Abstract

Information services delivered via wireless, portable communication devices continue to pervade our work and leisure spaces. While people are continuously bombarded with promises of newer and better ways to maintain contact with others and to have constant access to information, however, there remain a number of open issues that inhibit the potential for an open information society. The bidirectional influence between such wireless technologies and applications and their potential end-users, contributes to the development of both the technologies and applications and the social setting in which they are embedded. In this paper, we extend current studies of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) uptake by integrating interpretations of “ubiquitous computing” and its pervasion of everyday life. We draw upon findings from a range of IS research to structure our future studies of adoption issues in relation to a variety of wireless application cases. We show that, while some “traditional” IS/IT dimensions of uptake still hold, there are now a variety of other “non- utilitarian (hedonic)” factors that developers and designers need to take into account. We conclude by proposing a research model – expanded from model of user acceptability and product uptake, a descriptive framework based on the “Price of Convenience”(Ng-Kruelle, Swatman, Rebne and Hampe 2002).

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