Virtual Society?

Initial findings from the study (based on detailed analysis of two organisations) confirmed that the adoption of groupware is highly variable. Users point to a number of problems, ranging from the purely technical (poor quality of some conferencing facilities) through to perceptions that groupware, and email traffic in particular, creates excessive demands on managerial time. More importantly, users tend to experience the electronic communication offered by groupware as a highly formal and politicised medium. Users perceived that their personal standing within the organisation could be enhanced or diminished by the quality of their electronic communications. Such communications were not seen as ephemeral, but as highly durable records which required careful crafting since they could be archived, forwarded throughout the organisation and retrieved at some future date, to the potential cost of the sender. In response, users described a range of strategies they adopted to manage electronic communication. These included attempts to prolong debate in order to expose potential flaws in prior parts of the exchange and the strategic mobilisation of possible allies through the copying in of superiors and interested parties.

The research found evidence that the implementation of groupware has actually tended to increase rather than reduce the number of face-to-face meetings held by the two participant organisations (additional meetings are now held to resolve disputes emerging from groupware communication). Managers are tending to routinely store colossal numbers of emails and other electronic documents, sometimes stretching back five years or more. Such archives are strategically used by managers to rapidly produce persuasive evidence in their favour when their own action are questioned, or to re-introduce potentially damaging past exchanges opportunely to challenge the current actions of rivals. Managers also use of a range of tactics to gather information for their own archiving practices. These include 'lurking' on exchanges which are becoming increasingly hostile, provoking others to produce complex accounts of the past by sending innocuous looking suggestions about current strategies and routinely copying in particular individuals who are known to 'keep everything'. Organisational memory is then not the simple preservation of information, but rather a strategic process of archiving, editing and re-introducing selection from masses of past electronic communications.

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Understanding the Implications of the Emergence of Virtual Self-Help for the Future of Welfare
Roger Burrows (University of York)

The importance of self-help and social support for contemporary debates in social policy is undeniable. Social support is viewed as a crucial buttress against what Giddens has influentially characterised as a ‘runaway world’. Systematic reviews of the research literature conclude time after time that there exists a strong and unambiguous relationship between social support and both physical and mental health and wellbeing. Ironically perhaps, although rapid technological change is often conceptualised as one of the major forces invoking feelings of both stress and isolation it is also, paradoxically, held up by some as the means by which new forms of social connection and support will emerge. However, as yet there is no clear answer to the question of whether ‘virtual communities’ and ‘virtual relationships’ have the same health promoting effects as ‘real communities’ and ‘real relationships’? However, what is certain is that how social relations in cyberspace function, and the impact they have on people’s lives will form a crucial seam which social policy analysts need to explore and seek understand. 

The computer mediated sharing of common interests, experiences, thoughts and fellowship combined with an ability to access health and welfare information and/or challenge professional monopolies of expertise in the areas of health and welfare is well established in the USA. However, the growth of on-line self help and social support is a global phenomena and as Internet access grows the manner in which systems of virtual community care articulate with locally based systems and structures will provide interesting examples of what some cultural analysts have termed ‘glocalisation’. This has meant that as Internet access in Britain has increased we have witnessed not just increased participation in existing USA dominated systems of on-line self-help and support by British people, but also the formation of new virtual spaces expressly designed to deal with the specificity of the British context.

Whether or not the large number of social actors who currently engage in on-line self-help and social support constitute themselves into virtual communities is a key area for debate. But whatever conceptualisation one favours there is no doubt that growing numbers of people across the globe are using e-mail, the web, mailing and discussion lists, news groups, MUDs, IRC, and other forms of computer mediated communication (CMC) to offer and receive information, advice and support across a massive range of health and social issues. It is also the case that even larger numbers of individuals are observing these various interactions without ever necessarily actively contributing themselves. At present the great bulk of Internet traffic relating to on-line self-help and social support occurs within Usenet news groups. Also important are publically accessible discussion lists. However, given the recent trend for different forms of CMC to coalesce with web pages to form more integrated systems of information and on-line support (offering perhaps web based information services alongside integrated provision to join mailing lists, discussion groups and/or to engage in real time chat) the virtual geography of wired self-help and social support is constantly in a state of some flux.

