Tools and Technology Theory-Type Research

Seven of the twenty-two Theory-Type Research publications are about Tools and Technologies (Schooler 1991, Rice, More and D'Ambra 1995, Harper and Sellen 1995, Fox and Furmanski 1995, Karamuftuoglu 1997, Citera 1998, Ashton and Levy 1998). Schooler (1991) reviews the history and development of video teleconferencing and predicts that multimedia teleconferencing has come of age. Rice, More, and D'Ambra (1995) explore Media Richness Theory and identify choice based on situational context as a deciding criteria for the suitability of new media use. Harper and Sellen (1995) explore Media Richness in organizations, and use the cultural inertia argument to explain the lingering preference for paper, concluding that information that requires judgment in its production is less easily shared than information that does not require judgment; and that social interaction is not as crucial to the sharing of objective information as it is to sharing of interpreted information. Fox and Furmanski (1995) explore the future of the Web and conclude that the vision of the Web can only be achieved with truly open and pervasive technologies. Karmanuftuoglu (1997) argues for the semiotic approach to information storage and retrieval, and uses choice as a foundation on which to resolve the conflicting acts of detonation (description) and prescriptions (performatives) as forms of computer language for development of information systems. Citera (1998) looks at the impact of communication media on influence and decision quality, concluding that dominant personality types maintain levels of influence across media, while less dominant types gain influence when using technology for communication. Ashton and Levey (1998) explore the impact of network learner support and the new roles for service and staff with responsibility for promoting skilled use of electronic information resources, concluding that new roles based on the sharing principle are developing. The overarching concept of these seven Tools and Technologies Theory-Type Research articles is equalization in communication via media richness empowered by choice, power, openness, and sharing.

Uses and Testbed Theory-Type Research

The ten articles in the Uses and Testbeds Theory-Type Research retrieval set (Kydd and Ferry 1991, Mantovani 1995, Barua et. al. 1995, 1996-1997, Robbin 1995, Travica 1995, Mitchell and Singh 1996, Andersson and Roonnberg 1996, Glasner 1996, Swanson et. al. 1997) include all eight of the articles produced by the Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) disciplines. Kydd and Ferry (1991) provide an integration of the literature of Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Media Richness Theory. They use behavioral theory to argue that information processing occurs during group work for two reasons: to reduce uncertainty, and to reduce equivocality; they contend that matching the situation with the appropriate tool is a critical implementation decision.

Mantovani (1995) explores virtual reality from the social psychology perspective as being a communication environment involving consensual hallucination, fiction and possible selves, and integrates a theoretical framework centered on self identity processes. Barua, Chellappa, and Whinston provide two of the publications (1995, 1997). The 1995 document recounts the experience of creating a collaboratory for the business environment and explores complementarity theory as a way to evaluate value that users derive from the system. The 1997 publication recounts the design and development of an Internet and intranet-based collaboratory, analyzes the needs of three geographically dispersed electronic communities, and concludes that a shift of technology platforms from proprietary to open environments is necessary. Robbin (1995) recounts the construction of a collaboratory based on delivery of the federal government's massive Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). She explores the use of distributed database software for delivery of partial information from a large dataset using internetworked technologies, and analyzes the success of the project based on the NRC (1993) Report (both Robbin and NRC are discussed further in Chapter Six). She concludes that focus on communication flows, the data-to-information-to-knowledge process, and alleviating administrative bottlenecks are necessary for progress. Travica (1995) explores the accounting industry for the culture of collaboration, concluding that traditional cultural propositions largely hold online, and that it is possible to create a profile of the typical collaborating professional.

Mitchell and Singh (1996) explore the survival of businesses that use collaborative relationships, and conclude that those that collaborate are less likely to shut down than businesses that follow independent approaches when the environment changes gradually, but that businesses using collaborative relationships are susceptible to takeover. They also find that businesses that collaborate and suffer sudden environmental shock in the area of the collaboration are more likely to shut down than collaborating businesses that suffer sudden environmental shock outside the area of collaboration, concluding that inter-firm collaboration is usually beneficial.

