Ben Gross

Biography
As a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), I research methods to improve organization, navigation, retrieval and analysis of large personal collections of email. My dissertation focuses on the socio-technical aspects of users maintaining multiple email addresses and instant messenger screen names.

Other interests include digital identity and role management particularly with regard to messaging; the organization, retrieval and navigation of long-term and persistent online conversations; messaging on mobile devices and community wireless networking.

Position Paper
Our technologically enhanced late modern society often leads us to complex social interactions which span a continuum of the physical to the virtual, the face-to-face to the technologically mediated and from communication-dependent to location-dependent. People inhabit many “social worlds.” Kazmer paraphrases Strauss’ description where “a social world consists of people who share activities, space, and technology, and who communicate with one another.” Shibutani states that a “social world is an interactive unit, a “universe of regularized mutual response,” that is “set neither by territory nor formal membership but by the limits of effective communication.”

In everyday life, people segment their social worlds to manage their time, impressions, relationships, etc. Individuals commonly segment their social worlds into distinct domains such as home and work.

Goffman describes a form of segmentation as “the individual in ordinary work situations presents himself and his activity to others, the ways in which he guides and controls the impression they form of him and the kinds of things he may and may not do while sustaining his performance before them.”

Yet, the post-industrial distinction between public and private has become substantially more complex in late modern society. With the rise of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs), the boundary between public and private has blurred, people frequently work at home and their private affairs often unfold in public spaces. Technology oriented researchers have typically examined how individuals use ICTs to negotiate the separation and integration of home and work. Scholars have less frequently examined the more complex ways individuals use electronic media to negotiate multiple domains—using strategies that include both segmentation and integration. Individuals with complex social worlds often both segment and integrate domains that people typically consider distinct such as: home, work, family, friends, school, professional organizations, social organizations; networks that overlap times, locations, and contexts.

People’s use of multiple electronic mail addresses and instant messenger screen names as identifiers are compelling examples of how individuals segment and integrate their social worlds. In this paper, I will investigate how individuals manage complex social worlds through the use of multiple online identifiers composed of email addresses and instant messenger screen names. I will compare two populations, financial services professionals and university students, which will provide the opportunity to explore the socio-technical issues in two populations with distinct needs and uses of segmentation, integration, negotiation strategies and technology. I hypothesize that while students use messaging to integrate their social worlds, financial services professionals working in a highly regulated environment will have highly developed strategies for segmentation. Understanding the strategies and explanations for people’s use of multiple online identifiers will provide a lens through which to examine how these two groups of “lead users” use messaging to segment or integrate their social worlds. By better understanding the multiple functions of email and instant messaging identifiers we can inform the design and implementation of technical infrastructure.

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