Our investigations suggest that it is important to recognise the inherent ambivalence of the phenomena because it has become customary in the popular and indeed, some of the academic literature on the emergence of CMC to engage in highly polarised evaluations of its qualities and effects. On the one hand it is argued that virtual relationships will take the place of real-life social relationships and lead to a decline in quality of life, contributing to the general decline in social engagement that has previously been observed. On the other, it is suggested that the Internet provides greater choice in possible relationships liberating the individual and enabling network members to draw upon a greater range of social, emotional and knowledge based resources. For the most part the debate has relied on anecdotal evidence, which has rightly been criticised , as even limited exposure to the Internet makes it clear that an example of almost everything is out there somewhere if you look hard enough, and it is certainly easy enough to find examples of self-help and social support. It is, of course, also easy to find examples of aggression and extreme incivility as well. Hitherto, rather than recognising the inherent ambivalence of the phenomena analytic reactions have tended to mirror its extremes.

Our research has been influenced by the call from Smith and Kollock in their seminal book Communities in Cyberspace for research which involves ‘describing and analysing patterns of online interaction and organisation as they exist’ coupled with the need ‘to investigate the ways in which social groups in cyberspace spill out into the “real” world and vice versa.’ We have found that despite the ambivalent nature of the phenomena CMC clearly has the potential to have a profound impact upon social lives in ways which have implications for social policy. We would point to six issues in particular:

• Although the rise of self help groups is not a consequence of CMC, CMC has almost certainly accelerated the spread of such groups. It has been well documented that the number of self help groups have grown dramatically over the last few decades and ever greater levels of Internet access are drawing more people in.
• Virtual self-help tends to privilege personal experience and lay knowledge over ‘expert’ knowledge. Advice from orthodox experts is not accepted uncritically and users gather information and advice from a wide range of sources. The internet expands the array of information sources dramatically on virtually every aspect of people’s lives. Our analysis is providing data on how and when people turn to the Internet for information and support and the relative weight they give to the sources of help they access in that medium.
• Virtual self-help has complex implications for interactions between traditional ‘experts’ and ‘lay’ people. This constitutes a matter which has been the focus of much research for some decades within, for example, the sociology of health and illness. Nevertheless the increased use of the Net for information and advice is having far reaching implications for practitioners who find their existing practices challenged or outmoded. Thus on-line self help and social support is likely to alter the nature of many professional-client relationships within the context of health and social care.
• There is much concern about the quality of the information and the legitimacy of the advice, information and support that is being provided and accessed on the Net. Given the unregulated nature of many interactions it is often difficult for users to assess the quality of such information. Most people seek information from a range of sources and then assess the relative merits and demerits of what they have found. There has been only a very limited number of studies into this issue, although what research has been done suggests that the quality, whilst variable is on the whole good . It is likely however, that this will vary depending on the substantive topic itself, and the type of system in which it is communicated. We have focussed in our research on diabetes and the results from our analysis which we have carried out with expert medical consultants in this area will be finished soon. 
• Currently regarded as a ‘lean to’ technology - in that people have to be pro-active in their participation, it may become more of a ‘lean back’ technology in that Net use will be a largely passive experience and people may begin to treat the Net rather like the television, especially if the primary mode of access is via digital/cable television networks. It is already thought that for every active participant on newsgroups there are many more ‘lurkers’ -people who read posts but never make a contribution. Some research suggests a ratio of 1:20. For some of these lurkers the information, advice and support being given may well offer positive benefit. However, there is also the possibility that publically accessible systems of wired welfare - with their multitude of daily narratives and hopes and despair are being treated as a form of voyeuristic entertainment and as such are simply yet another expression of the depressing Oprahfication of popular culture.
• Finally, our work demonstrates clearly that the issue of social exclusion is not just a function of lack of access, but one of the already better equipped (virtual?) middle classes being able to understand and engage with the technology in ways that advantage them even further. Like traditional forms of welfare, wired welfare may tend to advantage a middle class who have the time, the reflexivity, inclination and resources to best exploit it, and in so doing gain systematic advantage. Thus systems of wired welfare may replicate other forms of welfare and benefit those who are already more ‘well off’ in terms of their other resources - an enduring theme of social policy - and one which needs to be urgently addressed.

