Steve Abrams
I’m currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Interactive and Collaborative Technologies program in the Dept. of Informatics, Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California-Irvine. My research interests to date include distributed work/play teams/groups, computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). computer-mediated communication, sensemaking, and social network analysis Research interests I haven’t yet had the opportunity to formally study include mobile and ubiquitous computing and technology use in multi-cultural environments.
My research is perhaps best understood in this way:
Sometimes I do strange and interesting things with technology.
Sometimes I observe people doing strange and interesting things with technology.
Mostly, I observe people doing strange and interesting things with each other via technology.
The rest of the time, I’m writing about the above or trying to get funding for the above.
Life is good.
(The first two lines are paraphrased from my sagacious colleague at UCI, Amanda Williams, and I thank her for them.)
My dissertation is titled “Uncovering the Network-Centric Organization,” an ethnography of the efforts of a Fortune 100 aerospace corporation to develop a business model for their highly-distributed and highly-interdependent operational activities that was not so reliant on the organizational hierarchy. The essence of a network-centric organization is not to transplant existing, hierarchically-oriented practices onto the technological media enabling members of an organization to collaborate across distance but to organize work according to the affordances of the media. Rather than the simple mediated interaction of distributed work found in many organizations today, the network-centric organization “enmediates” its work by capturing details of the mediated interactions into information systems as a resource for future work. Many organizations record operational information for accounting purposes, but not for facilitating future work. I show how such information can be transformed to extend an organization’s social networking services (Web 2.0) to collaborative networking services. The easiest way to learn how to do this is to hire me <grin>. Yes, I’m on the market for a paid research position ... could you tell?
