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"It's simply integral to what I do": enquiries into how the web is weaved into everyday life

Published: 16 April 2012 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    This paper presents findings from a field study of 24 individuals who kept diaries of their web use, across device and location, for a period of four days. Our focus was on how the web was used for non-work purposes, with a view to understanding how this is intertwined with everyday life. While our initial aim was to update existing frameworks of 'web activities', such as those described by Sellen et al. [25] and Kellar et al. [14], our data lead us to suggest that the notion of 'web activity' is only partially useful for an analytic understanding of what it is that people do when they go online. Instead, our analysis leads us to present five modes of web use, which can be used to frame and enrich interpretations of 'activity'. These are respite, orienting, opportunistic use, purposeful use and lean-back internet. We then consider two properties of the web that enable it to be tailored to these different modes, persistence and temporality, and close by suggesting ways of drawing upon these qualities in order to inform design.

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    1. "It's simply integral to what I do": enquiries into how the web is weaved into everyday life

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      cover image ACM Other conferences
      WWW '12: Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World Wide Web
      April 2012
      1078 pages
      ISBN:9781450312295
      DOI:10.1145/2187836
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 16 April 2012

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      Author Tags

      1. diary study
      2. field study
      3. information need
      4. leisure
      5. persistence
      6. plasticity
      7. routine
      8. temporality
      9. user intent
      10. web activity

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      WWW 2012
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      • Univ. de Lyon
      WWW 2012: 21st World Wide Web Conference 2012
      April 16 - 20, 2012
      Lyon, France

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      Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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      • (2022)“Every Website Is a Puzzle!”: Facilitating Access to Common Website Features for People with Visual ImpairmentsACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/351903215:3(1-35)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2022
      • (2022) “I Try to Find a Balance”: Investigating Strategies for Self‐Regulating Covid News Consumption Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/pra2.76059:1(368-380)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2022
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