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The Design of Inclusive Information
Kevin Carey (Director HumanITy)

At the root of most difficult community development initiative there lurks what I call the Red Nose question; if you believe in community self determination but a community wants something a donor finds repugnant, what do you do? Sonia Liff has provided a valuable contribution to that debate. Those of us who far too often get carried away by wanting to do good to others - for their own sakes of course - are apt to forget that people don't learn much except resentment from imposition.

Liff, Watts and Steward have taken a very welcome broad view of the context of learning about ICTs. They should not be too flattered to be compared favourably in this respect with Messrs. Brown and Blunkett who persist in wishing to do good, for the sake of deprived communities and the socio-economic efficiency of the country but it won't do. If you have a group of people who have been totally alienated by the formal education process then I would have thought it unwise to call your ICT projects "Learning Centres". The evidence in this report urges us, I think, to take the technology off its pedestal and drop it into the environments where people feel comfortable. What is more, there is not much point lumbering the least advantaged with legacy technology like 386s when they will insist on spending their benefits money on digital television.

One of the challenges of that new medium is the possibility that it might become a 'sit back', as opposed to a 'sit up' technology and I was therefore particularly heartened by the finding not only that informal learning processes are effective but also that they involved interaction between people of widely different levels of competence. It is all that a social theorist and seeker after justice would want. The icing on the cake is surely the welcome but perhaps surprising finding that less conventional environments encouraged greater than predicted participation by minority groups. This is a finding of some importance because it is our formal institutional settings like schools and libraries that are explicitly inclusive whereas these unconventional settings are notionally inclusive, reminding one of the judicial comment that anyone is entitled to enter the Ritz.

Roger Burrows fastens onto the central point of inclusion with his observation that it isn't the technology that counts but the information and what you are able to do with it. I think that it really is time for policy makers to stop thinking in terms of the kit. The IT industry is rapidly evolving from one whose primary concern is with upgrading the top 20% who use computers to a concern for 100% market penetration with digital television and WAP-enabled telephones. The Government really is right with its education mantra but the big six - reading, writing, counting, cv-ing, interviewing and obeying - really aren't enough any more. Burrows reminds us, not an instant too soon, that if there is anything to be had from novelty then the well off and the well endowed will have it. The problem of self-help is that it usually succeeds best among communities that are accustomed to helping themselves. Without public sector intervention the middle class will always be cross subsidised by the poor simply because their uptake of provision is always much greater than that of the poor. In the case of information, if we are not careful we are likely to end up with on-line services designed for the educated middle classes, based on their assumptions, written in their language, directing the kind of outcomes of which they approve.

What we are all expected to approve of most of all is choice, even if that is the choice between providers of identical products. But what we will need as the Internet expands is mediation. Burrows points to the potential elevation of the lay compared with the professional but I would warn against the promotion of advertising over reporting, hype over balance and perhaps most important of all as an encapsulation, the postmodernist tendency to rank all emissions as equally valid. Even if the wealthy are occasionally cheated they can stand it better than the poor.

Burrows raises the urgent question of social exclusion, of the threat of a widening divide between the rich and the poor and I want to turn to that topic for the balance of my remarks but in doing so I want to pose a question which I cannot possibly answer. Are we about to reach the stage, with the new e-commerce channels, where it will not be in the economic self-interest of global companies to try to sell anything to the poor? Might they not only not have enough money but also not enough things to buy?

I want to look at two major topics very briefly. Who are the socially excluded in ICT terms? And what can we do about it?

I have to say that I don't care for the term "socially excluded"; I prefer to think of the last third of the market; and if we count all those who have problems in accessing ICT in their current state then it might be more than half of the population. Taken at face value, we are supposed to take the poor, the disabled, those for whom English is not their first language, those who live in very rural areas, perhaps elderly people, and perhaps women; and there you have it.

