Workshop: Rethinking the Value of Busyness in IT

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

While information technologies (IT) promise to liberate us of hard labor and save us time by offering efficiency and productivity, improving our quality of life, at the same time they raise the standards of what we should accomplish and increase the amount of information we need to deal with and foster a sense of increased pace and accessibility. As such, the value of busyness may be implicitly embedded in IT design. This award funds a research workshop to create a research agenda on the design of future IT to account for the culture of busyness. The workshop participants will address two question: (1) What are the roles of IT in coping with and/or promoting a culture of busyness?, and (2) To what extent is it possible to intervene in the culture of busyness by altering the design of IT or its use practices? Through these initial questions the participants will identify theoretical and empirical gaps in understanding sociotechnical aspects of busyness at the individual, organizational, and societal level and will identify both technical and social opportunities and challenges in the design and application of IT interventions for this purpose. Workshop participants will be recruited and selected in three ways: (1) specific scholars who have done research related to this topic will be individually invited; (2) a general solicitation to submit position papers will be sent out through relevant mailing lists; and (3) local graduate students with interest in this topic will be invited to take part. The outcome of this workshop will be to develop a research agenda for better understanding and addressing the value of busyness embedded in IT. Specifically, we plan to submit an article to a general audience journal to describe this research agenda. Further, as we identify specific research being done, we plan to propose a special issue at a major journal in order to group together results about this topic.