Understanding cyberspace behavior with the critical social theory.

ABSTRACT

This paper presents an application of the Critical Social Theory (CST) in understanding cyberspace behavior. CST can be used as one of qualitative methodologies in IS research. However most prior IS research utilized a very narrowly drawn insight from CST without historical and social context considered. This study tries to apply a general concept of CST for the purpose of providing plausible explanation for cyberspace behavior. In this paper, two cyberspace behavior cases of a relatively developed country where the Confucius tradition dictating people's physical world behavior is defied in cyberspace are investigated. The first case deals with unexpected ignoring of cultural protocol such as showing respect to authorities in government cyberspace. Empirical data were collected and the result shows that people were able to overcome the Confucius psychological barrier in government cyberspace. This phenomenon shows people's ability to do critical reflection that led them to emancipation at least in cyberspace. The second case deals with compulsive buying behavior of avatars by the teenagers of the country. Empirical data were also collected and the result shows that teenagers were under immense pressure to excel in academics and inclined to immerse themselves into virtual world of avatars in order to relieve stress. This phenomenon indicates that in the unjust condition of the society, members who have no realistic power to fight back might resort to illusionary emancipation in cyberspace. This paper shows that a general CST can be adopted for an IS research method tackling topics relevant to cyberspace behavior.

Keywords: Cyberspace Behavior, Critical Social Theory, IS Research Method, Qualitative Application

1. INTRODUCTION

CST theorists strive to achieve a general goal that is to expose unjust conditions of the society and bring about emancipation of people. Namely they believe that modern society even including developed ones lacks complete emancipation of people due to existing unjust conditions. Hirschheim and Klein (1994) developed an information system development paradigm based on emancipatory CST concepts. However there has been only one study that was based on empirical data analysis while utilizing CST, which was the one conducted by Ngwenyama and Lee (1997). By analyzing discourse data between system analysts they exposed the occasions of critical reflection to remove distortion in information exchange, which then was considered as expanding media richness of e-mail. The CST theory that they utilized was Habermas' theory of communicative action (1984). Habermas' contribution to CST is thought to be that he is probably the only one who proposed a realistic solution that might lead people to emancipation. Other scholars, for example, Markuse and Adorno were able to expose injustices of modern developed capitalist system, but only to predict violent breakup of the system without proposing a practicable way to emancipation. In contrast Habermas proposed that human beings could change the unjust world through reasoning. He believed that the power of rational reasoning that could lead to critical reflection would free human beings of deceptive and illusionary information supplied by the oppressive society. Haberms' theory of communicative action explains four types of social action: (1) instrumental, (2) communicative, (3) discursive, and (4) strategic. Habermas suggests that, while performing these social actions, humans can be critical of validity associated with the information being disseminated through communication. Thus humans are capable of critical reflection, which can lead to detecting distorted communication such as false, incomplete, manipulative, and insincere information being transmitted to them such that they can emancipate themselves from those mental pollutants. Due to this useful insight on human communication, IS scholars adopted the theory of communicative action as the tool to understand otherwise unseen phenomenon during information system development. However the theory of communicative action should be understood much broadly than narrowing on critical reflections that happen on system developers' minds, i.e., critical reflection ought to be more fundamental and general such that emancipation would happen in many dimensional ways. Namely removing distorted information for system development is just one dimension of emancipation; general emancipation should happen to the system developer in terms of his/her social/political/spiritual awareness, that is, enlightenment. In short, there are two possibilities of application of CST in IS research:

1. A narrowly-drawn CST concept such as theory of communicative action can be applied for research in information system development.

2. A general CST concept that it is a CST's duty to expose unjust conditions of the society and lead the way to emancipation of people can be applied for research in cyberspace behavior since cyberspace provides a field for human beings to experiment and challenge the norm of behavior of the society as well as a venue to generate the false feeling of emancipation due to the virtual nature of cyberspace.

In this paper, two cases of cyberspace behavior are introduced and analyzed through a lens of a general CST and relevance of applying a general CST in research of cyberspace behavior is demonstrated.