Andersson and Ronnberg (1996) find a difference among individuals who collaborate during two types of memory tasks (semantic memory tasks and episodic memory tasks). Friends as opposed to non-friends reduce the negative impact of collaboration and the "free-ride" or "hide-in-a-crowd" phenomenon frequently associated with collaboration has no impact on the success of collaborators in either type memory tasks. Glasner (1996) uses social theory based on Merton's view of science to investigate the changing culture of science based on the collaboratory, and finds that the collaboratory model has no real impact on accepted views of the culture of science. Swanson, Bailey, and Miller (1997) investigate how entropy as a measure of system disorganization occurs and is measured in physical, biological, and social systems from the perspective of exchange of money-information markers. The underlying theoretical theme among these ten articles is fair exchange, sharing, and commonality, with maintenance of strong individuality within the collective collaboratory environment.

Theory Development

Synoptic statements from the abstracted content of the twenty-two Theory-Type Research articles are:

• Integration and adaptability is necessary and good.
• Change, choice, and personal power are requisite.
• Consensus, sharing, and exchange are positive and practiced.
• Individuality and collectivity are distinctly and respectfully maintained.

Taken as a whole, these qualitative findings point first to the remarkable absence of even the most subtle trace of masculine (hierarchical or patriarchal) social behaviors, among them individualism, dominance, competition, confrontation, mastery, aggression, advantage, etc. (Crimshaw 1986). Second, they resonate with an underlying harmony antithetical to traditional scientific and technological practices.

Without mentioning gender, Wulf (1988) and Lederberg and Uncapher (1989) project that the collaboratory would be antithetical to the traditional practice of (male dominated) science. They expected competition to be replaced with cooperation. They expected individual work to be replaced by group work. They expected individual rewards to be replaced by group rewards. They expected traditional administration and control mechanism and notions of ownership to be supplanted by new, decentralized systems based on sharing. They also projected it would be difficult to convince practicing scientists to accept these new notions about how science might be done.

McLuhan (1963) warned that the "medium is the message," and that we are entering a tribally-oriented "global village," in which electric technology is an "extensions of the self," leading toward a "world soul" or universal human nervous system. Teilhard de Chardin (1975) observed that incorporation of technology is part of natural, uninterrupted human evolution leading toward an etherized human consciousness and a unification of the nervous system. If technology is about the process of knowledge, about how we know, rather than the product of knowledge, or what we know, as it was in the mechanical age (Castells 1996), the early ideals, philosophies, and theories of the technologically-determined collaboratory suggest that these fundamental intellectual changes have been incorporated in the theoretical design of the emerging collaboratory environment.

Dorman (1998) finds that girls and boys interact with technology differently. Boys view technology as a way to extend their power and play games based on competition and contest, finding the workings of technology itself as enthralling as the uses of technology, whereas girls use technology as a way to connect with people and solve real life problems. In light of the fact that technology and science are male dominated professions (NSF 1999, Raber 1998, Clegg 1999, Weinman 1999), and the collaboratory is a male construct, this raises the question of feminism.

It is dangerous to draw dichotomous generalities about gender, and equally difficult to describe a fundamental feminism (Crimshaw 1986). Nevertheless, collaboration is a social practice at which women, generally, excel over men (Clinchy 1985, Roschelle 1992) and the collaboratory is an environment purposively constructed to foster collaboration. Certainly, engendering female attributes does not make the collaboratory feminist; that would be a sort of "this is not a duck" definition of a goose. It does, however, suggest a purposively de-gendered masculine environment, or an ungenderedness, which in many circles is remarkably feminist (Haraway 1985).

The qualitative statements distilled in this chapter are admittedly synoptic and preliminary, but nevertheless suggest that the collaboratory is at once protective of the individual, yet highly conducive to the collective. This reflects feminism's concern with the relationship between autonomy and dependence; between responsibilities to others and needs for self-realization or self-affirmation (Crimshaw 1986, 260). But, pending substantive ecological or sociological studies of the people, practices, and values of humans working in the functioning collaboratory, we are limited here to considering that part of the environment which is determined by technology, and specifically, how that environment is reflected in the library literature.

