Page 197 - Sustainability Communication Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Theoritical Foundations
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180                                                        A. Möller


            regard, it is not sufficient to provide web-based chat, wiki and forum components.
            The transformation process can be treated as a design process with different phases
            and intermediate results. Analyses of concepts like business process re-engineering
            provide important hints on how to organize these transition processes.



            Computer Support for Sustainability Communication


            In the last 10 years, email and instant messaging have become important daily tasks.
            Today it is imperative that everybody checks their email at least once a day. As dis-
            cussed before, this can be seen as information exchange between decision makers.
            But computer-based conversation support systems can also take the form of the new
            online social networks (OSNs) like Facebook and MySpace. These platforms “allow
            individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system,
            (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view
            and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system”
            (Weigand and Lind 2008: 51). In other words, they provide new infrastructures of the
            lifeworld including new domains like messaging, applications (apps), profiles, friends
            or photos, which become hypertext-based new structures, on a technical level in the
            form of clusters of web pages. State diagrams show how people move within these
            structures (Schneider et al. 2009). Web platforms become part of the lifeworld and
            provide new structures and domains (Fig. 15.2). New Web 2.0 services including
            micro-blogging, social bookmarking and location-based services (Ullrich et al. 2008)
            provide  a  new  medium  of  communication.  The  Internet  can  be  interpreted  as  a
            Piercian  ‘Pragmatic  Web’  that  integrates  different  levels  of  communication:  the
            media level of hardware technologies, the syntactic level for formal languages like
            HTML and XML, the semantic level of meanings and ontologies and the pragmatic
            level of information needs, expectations, norms and values (Yetim 2007).
              The processes within these networks are characterized as ‘socializing’ and com-
            munication for its own sake (Weigand and Lind 2008). Typical subjects of discussion




















            Fig. 15.2  Infrastructure of a web platform representing the user lifeworld
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