Depending on how these groups are defined, how they overlap and how you exclude certain sub-groups, like old people on hefty pensions and female Internet users, you can get any figure you like. More common is the aggregate approach where you can score people by allocating points for various misfortunes or shortcomings. In Internet terms this isn't very helpful. There is a wonderful, almost certainly apocryphal, story of Nobel Prize-winning physicists getting lot in an historic town because they were unable to walk South using a North-oriented street map. Of course that shortcoming was trivial but if something like 25% of the population does not readily distinguish left from right then we need to ask some very searching questions about the navigation systems specification for finding our way round disorganised, 3-dimensional hyperspace.

What we urgently need is a multi-disciplinary effort to arrive at some robust sense of the demographics of functional disability in respect of ICT. It is very easy to count how many people are too visually impaired to see a screen or so hard of hearing that they need sign language support; and we are familiar with the idea of severely physically disabled people who need to use simple switching systems and people with such learning difficulties that they can barely use predictive voice-in word processing. I suggest, however, that the extreme cases, mainly of severe, chronic, congenital functional limitation are a very tiny part of the ICT exclusion jigsaw. If you take those four examples and then extrapolate along the spectrum of each towards the mild end, the number of cases rises; so although there are approximately 60,000 people in the UK who use sign language there are eight million with hearing problems. The greatest difficulty of all is with the spectrum which covers learning and developmental difficulties. How much do we know, and need to know, about literacy rates, lexicography and syntax?

I am beginning to worry that we will define accessibility simply according to a formula: kit plus words equals access. We are perhaps two years away from the explosion in broad band services and the overthrow of the meta-academic Internet by global entertainment, retail and financial services consortia and yet there are many, even at the top of Government, who think that a computer is an exotic combination of electric typewriter and calculator.

If we are to live in  a society where there is universal access to interactive multimedia then we need to concentrate much more effort on thinking about how information is made and how it needs to be made to allow the greatest number of people to use ICT systems effectively.

I would draw your attention to six attributes of ICT systems which we need to think about carefully; they are:

• Accessibility - the capacity of the system to deliver information to the senses. This is the most familiar to disabled people but it has wider ramifications. In an ideal system each piece of information is delivered in the maximum number of media where each medium can deliver the information as a self-standing strand.
• Apprehension - the ability of the system to communicate to the user the intention of the author of the content. Examples of this might be the clear establishment of lexicality (the order in which the information is to be processed); weight (the relative importance the author assigns to elements of content, the establishment of what is essential and what supportive) and authority (the degree to which the user can rely on the content). This allows the user, particularly a user with a narrow skills base, a slow acquisition and interpretative rate or someone in a hurry to process the information with maximum efficiency in order to reach a clear and simple conclusion.
• Transparency - the ability of the system, taking the previous two factors into account, to separate style from content, foreground from background, source from criticism/commentary and peer reviewed criticism and commentary from ad hoc comment and 'virtual' marginalia. This aspect presents particular problems when authors deliberately employ irony, ambiguity and other deliberately misleading devices, permissible in creative content but not, for instance, in Government information.
• Navigation - the ability of the system to facilitate simple data location through the optimal balance between elements in an array and the number of steps required. <Stringer and Carey>.
• Interaction - the ability of the system to facilitate user feedback to meet the requirements of the interrogator.
• Expression - the ability of the system to facilitate the creation of and to collect unsolicited intellectual content.

To give you some examples of what this might mean, think of a soap opera where, because it is delivered unscheduled, the user can select a level of subtitling that suits reading speed and select a size and font. He may choose a high level of captioning so that the bulk of the dialogue is scrolled or simply prompt subtitling to keep the plot in focus. Another person may use audio subtitling during silent passages so that she can listen to the show when not looking at the screen. A third may want additional prompts about the previous episode or hints on what to look out for in the next ten minutes.

In another context, a citizen might want to access a Government White Paper. These are currently written primarily for legislators and Civil Servants but the citizen should be able to choose from different lengths, different degrees of syntactic complexity and different levels of vocabulary. The three are not to be confused; an executive summary might be packed with jargon and a full text would still include all the back up material and case histories but in simple language. For the Government this might have the benefit of allowing it to get round the tabloid and broadcasting intermediaries now completely self-absorbed in the frenzy of 7/24 'attack' journalism.

One of the things that humanITy is hoping to do is to make some of this sort of adaptable material rather than just writing huge manuals about it.

