Emerging Needs and Opportunities for Human Factors Research (1995) / Chapter Skim
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6 Communication Technology and Telenetworking
6 Communication Technology and Telenetworking
Pages 177-199
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From page 177... ...
In this chapter we focus on these technologies and on the challenges and opportunities for human factors research that they present. We begin with a brief historical overview of computer-communications networking technology.
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From page 178... ...
The Internet and the many smaller networks that connect to it depend on computing resources for all aspects of their operation and for the provision of the various services, such as electronic mail and bulletin boards, teleconferencing, information utilities, and the many others that they offer. Today there are several types of networks: local networks, long-distance networks that use telephone lines, satellite networks that communicate by radio transmission, and network complexes that use a variety of means of transmission.
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From page 179... ...
If network bandwidth continues to increase at anything like its recent rate, it will soon be feasible to transmit enormous amounts of data (including digital voice and video) at very low cost.
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From page 180... ...
Some technologists envision, within the next decade or two, a single worldwide integrated services digital network that would be capable of handling digitally encoded information of any type (data, facsimile, voice, graphics, motion pictures) and that would link offices, schools, and homes to information resources of various sorts (libraries, museums, national and international data banks)
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From page 181... ...
Despite the considerable interest in the idea of electronic newspapers, magazines, and journals, not much has been done along these lines to date (although a great deal of "prepublication" information and data are exchanged among scientists via computer networks and much debate of topical scientific questions takes place on electronic bulletin boards that serve specific user communities)
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From page 182... ...
. Changing Roles and Functions Given the type of connectivity global telenetworks are expected to provide and the information handling tools that are already beginning to appear, new methods of information distribution are likely to become increasingly widely used.
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From page 183... ...
A hint of how network technology may facilitate spontaneous political communication can be seen from an inspection of the messages that are posted on general-interest electronic bulletin boards. One informal analysis of 1,000 messages posted over a five-week period on a company board revealed that about 14 percent of them were classifiable as political commentary, discussion, or debate.
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From page 184... ...
This problem is of undoubted importance and deserves continued attention. Terminal and Interface Design An obvious problem will be improving the design of terminals that give people access to computing resources and of the interfaces through which people communicate with information resources.
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From page 185... ...
There is a need for tools that will facilitate information access both in the narrow sense -- access by specialists to the focused databases that serve their special interests -- and in the broad sense -- access by nonspecialists to information that is available to the public through news media, libraries, and general-purpose information services to which anyone can subscribe. There is also opportunity for innovative work on information representation and presentation -- hypertext systems that include multimodal representations provide a hint of the possibilities -- and on the design of navigation aids to help users move around effectively and efficiently in multidimensional data-rich environments.
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From page 186... ...
In addition to the need for tools to facilitate the organization of electronic information for retention, maintenance, and ease of access and use, there will be a need for new methods for coping with the information overload that connectivity to electronic mail, electronic bulletin boards, and other information resources can produce. Heavy users of such resources often develop their own techniques for keeping the amount of information they have to attend to within acceptable bounds.
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From page 187... ...
Among the obvious examples of such applications are electronic mail, electronic bulletin boards, and computerbased teleconferencing. Electronic Mail Electronic mail (E-mail)
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From page 188... ...
suggest that because E-mail is relatively impoverished in social cues and shared experience, it lends itself to communication in which the participants produce messages that display less social awareness than face-to-face or voice communication. Reduced social awareness is seen in "messages characterized by ignoring social boundaries, self revelation, and blunt remarks" (p.
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From page 189... ...
They note that correlation does not demonstrate a cause-effect relationship, but they appear to believe there to be one. Electronic Bulletin Boards An electronic bulletin board can be thought of as a special form of electronic mail, and much of what has been said in the preceding section about E-mail applies to electronic bulletin boards as well.
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From page 190... ...
The existence of electronic bulletin boards could have a great effect on the way people communicate with each other in the future. As more and more people acquire access to computer networks, they will also be acquiring access to widely distributed communities with common interests.
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From page 191... ...
For example, many of the factors that determine which participants play dominant roles in face-to-face meetings appear to be less influential in electronic meetings. These include gender (McGuire et al., 1987)
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From page 192... ...
"Just-in-time" manufacturing reduces the need for such inventories, but it depends on fast and effective communication techniques. The substitution of the transmission of information for the movement of people and material is another way in which computer networks can contribute to increased productivity, because this means the delivery of the same services at the expenditure of fewer natural or economic resources.
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From page 193... ...
The effectiveness with which geographically separated individuals will be able to collaborate, via computer networks, on complex tasks that draw on their combined skills will depend, to no small degree, on how well the many human factors issues relating to the design of the underlying systems are resolved. Telepresence The telephone created a telepresence of sorts.
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From page 194... ...
It should also be noted, however, that there are many opportunities for human factors work on the networking systems that currently exist. The evidence suggests that the currently operating electronic information resources are not utilized as effectively as they could be even by people who have easy access to them and could presumably benefit from making greater use of them (General Accounting Office, 1989)
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From page 195... ...
The proliferation of computer networks has the potential to affect it greatly in the future. Already it is possible to identify many human factors questions that are raised by telenetworking and associated developments; many more are likely to arise as the impact of the continuing development of these technologies on our daily lives becomes increasingly evident.
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From page 196... ...
Committee on Virtual Reality Research and Development, National Research Council. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.
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From page 197... ...
Pp. 425-431 in Proceedings of the AFIPS 1966 Sprint Joint Computer Conference.
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1994 Electronic bulletin boards: a case study in computer-mediated communication. Interacting With Computers 6:117-134.
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From page 199... ...
Annual Review of Computer Science 4:435-452. Weizenbaum, J
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