Get your organisation together. Video-mediated communication in an informal setting.

Abstract

Videoconferencing is a way to make people meet regardless of the geo-graphical distance between them. In recent years, it has become possible to use the Internet as a carrier for communication of this type. This has opened up new opportunities to use computers that already are connected to the Internet as vehicles for video-mediated communication. In this Master the-sis, we have explored some possibilities to use video-mediated communica-tion in an organisational setting ö where the purpose was to support aware-ness and informal, social interaction between geographically dispersed loca-tions. An ethnographical study was conducted at an IT-research institute, fo-cusing on the instituteâs memberâs behaviour around and assumptions of an implemented videoconference prototype. The users testified that, albeit they found it interesting, the prototype was too weak in mediating interaction in a completely natural way. Some issues of privacy and integrity matters were also hampering the userâs will to accept the system. The result of this study points out some social and technological factors that are important to ac-knowledge when designing future video-mediated communication systems dedicated to support awareness and informal communication.