Finally, returning to the two reports from Sonia and Roger, it is important to note that they conform to the admirable scepticism of the query at the end of the Virtual Society title. I hope that what I have said in my response is subjected to the kind of rigour exercised by our two admirable speakers.

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Virtual practices and campus culture
Charles Crook (Loughborough University)

Distributed computing has become a commonplace feature of the traditional university environment. This networking infrastructure for information technology promises new and flexible patterns of communication for both students and tutors. In particular, distributed computing allows the ready transfer of documents among teachers and learning.. Moreover, simple software tools empower new forms of interpersonal co-ordination.

The present project has been concerned to understand how this new structure for interaction is influencing patterns of studying among students in full time and traditionally residential circumstances. We have given particular attention to how the networking of student study-bedrooms has supported new forms of learning. Our observations are based upon contact with students who are taking advantage of this facility, versus those who are not. We have employed interviews, diary methods and various forms of computer system monitoring to capture the style of study that is afforded by ready access to networked computing.

This talk will consider three senses in which study may be re-mediated by widespread access to distributed computing in a higher education campus setting. First, the student’s relationship to the broad campus learning infrastructure may be altered – in relation to the use of physical spaces for learning. Second, new forms of interpersonal co-ordination may occur as electronic media support online conversations. Third, re-mediation may be at the "desktop level" – new forms of managing individual documents that support learning and composition.

Our findings suggest that students broadly welcome the greater access to electronic opportunities that computer networking offers. However, they are universally suspicious of any vision for the wholesale transformation of a bricks-and-mortar base for this experience - into something more virtual. Yet, in many ways, current ease of access to this technology is not creating patterns of use that represent radical departures from orthodox study practices. This is certainly true at the first and second of our three levels of potential re-mediation listed above. On the other hand, there is evidence that at the third level – the desktop level – there are emerging new patterns of study that reflect the strong interactive and distracting affordances of the technology.

This overall pattern is interpreted in terms of the relative resilience of different features within the practice of studying, as encultured by the long periods of primary and secondary education that precede university.

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The Virtual University is the University made Concrete
John Goddard (Newcastle University)

The ‘virtual university’ is a potent vision of the future of higher education. It is seen as a ‘university without walls’, an institution which has torn itself free from the geographical confines of the campus and its region, to connect learners, teachers, potential students, alumni, employers, researchers, research funders and research users across the globe in a flexible ever changing organisation for knowledge creation and distribution. For teaching, the vision sees a separation of the development of course content, the assembly of students, the provision of learning and assessment. The University ceases to be an end to end supplier and adopts the role of an intermediary, acting on a global stage as collaborator, client or contractor. Research teams cross disciplinary, institutional and national boundaries working closely with users. And administrators provide the information systems to support the teaching and the research networks of the academics.

This vision has captured the imagination of academics, university managers, educational policymakers, human resource managers in the corporate sector, the media industry and entrepreneurs across the world. Numerous actions to move towards the creation of virtual universities are underway in existing institutions or through the creation of new institutions.

While some of the initiatives are on "greenfield", sites the majority are taking place on "brownfield" sites. This raises the key question of how the customs and practice of teaching, learning and administration within the ‘traditional university’ interact with the requirements of the ‘virtual university’. While the traditional notion of the university as a ‘band of scholars’ coming together in the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge may have always been a myth, it imparted to universities a collegiate model of organisation in which ‘the university’ existed primarily in the heads of the people who constituted it, and in the myriad of locally negotiated practices and interactions. This collegiate model could be at the same time highly flexible and responsive and rigid and resistant to change.

In a project entitled "Space, Place and the Virtual University" which is part of the ESRC virtual society? Programme, we have been studying in depth a number of IT projects in universities in the North East of England. These have included Newcastle University’s introduction of a new finance and HR Management Information System, the work of Sunderland University’s Learning Development Services unit and Northumbria University’s "Excellence in the use of C & IT" programme.

These studies suggest that far from leading to a break-up of the traditional university, the new technologies are requiring a re-institutionalisation of the University as a more corporate kind of organisation where goals, roles, identities, rules and operating procedures are made more explicit. In this sense, then, the virtual university is far more ‘concrete’ organisation than the traditional university.

