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Internet-based platforms present new opportunities for theory and design in Information Systems. The social implications of technological change have always been important, but new platforms, with their changes in negotiated social order and contending opportunities for freedom and control, require an explicitly critical perspective. If democratization is to be a feature of platforms, we need adequate distinctions for the design of these social/organizational spaces. Critical theory provides such a framework, and a way to sort out the disconnects between intent and implementation. Habermas’s concepts of the system, public sphere, and lifeworld provide a social philosophy that can directly influence IS research and design. Using health care trends that bring patient lifeworld and hospital system into closer contact, we illustrate a gap in conventions that arises, and recommend this gap be formatted as a public sphere., Conference of 26th Americas Conference on Information Systems, AMCIS 2020 ; Conference Date: 10 August 2020 Through 14 August 2020; Conference Code:165451

As a scholarly field, the ACM SIGCHI community maintains a strong focus on conferences as its main outlet for scholarly publication. Historically, this originates in how the field of computer science adopted a conference-centric publication model as well as in the organizational focus of ACM. Lately, this model has become increasingly challenged for a number of reasons, and multiple alternatives are emerging within the SIGCHI community as well as in adjacent communities. Through revisiting examples from other conferences and neighboring communities, this panel explores alternative publication paths and their opportunities and risks.

A meta-review of the history of qualitative and critical theory in Information Systems (IS) and HumanComputer Interaction (HCI) illustrates how source disciplines and publication outlets can filter reputation and affect methodological diversity. An academic cultures framework allows us to compare disciplines and explain different timelines for methods and theories. IS has many publication outlets, while HCI reputations depend on publication in the ACM Conference on Computer-Human Interaction (CHI). The fields deal with similar topics but are shaped by different institutional contexts. Qualitative research and critical theory arose in Information Systems during the 1980s and 1990s, while a search of HCI literature shows no critical theory until the 2000s. An open field of journals may create affordances for new approaches, whereas filtering reputation through a core conference may constrain them. The rise of platforms may blur domain distinctions through a common focus on AI, privacy and information integrity.

Healthcare informatics is undergoing major changes due to new infrastructures like social media that allow patients to proactively bring information to the physician consultation. We use the concept of infrastructuring to describe these changes, referring to the social practice of adapting human infrastructure for specific contexts. This poses informational and social challenges to providers, as they negotiate new boundaries with patients. Information integrity is essential because of risks to both parties. Infrastructuring in this case is the maintenance of information privacy and accuracy, or information integrity. The tasks of vetting information integrity and managing patient expectations add complexity to provider work even as physicians are positive about patients taking responsibility for their own health. The paper addresses infrastructure transformations, the process of infrastructuring, and a concept of information integrity. Using qualitative data from a medical setting, the study illustrates the contradictions physicians face in accommodating social media to their practice.

Browsing is one of the methods used for finding and refinding information on the web or in the file local system and there are opportunities to avoid this, particularly if that information is revisited frequently. We present empirical results from a field study contrasting patterns of browsing to local and web information and we qualify the cost that this navigation method incurs. In addition, we provide an improved method for defining revisit behavior and report on the level of revisits during our study. Our findings have implications for solution development that reduce user effort for finding and refinding information., Sponsored in part by National Science Foundation under Grant IIS-0133994.

There has been considerable interest in the topic of virtuality over the last few years among both academics and practitioners. The focus of attention has generally been on how to improve collaboration and knowledge sharing, how to develop trust and cohesiveness within virtual organizations, virtual teams and virtual communities, and how to best support virtual interactions. Underlying this research area is the assumption that we possess sufficient understanding about the nature of virtuality and that we know how to distinguish 'what is virtual' to 'what is not virtual'. Even though several of us have attempted on various occasions to make a contribution in this field, we increasingly recognize that the nature of virtuality has not been well conceptualized in the literature. Part of the reason for this is that researchers, including us, often have the tendency to compare the virtual (distributed and CMC-based) to the traditional (collocated, and face-to-face) environment. We question this purely technological distinction, but recognize that virtuality, as an IT-enabled phenomenon, is increasingly extending its reach, becoming more global and more pervasive across all spheres of society. The theme of this panel is to examine, appreciate, and debate the multi-dimensional nature of what virtuality has been, is, and may become-specifically, its global and local dimensions, including the different interpretations that are and should be given to these dimensions.