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Reviewer: Richard W. Sauvain

This book attempts to assess the impacts of a comuterized conferencing system on communication patterns and productivity in scientific research communities. The author studied usage of EIES, a message/conferencing/text composition system, over a two year period (roughly 1979-80). EIES provides delivery of messages to individual or groups, conferences (time-sequenced transcripts of group discussions), notebooks (text composition and word processing functions), and a membership directory. Some 220 users (80 percent of them in academic insitutions) were studied via their responses to both pre- and post-use questionnaires. EIES features, participant characteristics, and survey methodology, are described. The bulk of the book is taken up with statistical analyses of the survey results. (This reviewer found the analyses somewhat lengthy and often inconclusive, with the more anecdotal end-of-chapter summaries being easier reading.) Among the findings are these: (1) The best predictor of acceptance by a new user of such a system is that person's expectation about how useful the system will be, and how many coworkers will be online. This is much more important than skills such as prior computer experience or typing ability. (2) A substantial learning period is required — about five hours of online time to learn the basics and about 50 hours before it becomes second nature. (3) For those who make it through the learning period (many dropped out), such a system does indeed expand their professional network and leads to perceived increases in quality of work. An update of this work would be interesting. Most of the users studied had less than 50 hours of online time; more expert users might behave much differently (as the author points out). Also, the typical interface to the system was a 30 CPS TTY-style terminal connected via a phone line. The vastly improved communication now afforded by local area networks, bitmapped displays, pointing devices, and menu-oriented multiple window interfaces makes such systems far easier to learn and use. This book should be of interest to sociologists interested in the impact of computer-assisted communications, to designers of such systems, and to those contemplating doing a usage study of a computer-based communication system.