However, the electronic processes are not completely displacing traditional ways of doing things but co-existing in a tense symbiotic relationship. Key actors take on a mediation role between the old and the new, articulating the non-IT drivers for change such as the requirement for efficiency gains arising from declining resource per student; a more diverse student body requiring recruitment (not selection), support and monitoring; more discerning clients with experience of IT supported private services; external pressures for quality assurance and accountability for earmarked funding; increasing global competition, the need for marketing and rapid responses to potential students/research clients; and the need for greater responsiveness to the needs of business and the community in a way that brings together teaching, research and cultural activities.

Taken together these drivers reinforce the need for a more corporate approach required in the adoption of information systems. Thus many bottom up attempts to realise the virtual university fade away because they are not mainstreamed and systematised across the institution. In addition public requirement for more responsive universities, particularly from the communities in which they are located, further reinforce the need for more integrated institutions with an enhanced capability for internal knowledge management. In short, a more corporate approach is required to preserve traditional activities such as time for face-to-face tuition, research led teaching and individual scholarship.

In summary we believe that the Virtual University as an electronic "sheltered workshop" or "boutique" is a flawed vision. On our evidence it seems that universities will have to pass through a period of regularisation and creation of rules based procedures before they can enter the sunny uplands of virtuality. The increasing use of the web for electronic commerce, especially the creation of knowledge based market places will present major challenges for universities that have not established their own internal electronic systems. If universities do not respond, vertical markets for students, materials and knowledge products managed by non university ‘infomediaries’ could indeed undermine the traditional or unresponsive university. Paradoxically localisation could provide some of the capacity to meet these challenges, reducing wasteful local competition, supporting full use of facilities (buildings and IT networks), in effect tying down the local in the global. But for these effects to come about UK higher education policy will have to pay more attention to capacity building within the sector and actively managing diversity. Short term initiatives supporting ad-hoc projects is not a way to build a network of virtual universities an protect the best of the ‘traditional’ universities.

(This article is a summary of a presentation made at an ESRC Virtual Society? Seminar, Thursday 14^th July 1999)

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Cultural barriers to E-commerce
Penny Harvey (Manchester University)

Culture cannot be standardised, for all definitions of this vague term imply that if nothing else, it makes
people distinctive from one another. That makes culture appear to be a barrier to the development of
e-commerce, but research in Manchester has shown that it is a positive resource in developing creative
solutions to overcome problems. In small companies, collective and group use of information and
communication technologies (ICTs) is very important and tends to be ignored in imagining the 'user' to be
an individual in front of a computer screen (i.e. sharing info/cultural knowledge/ getting together is a major way
in which ICTs are used, both by small business colleagues and potential customers). Small companies can use
this collective experience to get ahead in the market. On the other hand, geographical location continues to be
vitally important. Companies have found a number of barriers, including the strong London focus to
e-commerce; a general belief that web design should be free of charge, and; confusion in existing data
protection regulation. Culture involves interactions between people, and the unpredictability of the interactions
indeed makes culture impossible to standardise. However, companies should harness this diversity in
finding solutions for e-commerce, and be aware of the cultural resources they have, rather than regard this
diversity as a barrier to be overcome.

• Are the messages different in larger more established organisations? Yes, but in any office a collective understanding of what to trust and what not to trust develops. 
• The Manchester Host (set up to give access to public bodies) was one of the earliest public access service providers. So Manchester had a head start to develop computer networks. Yes, there were opportunities there, but this did not help in providing a customer base.
• Is culture nationalistic then, as law is increasingly European and technology is global? There is a difference between culture and nationality - which has cultural elements.
• Development of e-commerce has to be global. With respect to culture the whole net should be a leveller. Some large companies are enlightened and are embracing the technology available. Telecommunications companies should be analysing who is using e-commerce and why.
• Larger organisations have the capacity to have dedicated personnel involved in the training and use of computers/ the Internet. However, the willingness to see the potential and access help needs to exist. In large companies technology can change the relationship between the organisation and the people who work there, which could be seen as positive or as a threat.

