Social Media and Digital Collaboration

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 tradition of promoting scholarship that advances knowledge in this domain and invites submission of cutting-edge research on related topics.

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 often a primary source of news, a platform for establishing and maintaining social networks, 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, amplification of hate speech and other forms of cyberbullying, cybercrime, harvesting of personal data, and the emergence of filter bubbles.

Digital collaboration is now a mainstream approach to accomplish a wide variety of objectives in business and society. With recent pandemic events, digital collaboration has become even more prominent. From dyads and small groups to large-scale collectives and organizations, digital tools, such as platforms, are major means for facilitating collaboration. Digital collaboration takes many forms in a wide range of domains including open innovation, crowd work, distributed and hybrid teams, knowledge sharing communities, human-machine collaboration, and work-from-home (WFH) schemes. Evolving technologies, such as intelligent assistance systems, digital platforms, or AI agents as collaborators, 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.

Track Co-Chairs
Abayomi Baiyere, Ph.D., Copenhagen Business School
Hind Benbya, Ph.D., Deakin University
Yulin Fang, Ph.D., The University of Hong Kong
Steven L. Johnson, Ph.D., The University of Virginia