2. CASE OF CYBER-DEMOCRACY

With the help of information technology, democratic and affluent countries started to implement systems that could be used for enhancing democracy. These countries have long-standing tradition of maintaining democratic government. However the problem of political apathy and under-representation of popular will still persists. For example, the voter turnout for US congressional elections is often less than 50 percents, which implies a serious problem of alienation of people from democratic political process (Gerber and Morton, 1998). In order to alleviate the political alienation, many governments including local ones implemented cyber-government which usually refers to web pages of a government that are used for allowing citizen to voice their feedback on public policy and participate in political processes (Gronlund, 2001). Even though the use of cyberspace seems facilitating for democracy, there is no concrete evidence in affluent countries to confirm the benefit of cyber-democracy. Since the affluent countries already have a high level of citizen participation, except for efficiency aspect of cyber-democracy, it is not clear what kind of contribution the new IT-enabled political system makes. We would like to posit that a nation with short history of democracy should be an ideal example to examine the effect of cyber-democracy. A newly-developed country which achieved democracy recently and also happened to have strong national IT infrastructure can reveal the benefit of IT-enabled political processes because the nation does not have "built-in" participatory democratic tradition unlike traditionally democratic ones. South Korea belongs to this new group of countries where economic development and inevitable democratization were realized in the last decade or so. It has been only 12 years since democratically elected civilian government took power in the nation's history. Due to the past three decades of economic development, South Korea is able to provide many services and goods of the world-class level. Among them, national IT infrastructure is one of the best in the world. With the highly-developed IT infrastructure the government wanted to foster citizen participation into the political process through cyber-government projects which involved creation of web pages where citizens could voice their opinions on government affairs and lodge their complaints electronically. Since the national government-based cyber-democracy projects can be too broad-focused to show any evidence of the benefit of cyber-democracy, we introduce a local government cyberspace of city of Seoul. The city has decided to construct elaborate layers of web pages which could be used to receive citizens' complaints, opinions, and request to process paper works electronically. We have investigated a bulletin board in a form of the web page where citizens can lodge complaints against the city government. In this web page, people make a complaint on very specific matter such as garbage collection, taxi service, traffic control, etc. We have read more than 100 complaints available for public display in the web page in order to determine the effect of using cyberspace for citizens to express their opinions. We also conducted cyberspace survey with people who had experience of lodging complaints in the web page of government for the purpose of testing our hypothesis that in cyberspace, people overcome the Confucius psychological barrier of expressing signs of "respect" while they write their concerns to the government officials. Koreans are heavily influenced by the Confucian culture, which emphasized the respect to elders and seniors in the social hierarchy. In Lee's paper they are shown to be concerned about being not respectful enough when they use e-mail to convey their messages to their seniors especially in workplaces. This behavior must be an obstacle to practice democratic political process, which requires healthy criticism on authority figures. The Confucian tradition combined with long authoritarian rule left Korean people cowardly. From a general CST point of view, Korean people have been suffering under the unjust condition where any disrespectful attitude toward seniors and authorities were punished either implicitly or sometimes violently. Even without going through critical reflection to determine validity of information that one should pay respect to seniors and authorities no matter what these people's background was, Korean people mechanically observed this protocol. However after examining the contents of complaints, we found that people were not very concerned with showing respect in their postings in the web page. They were only interested in conveying their messages as they were. In other words, people can be liberated from the cultural norm which functions as a mental pollutant and focus on transmitting their message. This cyberspace behavior, which contradicts real life one, can be regarded as the sign of a possible solution that might lead Korean people to emancipation. This emancipation is rather enlightenment of human spirit in many dimensions including political, social, and historical ones. Korean people behaved without fear of offending authorities in cyberspace even though the possibility is still there. At least in cyberspace a degree of emancipation was achieved although it is to be seen if their cyberspace experience will alter their real life behavior. In order to confirm this emancipatory phenomenon empirically, we conducted a survey.

