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This research studies participants' self-repair practices in instant messaging (IM) interactions. IM is an online forum that allows two people to converse with each other through the exchange of text messages. Same turn, self-repair practices in IM are particularly interesting because here the message composition experience is uniquely poised between the written and oral contexts of communication. The composition is private and textual yet it is for an immediate audience. Drawing on the comparative approach used by Drew, Walker and Ogden (2013), the analysis compares the initial and final versions of participants' messages and observes the repair operations they perform (Schegloff, 2013), the technology used to effect the repair and the actions thereby achieved. The data used for this research comprise 15 chats between 30 participants. The initial versions of the messages were recorded using a key logging software and these were compared with the final versions retrieved from the chat logs. A total of 671 messages were analyzed to study the ways in which participants self-repair their messages to design turns that are best suited for particular interactional needs. The analysis suggests that the repair operations that IM participants perform are not very different from their oral counterparts and include replacing, inserting, adding, deleting, aborting, searching and sequence jumping. IM participants engage in such repair to achieve significant actions such as upgrading or downgrading their claims, displaying sensitivity to epistemic authority, searching for the right referent amongst others. Besides issues related to turn design, self-repair in IM is used for another crucial function: to address trouble arising out of sequential placement of messages and to construct messages that are most appropriate for an ever-changing semantic environment.

PurposeThis paper aims to develop a research model that explains how instant messaging (IM) technologies enable employees to be empowered.Design/methodology/approachThe paper uses survey of 253 Chinese work professionals with respect to their use of IM tools at work.FindingsIM does empower work teams via shaping the social networks and facilitating knowledge sharing in the workplace, resulting in heightened team performance.Research limitations/implicationsThe survey was conducted in China so generalization to other national contexts is tentative. It focuses on the bright side of IM, but neglects the dark side, e.g. security concerns and work interruptions.Practical implicationsIM is not only a social tool, it also has the potential to contribute to work teams. However, IM cannot achieve better work performance alone. Its contribution to strengthen the social networks at work is also critical. These social networks at work can enable employees to overcome psychological barriers to knowledge sharing.Originality/valueStudies of IM in the workplace have not previously considered social network perspectives, nor the value of such IM‐facilitated social networks for work performance. This large scale survey of work professionals across four locations in China provides evidence for the considerable positive impacts of IM on work.

This paper discusses the challenges and opportunities of using instant messaging (IM) technologies for diary studies. The discussion shows that IM as well as diary methods are both highly adaptable and flexible tools for qualitative data collection. In combination, they allow for innovative designs that might overcome limitations of more widely used data collection methods. The paper presents in detail and reflects upon a mixed online and offline design of an audio diary method with 'hard-to-reach' research participants in Burkina Faso. It ends with discussing further methodological and ethical aspects such as reach, temporalities, media formats, conversation styles, confidentiality/anonymity, technical aspects, as well as interaction and power sharing between the researcher and participants in order to spark methodological reflections when designing an IM diary study.

PurposeThe authors investigate the relationship between instant messenger (IM) use and work performance, mediated by interruptions and two key indicators of the stress associated with technology use: overload and complexity.Design/methodology/approachThe authors validate this research model using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) with data collected through a survey of 416 working professionals.FindingsThe data reveal that while IM use contributes minimally to work interruptions and to a greater extent to technological complexity, these two constructs fully mediate the direct influence of IM use at work on technology overload, and meanwhile significantly and directly contribute to work performance.Research limitations/implicationsThis research provides theoretical insights into the deployment of IM and its actual impacts in the workplace. To improve the generalisation of the findings, the authors call for more IM-related research in other countries, with more native theories and various methodologies in this domain.Practical implicationsThe level of stress generated through IM use is moderate, considering IM is not a significant contributor to work interruptions. Thus, despite the potential negative effects of IM communication, the positive effects of using IM at work prevail. As a result, the technology can be promoted as long as employees, their managers and the organisation as a whole are well prepared. Employees can transfer skills and behaviour from the personal setting to their work environment and thus may find an intrinsic motivation to make better use of the IM technology at work.Originality/valueThe authors argue that this research model is novel for its perspective on evaluating the actual impacts of IM use at work instead of the reasons of using it. The authors conceptualise the process to explain how IM contributes to interruptions and other technostress indicators in the working context, and the impact on performance. Contrary to some prior research, the authors find that overall IM applications do not have a negative impact on work performance, and instead may enhance it.