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Inclusion in the Information Society - The Distinctive Role of E-Gateways
Sonia Liff (Warwick University)

Please see http://www.brunel.ac.uk/research/virtsoc/reports/egateways.htm

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The Public Understanding of E-commerce
Peter Lunt (University College London)

Empirical research into e-commerce starts from an agenda concerning: the market effects of e-commerce; privacy issues; regulation and diffusion.

This early agenda ‘writes out’ the study of the consumer: The market is understood in terms of abstract idealisations of consumers; Participation is understood in terms of distributions of technology in the population; Privacy is understood in relation to principles of rights; Regulation is understood in terms of policy tools.

Such studies do not require the detailed, grounded empirical study of the consumer and they issue in research questions of the following kind: Will people be able to take control of information giving in online transactions? Which data are considered to be sensitive? Will consumers trust online merchants? Will concerns about security or lack of regulation de-motivate consumption online?

In contrast, the Virtual Consumer Project examined consumers’ responses to e-commerce in their own terms using a variety of methods

Focus groups

• Participants had a positive view of e-commerce as a novel application of new technology, e-commerce was seen as the inevitable future of shopping. There was little resistance to or questioning of e-commerce though a variety of reasons for caution were discussed:
• the costs of equipment, going online and delivery; technical problems using computers; incompatibility with shopping style and obligations; some high street stores were not yet online suggesting e-commerce is not market tested
• The design and usability of e-commerce websites: disappointment with e-commerce websites (boring and slow compared to computer games); a tendency to use search engines rather than navigating through sites; product category labels and hierarchies are non-intuitive; important experiential dimensions of shopping missing (impulse buying, considered choices, examining products)
• Security of transaction was a common concern; seen as a technical problem that firms were expected to solve. There was little discussion of technical solutions to security problems (PETS, encryption). There was little concern over possible infringements of privacy and the potential value of personal information. Data was commonly regarded as labile and there was a lack of appreciation of the potential use of data in marketing.
• People predominantly talk of e-commerce by analogy to ‘real’ shopping. The main exceptions to this caution were IT literate consumers interested in novel aspects of e-commerce (e.g. readers’ reviews (e.g. Amazon.com), sample recordings online (e.g. CDNow.com) and access to broader and niche markets.

User Trials (household interviews)

• Households discussed the difficulty of fitting e-commerce into their ways of shopping -- part of the structuring household activities and obligations. E-commerce was seen as convenient for mundane grocery shopping. However, goods bought on impulse or with specific occasions, people or meals in mind were felt not to ‘fit’ e-commerce.
• There were gaps in understanding of technical and marketing issues. Many people knew about data warehousing and intelligent search engines but had little appreciation of the strategic use of these techniques.
• IT literate households were attracted to innovations. For example, day-trading and share information sites, auctions, specialist or niche traders and links to clubs or societies.
• Computers were not located in places in the home that made them ready to hand for consumption.

 Survey

A national sample survey (N = 868, response rate = 54%) showed that 49% had Internet access, 14% had tried shopping online, 5% reported regular (monthly) use of e-commerce only .003% (N=3) reported frequent (weekly) use. The products bought most online were CDs, books, travel and entertainment tickets.

Early adopters are neither buying a wide range of goods nor shopping frequently online. So what is stopping them using more sites more regularly? The following percentages rated a number of barriers as important: cost (58%); uncertain about returning goods (50%); fear of using credit card online (51%); not wanting to give personal information (50%); preferring ‘real’ shopping (46%); wanting to examine products before buying (60%)

Amongst those with Internet access, 29% had bought something online. What distinguishes Internet users who do and who do not shop online?

The only demographic effect was that the proportion of men was higher (58%) than the proportion of women (43%). There were no differences in shopping practices. There were differences: in attitudes towards shopping; in ownership, use and attitudes towards new technology; in intentions to purchase online; in relation to new technological developments in e-commerce.

Conclusions

• Consumers are generally positive about e-commerce but cautious about adoption.
• People were keen to see problems as ‘technical’ problems that are the responsibility of firms.
• There were important knowledge gaps in the public understanding and discussion of e-commerce
• E-commerce conflicts with many of the normal practices of shopping.
• Rather than taking control, consumers seem to expect similar standards of protection that they are used to in ‘real’ shopping.
• E-commerce was low on people’s list of priorities compared to diffusion issues and education.

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