2.1 An Empirical Investigation

We particularly investigated a bulletin board in the form of the web page, which contained complaints to the mayor section. People lodged diverse but very specific concerns to the mayor, which incidentally, contains no decorative phrases to show respect, i.e., they were not worried about being considered as disrespectful, but only interested in writing their problems as clearly as possible. We looked into 103 postings from different individuals. We classified those postings into two groups according to the following criterion: The content of a posting has any heading before its main body that contains "respectful" phrases such as "Dear Sir:", "How are you sir?", "I appreciate what you are doing for us.", "I am sorry to bother you.", etc.. Surprisingly majority of postings did not contain any decorative heading to express "respect" that is the norm in the Confucius tradition (Table 1).

We theorized that people would find the web page bulletin board more "emancipatory" compared to sending an individual e-mail to the government official where the Karma of "show respect" haunts them. Thus we proposed a following hypothesis.

H1: Posting a message on a bulletin board of the government web page allows people to break out of the Confucius psychological barrier that they need to show respect.

In order to determine if this result is only a coincident or not, we have conducted a cyberspace survey with the following questionnaire:

Background: Please answer the following questions if you have ever posted a message directed at government officials in a government web page bulletin board with your real name.

Q1: Does the format of a bulletin board in the government web page instead of individual e-mails encourage you posting on the government web page?

a) yes b) no

Q2: When you posted your message, did you think that you needed to show respect to the relevant government officials in your message?

a) strongly agree[l] b) agree[2] c) disagree[3] d) strongly disagree[4]

This survey questionnaire was published as a web page listed in various Korean search engines and directories and had been on-line for six months from 12/2002-05/2003. Since no demographic questions were asked in order to make the survey as short as possible, the characteristics of subjects is only known as people who posted a message to a government web page bulletin board with their real name (most government web pages require the usage of real names to prevent unwelcome pranks). However for our purpose of determining what caused the break-up of the Confucius psychological barrier, demographic information is not deemed to be necessary. 125 people responded to the cyberspace survey. Table 2 shows the result of the survey.

We classified the subjects into two groups based on the answer to the first question. That is, those who answered YES (101 subjects) and those who answered NO (24 subjects) to the first question. Then the average numeric value of answers to the second question was calculated according to group. Finally, Comparison of Means of two groups using SAS software was conducted. The statistical test showed that H1 was accepted with p-value < 0.05. In other words, we have empirical evidence that people of South Korea can be "emancipated" from the burdens of the Confucius practice of "show respect" at least in cyberspace where the form of expression is a bulletin board of a web page. Since the content of messages posted in the mayoral section of city of Seoul can be regarded as the content of a letter or an e-mail, the format must have made a significant difference in making people brave and the survey result confirms it.

2.2 Meaning of the Result

How can people be ignorant of the tenacious barrier of "show respect" tradition when they write on a bulletin board web page? Writing to a space in a web page seems not regarded as the same as an email letter to the authority. It takes the burden of cultural influence out of people's mind. Good reason for people's behavior can be that people look at others' postings, which influence their own behavior. In the bulletin board web page, citizens can read other people's postings where no decorative words to express respect are used and get encouraged to do the same. In a CST term, people went through critical reflection on their usual perspective on the universe by observing what others have done. They were able to question the validity of the holy grail of the oppressive and unjust society. They, then, emancipated themselves from a thousand year shackle that ruled their everyday existence. The case study of city of Seoul web pages exhibits the evidence that use of cyberspace, in fact, can enhance democratic political process by emancipating people, which was not obvious in traditionally democratic nations.

