Social Media and Digital Collaboration

Track Description
Social media and digital collaboration are core pillars of research inquiry into how digital technologies connect people and enable social and collaborative interactions. The International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) has a record of promoting scholarship that advances knowledge in this domain and invites submission of cutting-edge research on related topics. This can include topics relating to social media and digital collaboration.

Social media continues to be a prominent feature of individual, organizational and societal life. Its broad reach extends from facilitating personal interactions to shaping the global flows of information among organizations and nations. Impacting individuals, social media is a primary source of news, a main platform for establishing and maintaining social connections, and a basis for building personal brand and reputation. Impacting organizations, it serves as a means to engage with customers, a channel for shaping brand image, a valuable source of information for business decisions, and an avenue for influence on a global scale. Impacting society, social media serves as a tool for coordinating social movements, understanding needs and preferences, providing services, and promoting social and political values. Social media has also had unintended consequences including the growing skepticism about traditionally accepted information sources, magnification of hate speech, cybercrime, harvesting of personal data, and the emergence of filter bubbles.

Digital collaboration is now a mainstream approach to accomplishing a wide variety of objectives. With recent pandemic events, digital collaboration has been made prominent. From dyads and small groups to large-scale collectives and organizations, digital platforms are the primary means for facilitating collaboration. Digital collaboration takes many forms in a wide range of domains including open innovation, crowd work, distributed teams, knowledge sharing communities, citizen science, and work-from-home (WFH) schemes. These technologies facilitate greater participation in the exchange and integration of knowledge and resources. However, they also raise questions about fairness, effectiveness, ownership of intellectual property, overload, and suboptimal collaboration dynamics.

We invite submissions that explore new areas, advance new insights, develop new methods, or challenge established points of view on social media phenomena and digital collaboration. The track is open to empirical, methodological, and conceptual research employing diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives and paradigms.

Track Chairs:
Cheng Suang Heng, National University of Singapore
Steven L. Johnson, University of Virginia
Onook Oh, University of Colorado Denver
Tuan Q. Phan, University of Hong Kong