Computer-supported cooperative work
[2] More specifically, the field of CSCW seeks to analyze and draw connections between currently understood human psychological and social behaviors and available collaborative tools, or groupware.
The origins of CSCW as a field are intertwined with the rise and subsequent fall of office automation as response to some of the criticisms, particularly the failure to address the impact human psychological and social behaviors can have.
[5] Computer-supported cooperative work is an interdisciplinary research area of growing interest which relates workstations to digitally advanced networking systems.
[citation needed] The measures to mitigate the virus' spread led to firm closures and increased the rates of remote working and learning.
CSCW is a design-oriented academic field that is interdisciplinary in nature and brings together librarians, economists, organizational theorists, educators, social psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and computer scientists, among others.
For example, many R&D professionals working with CSCW are computer scientists who have realized that social factors play an important role in the development of collaborative systems.
While most work is always developing in some way, newer projects will have to spend more time establishing common ground among its team members and will thus have a higher level of nascence.
[22] Self-presentation has been studied in traditional face-to-face environments, but as society has embraced content culture, social platforms have generated new affordances for presenting oneself online.
[23] The likelihood of context collapse is especially challenging with the surge of proprietary software which introduces a conflict of interest for the users who have an ideal audience, but the platforms algorithm has a differing one.
[23][24][25] For example Snapchat and Instagram both allow users to build a "close friends list" and block specific people from viewing content.
There have been three main generations to distance education, starting with the first being through postal service, the second through mass media such as the radio, television, and films, and the third being the current state of e-learning.
[36] These technologies have created massive change in their use as CSCW tools, allowing students and teachers to work on the same platforms and have a shared online space in which to communicate in.
The lack of interface and design consideration for younger users causes difficulty in potential communication between children and older generations utilizing the software.
[45] Computer-mediated communication in gaming settings takes place across different channels, which can consist of structured message systems, bulletin boards, meeting rooms, and shared diaries.
[47] Personal accountability might be incorporated into video games by including an incentive system where individual players are rewarded with additional points for completing an objective or an action that improves the team's chances of success.
[50] Often, these social systems focus key functionality and feature creation for younger demographics, causing issues in adaptability for older generations.
[54] The significance of this is they felt that by exploring EMCA, it could provide different insights on collaborative social network systems, as opposed to relying solely on recall.
Revisiting the CSCW Fundamentals on Distributed Collaboration is another research article that, as the title suggests, explores under what circumstances distance matters.
"[55] This problem arises when a group in a distributed collaborative system experiences a breakdown in communication due to the fact that its members lack a shared understanding for the given context they are working in.
The solutions of unresolved issues in ubiquitous computing systems can be explored now that the observations of user experiences in social media, which are normally based on recollection, are no longer needed.
Examining these sequential and parallel activities in user groups on social media networks enables the ability to "[manage] the experience of that everyday life.
"[54] An important takeaway from this paper on EMCA and sequentiality is that it reveals how the choices made by designers of social media apps ultimately mediates our end-user experience, for better or for worse.
An apparent guiding principle to the research is that the goal of advancing any ubicomp technologies should be to maximize the amount of good to as many people in a society as possible.
Data at work: supporting sharing in science and engineering is one such paper that goes into greater depth about how to build better infrastructures that enable open data-sharing and thus, empower its users.
Ubiquitous computing is huge to the field of CSCW because as the barriers between physical boundaries that separate us break down with the adoption of technology, our relationships to those locations is actually strengthened.
Consequently, CSCW systems that are based on the design of successful ones may fail to be appropriated in other seemingly similar contexts for a variety of reasons that are nearly impossible to identify a priori.
[61] While groupware enables geographically dispersed teams to achieve organizational goals and engage in cooperative work, there are also many challenges that accompany use of such systems.
Further, research has found that groupware requires careful implementation into a group setting, and product developers have not as yet been able to find the most optimal way to introduce such systems into organizational environments.
[69] Hospitals may respond to cross-boundary breakdowns by explicitly ranking key resources or assigning "integrator" roles to multiple staff members across different departments.
Because researchers evaluating CSCW systems often bypass quantitative data in favor of naturalistic inquiry, results can be largely subjective due to the complexity and nuances of organizations themselves.
