[Air-L] Mediated Conversation minitrack: HICSS CFP

[Yoram Kalman]

Dear all,

I believe many at AoIR would be interested in the HICSS minitrack on
mediated conversation. HICSS, Hawaii International Conference on System
Sciences is now in its 51st year. This year it meets in the Big Island of
Hawaii. For more information about this unique conference and its
international reputation see http://hicss.hawaii.edu/about/  Details of the
CFP are below.

Mediated Conversation

Conversations are at the heart of every human activity.  Mediated
conversations that use text, audio, images and video are a part of every
aspect of life: From the Cluetrain Manifesto’s “markets are conversations”,
through Robin Dunbar’s conversations as devices for social grooming.
Accordingly, this minitrack is open to research on mediated conversation
from a variety of disciplinary perspectives including Communication,
Management, Education, Computer Science, Sociology, Political Science,
Psychology, Linguistics, Law, and the like. The mediated conversation
minitrack is home for research of the interface of conversation and
technology at HICSS.

As the role of mediated conversation in everyday life and in the workplace
becomes more dominant, we encounter new research questions. Many mediated
conversations leave a persistent record and become persistent
conversations. This persistence transforms the essence of conversation that
was, until recently, predominantly volatile and ephemeral. On the other
hand, some forms of mediated conversation are deliberately ephemeral and
impermanent, as demonstrated by media such as Snapchat. This is the
successor of the Persistent Conversation minitrack established by Tom
Erickson and Susan Herring at HICSS in 1999, which was originally focused
on the novelty of conversational persistence.

Since then, the mediation of human communication has been imposing a new
set of challenges. For example, what are the mechanisms that perform the
role of the ephemeral social cues of face-to-face conversation? What are
the consequences of the creation of potentially permanent records in terms
of privacy, accountability, and the right to be forgotten? What of the
ability to erase, steal, hijack and selectively leak and disseminate
conversations that were meant to remain under the control of their
participants? How do platforms affect or mediate conversations, for example
by imposing algorithmic biases? Can we evaluate the claims about loss of
intimacy, depth, and quality of human communication when carried out
digitally?

This minitrack brings together researchers and innovators to explore
mediated conversation and its implications for learning, commercial
transactions, entertainment, news, politics, and other forms of human
interaction; to raise new socio-technical, ethical, pedagogical, linguistic
and social questions; and to suggest new methods, perspectives, and design
approaches. Examples of appropriate topics include, but are not limited to:



·         Innovation in digital conversational practice: turn-taking,
threading, and other structural features of CMC

·         The dynamics and analysis of large scale conversation systems
(e.g., MOOCs and big data applications)

·         Methods for analyzing mediated conversation

·         Studies of virtual communities or other sites of digital
conversation

·         The role of mediated conversation in knowledge management

·         The role of mediated conversation in organizations

·         Domain specific applications, opportunities and challenges of
mediated conversations and conversational exchanges (e.g., in education,
healthcare, social movements, government, citizen participation)

·         Conversation visualization, and visual cues

·         The role of listeners, lurkers, and silent interactions

·         Novel properties of mediated conversation

·         Social presence and the mediation of an attributed user’s identity

·         The platform's role in mediating the conversation



Submit at https://confs.precisionconference.com/~hicss/

*Submission deadline: June 15, 2017, 11:59 pm HST*

For questions, please contact one of the co-chairs

*Minitrack Co-Chairs:*

*Sheizaf Rafaeli* (Primary Contact)
University of Haifa
sheizaf at rafaeli.net

*Yoram M Kalman*
The Open University of Israel
yoramka at openu.ac.il

*Carmel Kent*
University of Exeter, UK
kent.carmel at gmail.com

-- 
Yoram Kalman, PhD

Cell: +972 54 574 7375
www.kalmans.com