Ellen Isaacs has an essay on work she did with folks at AT&T on IM in the workplace.
My initial thought is that it’s *great* that people are finally realizing that IM is more than just an organizational tool. My gut says that the earlier studies weren’t wrong, but that things have changed. IM use has changed over time and adults are starting to pick up on the fact that it’s better than email for many complex work discussions. (My CS colleagues & i knew this back in college as we did most of our projects over IM.)
One concern that i have over this study is this statement: “Only 13 percent of the conversations we monitored included any personal topics whatsoever, and only 6.4 percent were exclusively personal.”
I have no doubt that people do a lot of productive interactions over IM, but my gut says that 13% having any personal topics seems very low. Even in normal working conditions, it’s so common to start out an interaction with something like “how was your thanksgiving?” This is a social ritual that helps us relate to folks. It makes me wonder if these users knew they were being tracked and studied… or if they knew that their employers were reading their IMs.
At least managers are finally finding the courage to allow IM into the workplace. We have recently explored including IM into our schools-oriented web publishing platform, but most schools seem gripped by paranoia about IM, and it’s clear we are way too early for that particular market. This is a great shame because it has the potential to be a brilliant learning tool.
If you are interested in system descriptions and more involved discussion of the Hubbab project, look up her papers from CHI 2002/2003 and CSCW 2002. A quick answer to the 13% question though is the following: Hubbab was a proprietory AT&T system and a research project. Everyone who used Hubbab knew it was a research project and everything was very explicitly recorded. One very interesting aspect of Hubbab was that it made it explicit when the user was multi-tasking to the other person involved in the conversation. Even with that, evidence of multi-tasking was high for heavy IM users.
Also, users were not prevented from using other IM systems. Presumably, much of the social conversation could happen on those. However, in her papers, Isaacs insisted that most of the sample invovled in Hubbab never used IM before.
The personal content on IMs is not something one likes to admit in surveys. So that may be skewing the results. Based on my seeing my partner/significant other’s extensive use of IM at a public company (they use it *all* the time while working and especially during conference calls) there’s a significant amount of personal peripheral conversation going on (such as, how are your twins doing? as well as a lot of joshing around.)
danah, you know you’re going to get a dozen “how was your thanksgiving?” IMs in the next day… 🙂
I admit I don’t get IM. Over the years I’ve tried all the platforms, ICQ, AOL buddy lists, MSN, Netscape, all kinds of online chat rooms. Can’t stand any of them. I hate the way you start typing a sentence and the other person is also typing and often by the time you’re ready to hit the “send” button then what you’ve written is no longer on topic. Very disjoint.
I’m a little surprised that when I talk to other programmers about code they nearly always suggest we have an IM session, as if that would be a good way to talk about code. Maybe I should add the qualifier “young” before the word “programmer.” I don’t know if its an age related thing or just mere personal preference. Talking about code, explaining code, usually means writing some detailed stuff about how one object depends on another object. It makes way more sense to me to discuss such stuff in email or, better, in a multi-threaded online discussion board. IM is the worst. Or at least, I think so. But others seem the most comfortable talking that way.
I think that the trick is that anyone who is comfortable with IM is very comfortable multi-threading within the conversation… And it’s much more comfortable and real time than a board.
Debunking Conventional Wisdom re: IM Use
Ellen Isaacs writes on a research study undertaken at AT&T Labs regarding IM use in the business setting. We’ve all heard the conventional wisdom — its in dozens of tabloid articles every week: IM use is mostly personal, gossip and…