Internet Haze: Why New Artifacts Can Enhance Situation Ambiguity

Abstract

Social and psychological research on the Internet has been biased for a decade by the deterministic assumption that technology per secan have an ‘impact’ on individuals, groups and organizations. This presumption is challenged by a different perspective, which conceives of technology as a social production and relies on ‘ethnographic’ methodologies to investigate the specific ways in which social actors interact with technological tools. Adoption of new artifacts tends to disrupt existing task–artifact cycles and at the same time create new skills in social actors and new features in environments. For this reason new artifacts can enhance, rather than reduce, the ambiguity of everyday situations. The changes in the environment stimulated by the introduction of new artifacts may remain undetected for a while because social actors cannot rely on previous experiences to make sense of the new situation. The wide diffusion of the Internet can render more problematic the selection of information, its control by ordinary actors, interpersonal communication and self-presentation (which in cyberspace is exposed to special forms of deception), and the sense of presence in an environment. The ambiguity of the situations emerging on the Web can be reduced by awareness of the characteristics of cyberspace as an artifact under construction and by the development of shared cultural norms to regulate the exchanges taking place on the Web.

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