Online spaces that enable shared public interpersonal communications are of significant social, organizational, and economic importance. In this paper, a theoretical model and associated unobtrusive method are proposed for researching the relationship between online spaces and the behavior they host. The model focuses on the collective impact that individual information-overload coping strategies have on the dynamics of open, interactive public online group discourse. Empirical research was undertaken to assess the validity of both the method and the model, based on the analysis of over 2.65 million postings to 600 Usenet newsgroups over a 6-month period. Our findings support the assertion that individual strategies for coping with “information overload” have an observable impact on large-scale online group discourse. Evidence was found for the hypotheses that: (1) users are more likely to respond to simpler messages in overloaded mass interaction; (2) users are more likely to end active participation as the overloading of mass interaction increases; and (3) users are more likely to generate simpler responses as the overloading of mass interaction grows. The theoretical model outlined offers insight into aspects of computer-mediated communication tool usability, technology design, and provides a road map for future empirical research.

Organizations actively seek methods for increasing employee engagement by incorporating game elements in core systems and processes, in an effort to increase their perceived playfulness. However, little is known about the actual impact of these elements on perceived playfulness. This study includes results from three repeated experiments performed during a gamified academic course. The relationships between enjoyment of specific game elements, the way they increase perceived playfulness, and gender moderations of these relations were examined. All three experiments show that badges had a positive relation with perceived playfulness and were more enjoyable to women. Surprisingly, the results showed that when men were the majority of subjects in the group, the relations between the game elements and perceived playfulness were different from when men were a minority. These results provide important insight into what possibly influences perceived playfulness in gamified solutions.

What are the antecedents, inhibitors and catalysts to providing information and participating in mixed fee-based and free online contexts? We describe the behaviour of about 500 'Researchers' in the Google Answers (GA) online service and over 70,000 questions posed on this system over a 29 month period. GA is a fee-based environment. Answers provided on it are 'worth' over $20 (including tips) on average. However, labour economics of response to price and tip alone do not fully account for the online information provision market. Non-monetary incentives, such as feedback in the form of comments predict and explain some of the variance in participation. Descriptive and correlational findings presented here are based on many thousands of answers. We thus corroborate some of the hybrid theories of information provision behaviour presented to date mostly in laboratory settings. The participation of experts in GA is associated with a hybrid of material (economic) and social motivators.