Successful animal systems often manage risk through synchronous behavior that spontaneously arises without leadership. In critical human systems facing risk, such as financial markets or military operations, our understanding of the benefits associated with synchronicity is nascent but promising. Building on previous work illuminating commonalities between ecological and human systems, we compare the activity patterns of individual financial traders with the simultaneous activity of other traders—an individual and spontaneous characteristic we call synchronous trading. Additionally, we examine the association of synchronous trading with individual performance and communication patterns. Analyzing empirical data on day traders' second-to-second trading and instant messaging, we find that the higher the traders' synchronous trading is, the less likely they are to lose money at the end of the day. We also find that the daily instant messaging patterns of traders are closely associated with their level of synchronous trading. This result suggests that synchronicity and vanguard technology may help traders cope with risky decisions in complex systems and may furnish unique prospects for achieving collective and individual goals.

PurposePlatform‐independent low‐cost instant messaging (IM) may allow small businesses with limited financial and technical resources to communicate and collaborate internally and externally. Little research has been done investigating IM in the small business context. This study seeks to address this research gap and to investigate how small businesses respond to and actively exploit the opportunities brought by IM.Design/methodology/approachTwo comparative case studies were conducted with two US small businesses. The research sites were selected based on the companies' IM usage pattern. Multiple data collecting methods were used including observation, interview, and IM transcripts. Open coding and qualitative data analysis were employed to get rich descriptive findings about IM usage.FindingsIM was found beneficial to small businesses in several ways. The IM usage management is more a managerial issue than a technical one and a set of organizational and managerial factors were identified critical to the achievements of these benefits.Originality/valueThis paper addresses a research gap and investigates the under‐researched IM management issue. The study shows that creative and constructive usage of IM could bring a variety of organizational benefits to small businesses. The findings of this study provide guidance to IM researchers and small business practitioners as to how small businesses can manage IM to exploit its benefits. The comparative study method employed by this study also identifies situations where the utility of IM usage could be limited.

ABSTRACTOrganizational decision making is dominated by teams. When an important decision is required, a team is often formed to make it or to advise the individual decision maker, because a team has more resources, knowledge, and political insight than any one individual working alone. As teams have become geographically distributed, collaboration technology has come to play an important role in such collective decision making efforts. Instant messaging (IM) is an increasingly prevalent workplace collaboration technology that enables near‐synchronous text exchanges on a variety of devices. We examined the use of IM during face‐to‐face, telephone, and computer‐mediated team meetings, a practice we call "invisible whispering." We introduce Goffman's characterization of social interaction as dramatic performance, differentiable into "front stage" and "backstage" exchanges, to analyze how invisible whispering alters the socio‐spatial and temporal boundaries of team decision making. Using IM, workers were able to influence front stage decision making through backstage conversations, often participating in multiple backstage conversations simultaneously. This type of interaction would be either physically impossible or socially constrained without the use of IM. We examine how invisible whispering changes the processes of collaborative decision making and how these new processes may affect the efficiency and effectiveness of collaborative decision making, as well as participation, satisfaction, relationships among team members, and individual attention.

