Computer-supported collaboration research focuses on technology that affects groups, organizations, communities and societies, e.g., voice mail and text chat.
As net technology increasingly supported a wide range of recreational and social activities, consumer markets expanded the user base, enabling more and more people to connect online to create what researchers have called a computer supported cooperative work, which includes "all contexts in which technology is used to mediate human activities such as communication, coordination, cooperation, competition, entertainment, games, art, and music" (from CSCW 2023[1]).
The subfield computer-mediated communication deals specifically with how humans use "computers" (or digital media) to form, support and maintain relationships with others (social uses), regulate information flow (instructional uses), and make decisions (including major financial and political ones).
By contrast, CSC is focused on the output from, rather than the character or emotional consequences of, meetings or relationships, reflecting the difference between "communication" and "collaboration".
Some theorists hold that a play ethic should apply, and that work must become more game-like or play-like in order to make using computers a more comfortable experience.
[citation needed] True multi-player computer games can be considered a simple form of collaboration, but only a few theorists include this as part of CSC.
[citation needed] Since some specialized devices exist for games or conferences that do not include all of the usual boot image capabilities of a true "computer", studying these separately may be justified.
The development of this field reaches back to the late 1960s and the visionary assertions of Ted Nelson, Douglas Engelbart, Alan Kay, Glenn Gould, Nicholas Negroponte and others who saw a potential for digital media to ultimately redefine how people work.
Alan Kay worked on Smalltalk, which embodied these principles, in the 1970s, and by the 1980s it was well regarded and considered to represent the future of user interfaces.
As few computers had even local area networks, and processors were slow and expensive, the idea of using them simply to accelerate and "augment" human communication was eccentric in many situations.
Some researchers, such as Brenda Laurel, emphasized how similar online dialogue was to a play, and applied Aristotle's model of drama to their analysis of computers for collaboration.
Such systems as Superbook, NoteCards, KMS and the much simpler HyperTies and HyperCard were early examples of collaborative software used for e-learning.
Online videoconferencing and webcams have been studied in small scale use for decades but since people simply do not have built-in facilities to create video together directly, they are properly a communication, not collaboration, concern.
Other pioneers in the field included Ted Nelson, Austin Henderson, Kjeld Schmidt, Lucy Suchman, Sara Bly, Randy Farmer, and many "economists, social psychologists, anthropologists, organizational theorists, educators, and anyone else who can shed light on group activity."
The separate Computers, Freedom and Privacy conferences deal with larger social questions, but basic concerns that apply to systems and work process design tend still to be discussed as part of CSC research.
By the late 1990s, with the rise of wikis (a simple repository and data dictionary that was easy for the public to use), the way consensus applied to joint editing, meeting agendas and so on had become a major concern.
Study of content management, enterprise taxonomy and the other core instructional capital of the learning organization has become increasingly important due to ISO standards and the use of continuous improvement methods.
[citation needed] Natural language and application commands tend to converge over time, becoming reflexive user interfaces.