Understanding Common Information Spaces in CSCW

Liam J. BannonInteraction Design Centre,University of Limerick,Limerick, IrelandLiam.bannon@ul.ieDRAFTPosition paper for Workshop on Common Information Spaces, Copenhagen,August 23-25, 2000.(In my talk, I plan to go beyond the notes below and provide a rather personalperspective on the topic of what is now commonly called “common informationspaces”, and my current stance towards this concept. I now believe that there are anumber of serious problems with the concept, and the way it is often used today. Itwould appear that rather than clarify matters, the label may only obfuscate, andrather than reify the term, perhaps we should bury it, as it seems to be used currentlyin a wide variety of meanings that bear little relation to each other. In a sense, just asLatour recently disowned “actor-network theory” by noting that there were 4 thingswrong with it, the word “actor”, the word ”network”, the word” theory” , and thehyphen! (Latour, 1999), I believe that there are at least 2, if not 3 things problematicabout the concept “ common information spaces” – the word “ information” , theword “spaces” and possibly even the word “common).