Ubiquitous information and communication technologies (ICT) are having transformative effects on the ways in which people socialize and collaborate. In particular, "virtual organizations" - aggregations of individuals, facilities and resources that span geographic and institutional boundaries - are an increasingly common work structure in a range of settings. One of the most important problems faced by those working in virtual organizations, however, is that unscheduled informal interaction with colleagues can be difficult to support. When compared with face-to-face collaborations, this means unanticipated problems can take longer to solve, uncertainties and misunderstandings can persist longer, and relationships may take longer to develop.
Supporting informal interactions requires improved interpersonal awareness, that is, the ability to quickly and naturally see what colleagues are doing and whether or not they are available to talk. To date, design and research efforts have generally failed to produce novel and widely adopted technologies that overcome the problems associated with sub-optimal interpersonal awareness in virtual organizations. One problem limiting progress in the area is the implicit assumption in many awareness and interruption minimization technologies to reduce ambiguity and provide accurate information about others. There is increasing evidence, however, to suggest that such assumptions may not be valid. In communication, people frequently draw on the ambiguous properties of certain media to maintain plausible deniability about message receipt, avoid confrontation, as well as to encourage or discourage rapid response to a query.
With regard to awareness technologies, such practices can sometimes be considered deceptive in that false information about one's availability may be deliberately provided to colleagues. This leads to the following research questions: When and how do people use deception to manage interpersonal awareness with current ICTs? What is the impact of these deceptions on their self-concept and their ability to work with colleagues?
Most existing work in this area aims to either characterize people's use of deception, or eliminate deception by providing more accurate information. The long-term goal of this project, on the other hand, is to identify deception and to exploit it as a resource in designing and implementing improved awareness technologies. This SGER enables preliminary work on novel ideas about the identification and usage of deception hotspots in interpersonal awareness is the first exploratory step of a research program that could significantly impact how interpersonal awareness technologies are considered and designed, as well as our understanding of the role of deception in interpersonal awareness. Its primary contributions are: 1) a systematic examination of the conditions under which deception is used as a resource with existing awareness technologies, and 2) a conceptualization of deceptions as an indicator of a "trouble spot" in how a technology is supporting interpersonal awareness.
Broader Impact: The results of this project will be critical to providing the necessary social capacities in our national cyberinfrastructure that will enable effective and transformative work in various forms of geographically distributed virtual organizations.
