Remote Cooperation:
CSCW Issues for Mobile and Tele-Workers
Alan Dix and Russell Beale (eds.)
Remote Cooperation:
The communications and information technology advances of recent years have led to a number of new possibilities that were hardly plausible just a few years ago. Many of these relate to the flexibility of the technology and the user's ability to use it to define their own information environment. This is equally applicable at home as it is at work and with the increase in speed and power of modern information and communications technology (ICT), the dividing line between work and home is becoming increasingly blurred. This has led to a resurgence of the ancient concept of oikos. The idea that work and home take place in close proximity, intermingled together and the forms a living, productive community (Bjerg, 1994). It has also been discussed as the rise of the "prosumer" by Toffler (Toffler 1980). This concept is seen as one possible consequence of the ICT revolution and is central to the examples described later. Along with this idea there is also the need to incorporate modern living and working patterns into this revised concept. There is, therefore, some attention being paid to the distributed home environment that allows inhabitants to live with a re-configured information environment. This allows closer integration of the work and home environments and an adaptation of the physical environment into a virtual distributed home environment.
Andy's latest book on Multimedia Communication can be found at http://www.wlv.ac.uk/~cm1950/multimedia/start.html