there is no hearable pause prior to the next word uttered. Downward and upward arrows indicate the pitch jumping downward and upward. The punctuation marks “,?;.” indicate movement of pitch (intonation) toward the end of an utterance: slightly and strongly upward, slightly and strongly downward, respectively.

  5. We follow the suggestion to write irreducible analytic pairs using the Sheffer stroke “|” to indicate that each part of the pair co-implicates and determines the other part of the pair and, in this, the pair as a whole (e.g. (Roth 2013)).

  6. In a strong sense, the statement does not just belong to Danny, whose vocal organs have produced the sound-words, but also belongs to Hank, in whose ears the sound-words resonate at the same time (Roth 2014a, b). Hank’s verbal articulation not only implies whatever he has heard, which has come from Danny, but also is for Danny. An articulation, therefore, cannot be ascribed to an individual but inherently belongs to both speaker and recipient. Speaker and recipient, thus, are oriented to and own, the same sound-words; this co-ownership constitutes, in part, the we-intention.

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Acknowledgments

Josh Tenenberg thanks the University of Washington for granting a sabbatical leave during which much of this research was undertaken, as well as Professor Margaret-Anne Storey, the CHISEL group, and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Victoria for hosting him during this time. He also thanks Julia Schenk and Natalie Jolly for discussions during early phases of this research. David Socha thanks the Computing & Software Systems Division of the School of STEM at the University of Washington Bothell for funds to purchase recording equipment. He also was partially funded by a 2012–2013 Worthington Distinguished Scholar award from the University of Washington Bothell. Finally, all of the authors would like to thank the employees at BeamCoffer who generously offered to open their workspaces and practices to us, without whom none of this research would be possible.

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Tenenberg, J., Roth, WM. & Socha, D. From I-Awareness to We-Awareness in CSCW. Comput Supported Coop Work 25, 235–278 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-014-9215-0

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