[Air-L] The Mediated Conversation minitrack @ HICSS-51: Submission deadline in 3 weeks

[Yoram Kalman]

The Mediated Conversation HICSS minitrack is home for research on the
interface of conversation and technology.

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.



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



The submission site is: 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



Since 1968, the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS)
has been known worldwide as the longest-standing working scientific
conferences in Information Technology Management. HICSS provides a highly
interactive working environment for top scholars from academia and the
industry from over 60 countries to exchange ideas in various areas of
information, computer, and system sciences. Recent research shows HICSS
ranked second in citation ranking among 18 Information Systems (IS)
conferences, ranked third in value to the MIS field among 13 Management
Information Systems (MIS) conferences, and ranked second in conference
rating among 11 IS conferences. As of May 2017, papers from the most recent
HICSS conference have been downloaded 100,547 times by readers from more
than 130 countries. Also, about 5,000 downloads of HICSS-50 papers were
recorded in the AIS e-library. For more details see
http://hicss.hawaii.edu/about/

-- 
Yoram Kalman, PhD

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