Perhaps the collaboratory, which is built of traditionally male tools but purposively designed to accommodate predominantly female behaviors, is a large step toward the unification of the human nervous system. Perhaps American scientists have built an ideologically utopian (Mannheim 1936) feminist environment, a sort of intellectually equalized opportunity to make new realities that reflect a holistic human way of knowing. Unlike the public Internet, which is open to all who would connect, the collaboratory is a closed environment of highly trained and educated intellectuals and visionaries, and so in many ways is protected by protocol from the overt and covert sexual exploitation and gender objectification behaviors that proliferate online. Perhaps the American scientist, by accommodating women's ways of knowing (Goldberger 1996), has in the process set himself intellectually free from the self-imposed limits of men's ways of knowing. It is too early to draw such broad conclusions, which is not the point of this study anyway. It is not, however, too early to consider the ungendered, harmonious nature of the collaboratory as informing the sociological and ecological studies that are required to sustain and advance the collaboratory.

Joining Haraway, feminist scholars Herring (1994) and Mallon (1998), among others, find fertile ground in technologically-enabled internetworked environments for the propagation of women's ways of knowing. They see great potential, but also the need for constant vigilance lest old constructs propagate unchecked in these new environments. Kelley (1963, 161) identified three conditions favorable to the formation of new constructs, including use of fresh elements (specifically setting), experimentation, and availability of validating data, all of which are available in the collaboratory. Wilson (1999) calls for a consilience or unity of knowledge between the hard and social sciences; and McLuhan projects that technological media will require replacing the traditional human classification imperative with pattern recognition behaviors. Castells (1996, 32) sees technological uptake as an evolutionary process moving from the accumulation of knowledge to the application of knowledge. Clearly, we are in the midst of great change.

As a connective, problem-solving scientific environment, the collaboratory seems remarkably hospitable to the female ways of using technology. Certainly, nothing in this study so far finds the collaboratory inherently antagonistic to feminism. The collaboratory emerges from the male-dominated worlds of technology and science as an ideologically ungendered, harmonious environment built from relatively equal contributions from the disciplines, as an inherently interdisciplinary, intellectual environment. Since the "nucleus of the scientific method is the rejection of certain propositions in favor of others in strict conformity to fact-based logic" (Wilson 1999, 264), the theory that the collaboratory is a relatively equal, interdisciplinary, ungendered information environment is put forth, and this study proceeds seeking rejection of that proposition.

As the evolution of the collaboratory passes from the implementation, and tools and technologies stages, and begins to concentrate on productive human uses and designs, focus shifts to the actual (vis theoretical) environment, and to the population, or the inhabitants of the new environment, and eventually to the intersubjective "rules of the road" for the collaboratory and the skills collaboratory pioneers value in prospective participants. These last two issues are considered in Phase Three of this study. But first, a subjective, experiential understanding of the functioning collaboratory is necessary. The subjective reality presented in the Phase Two of this study is achieved through prolonged immersion in the online environment of the collaboratory. It serves not only as a synoptic introduction for prospective participants, but tests experientially the validity of the objective ideals, philosophies, and theories the library literature provides. For Phase Two of this study, the collaboratory is not only an object for the conduct of science, but an environment subject to scholarly investigation: the collaboratory becomes the scientific sample.

Conclusions

Quantitative analysis of the collaboratory literature using taxonomies constructed from Wulf (1988), Haddow (1997), and Lederberg and Uncapher (1989) confirms as practiced principles the assumptions of relative equality of contribution to, and inhernent interdisciplinarity of the information environment of the collaboratory. The hard sciences and the social science have made relatively equal contributions to the collaboratory literature, and publication patterns as they constitute a single information environment, are inherently interdisciplinary (Klein 1990, 55). The differences in the contributions of the disciplines in topic, type, and approach of publication equalize within the numbers and percentages of total publications.