International audience ; Nowadays, digital communications are pervasive and as such, they carry a huge amount of both professional and private information all around the world. Given the knowledge that can be extracted from such information, its confidentiality is of utmost importance for both companies and individuals. Recent news related to massive breaches of privacy by both external actors such as government agencies, rogue teams, and internal actors such as communication services providers (i.e., Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon) have exacerbated the need for more secure communication technologies. Although message content can be encrypted end-to-end by so-called off-the-record techniques, message metadata such as sender, recipient, time sent and size can still leak a lot of information about communicating parties. Oblivious RAM (ORAM) systems form a promising new branch of research for hiding such metadata from the hosting servers, but they have not yet been deployed in production environments. Due to their complexity and performance penalty, they can currently be used only for very simple client-server applications such as instant messaging (IM). In this context, we show that accessing metadata on a messaging server can leak information that could be concealed by ORAM systems. More specifically, we show the differences observed in metadata collection between a classic XMPP server and two ORAM-based servers. In order to assess those systems , we have designed a new attack based on live forensic techniques in order to retrieve metadata from the RAM of a running IM server. We have used two datasets of instant messages for carrying out this assessment. Our experimental attack setup can highlight the leak of metadata from a standard messaging server and can also be used for testing the security of an ORAM-based messaging server.

International audience ; Nowadays, digital communications are pervasive and as such, they carry a huge amount of both professional and private information all around the world. Given the knowledge that can be extracted from such information, its confidentiality is of utmost importance for both companies and individuals. Recent news related to massive breaches of privacy by both external actors such as government agencies, rogue teams, and internal actors such as communication services providers (i.e., Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon) have exacerbated the need for more secure communication technologies. Although message content can be encrypted end-to-end by so-called off-the-record techniques, message metadata such as sender, recipient, time sent and size can still leak a lot of information about communicating parties. Oblivious RAM (ORAM) systems form a promising new branch of research for hiding such metadata from the hosting servers, but they have not yet been deployed in production environments. Due to their complexity and performance penalty, they can currently be used only for very simple client-server applications such as instant messaging (IM). In this context, we show that accessing metadata on a messaging server can leak information that could be concealed by ORAM systems. More specifically, we show the differences observed in metadata collection between a classic XMPP server and two ORAM-based servers. In order to assess those systems , we have designed a new attack based on live forensic techniques in order to retrieve metadata from the RAM of a running IM server. We have used two datasets of instant messages for carrying out this assessment. Our experimental attack setup can highlight the leak of metadata from a standard messaging server and can also be used for testing the security of an ORAM-based messaging server.

Despite its worldwide popularity, mobile instant messaging (MIM) as a new mode of interpersonal communication has received scant scholarly attention by far. Drawing upon the notion of "connected presence," this study extends related discussions by exploring the patterns of MIM interaction in the management of close relationships. Focusing on WeChat, the most popular MIM in China, this study presents findings based on interviews with young Chinese as WeChat users. This study finds that WeChat's wide functionality enabled multimodal communication in varying situations. Four modes of WeChat interaction were identified: General information exchange, experience articulation, technical support, and sympathetic companionship. The study also analyzes how user construction attaches social meaning to certain communicative practices on WeChat.

Modern communication technologies have vastly increased the reach and influence of political rumors, with negative consequences for democratic political systems globally. Rumor communication can be theorized as a form of political talk that helps citizens grapple with the uncertainty inherent in politics, form opinions, and build solidarity with others. The present study examines how one type of communication technology—instant messaging platforms—might facilitate forms of rumor communication that can influence participation in and knowledge about politics. Using original panel survey data from the 2017 South Korean election, we find that rumor communication on the popular instant messaging platform KakaoTalk predicts increased campaign participation, but not campaign knowledge. Further, political rumor communication on instant messaging platforms appears to exacerbate participatory inequality between those with weak and those with strong political interest and ideology.

In this article, we analyse WhatsApp interactions in a youth care setting. In family-style group care, young people temporarily live in the family of professional foster parents (PFP), while they regularly visit their birth parents (BPs). Our data consist of instant messaging of 11 pairs of PFPs and BPs during 2 months. Using Conversation Analysis (CA), we focused on the social interaction between BPs and PFPs, achieved in and through multi-modally constructed sequences of updates—responses. First, updates are used by BPs in the context of the transfer from the child from/to the PFP marking the transfer of responsibility for the child. Second, PFPs use images as updates to provide BPs quasi-primary access to the experiences of the child. Third, updates are given or elicited in the context of prior problems. Across these functions, we observe that while BPs work to display responsibility, PFPs subtly empower BPs as parents.