3. CASE OF AVATAR CONSUMPTION

For many consumers in Korea, the Internet is just a part of their normal daily life. They regularly purchase products through the Internet. Avatar was first introduced to Korean on-line users in 2000 by then a hardware-oriented Internet business "Neowiz.com" through its Internet community site named "www.sayclub.com." Only a year after its introduction to market, avatar was selected as one of the ten hit products in 2001 in Korea. Unlike other cyber products such as MP3 and on-line movies that are also sold in conventional markets, avatars are sold purely in cyberspace. While avatars have shown potential to be a successful cyber product in Korea and possibly in other areas of the world, more and more cases of compulsive and addictive shopping behavior related to avatars are observed as the frequency and intensity of the Internet use increases. Addictive consumption may also pose considerable threat to the social well-being of avatar consumers and/or others around them. Mendelson and Mello (1986) define addictive behavior as "behavior that is excessive, compulsive, beyond the control of the person who engages in it, and destructive psychologically or physically." As examples, they cite drug abuse, alcoholism, anorexia, bulimia, excessive gambling, exercising and television watching. Contrary to our expectation, addictive consumption appears to do some good to the respective consumers because addictive behaviors reduce stress (Davidson and Neale, 1986). Avatar consumption can be addictive as one may purchase props over and over again since the behavior might reduce stress. Many Korean teenagers are addicted to avatar consumption. From a general CST point of view, Korean teenagers' cyberspace behavior such as avatar addiction is a major indicator that exhibits how unjust and oppressive Korean society is. As with the first case of cyber-democracy, Korean tradition of emphasizing Confucius value that academic achievement is deemed superior to almost anything in life. It is no wonder that Korea has highest number of Ph.D.s per capita in the world. Also due to remnants of the die-hard authoritarian rule, teenagers were not allowed to rebel or even engage in frank expressions as well as acts that can relieve their stress. In short, they are supposed to study all the time until they pass the college entrance exam. Obviously most of teenagers cannot enter the top colleges, which means that for most teenagers, teenage years are likely to be gloomy due to pressure to excel in academics. This unjust and oppressive condition of Korean society for its teenagers contributes to the way they behave in cyberspace; they resort to compulsive and addictive purchase of avatars and its props in order to engage in false emancipation through fantasy of having his/her existence of choice in cyberspace. They can metamorphosis into anything and do anything technically possible in avatar world. This feeling of false emancipation reinforces addictive consumption of avatars. This behavior is not likely to bring about any critical reflection and no change in unjust conditions. Instead there have been incidents of destructive behavior in real life. However we should note that these are teenagers who are one of weakest members of the society and do not have any realistic means to fight back. From a general CST point of view, unjust condition of the society is the one to blame for cyberspace phenomenon of addictive consumption of avatars by Korean teenagers, rather than teenagers themselves. We also suggest that teenagers must feel false sense of emancipation by reducing stress induced from avatar consumption. In other words, no critical reflection as well as emancipation was materialized in this cyberspace behavior. We investigate this phenomenon empirically and a survey was conducted.

3.1 An Empirical Investigation

Avatars refer to pictures, drawings, or icons that users choose to represent themselves in cyber space. Props are objects that on-line users may add to their avatars such as a hat or cigar. What is unique about avatars in Korea is that avatars and props are very popular with on-line consumers and props are purchased item by item by on-line consumers while props of avatars in the USA are not sold separately. In other words, avatars in Korea have much potential to create a successful market. At initial stage, on-line users in Korea are given a free avatar of his or her choice. From then on, on-line users have to purchase avatar props to continue to decorate their cyber selves. Typical avatar props are sold for about $0.5 to $1.00 per piece. Recently, however, high-priced avatars and props are being introduced into the Korea's avatar market. Freechal.com, a Korean ISP, recently opened an avatar shopping mall named "Marry Lou Nanton" offering, for instance, an avatar prop (i.e. a female avatar's jacket) with a price tag of $7.00. Furthermore it is even possible to buy "plastic surgery" options for the avatar of one's choice. The consumers of avatars in Korea can be briefly characterized as follows. In terms of demographics, most avatar users are in their teens or early 20s (Two thirds of them are teenagers). These generations feel very much comfortable with using computers and surfing the net. The number of avatar purchase reached over 10 million in 2002. It is particularly alarming that too many teenagers spent money on avatars repeatedly. Incidents of teenagers addicted to avatars committing crimes to obtain money to buy more props were frequently reported. For example, some teenage girls went so far as to offer cyber prostitution where the girls were engaged in sexually explicit conversation with adult male on-line chatters (Dong Ah Daily News, 2002). These male counterparts were asked to provide the teenage girls with expensive avatar items (e.g. dresses, jackets, accessories, etc.) that were needed for decorating the girls' avatars. More seriously, these girls did not appear to grasp the negative consequences of their cyber behavior. One 15-year old girl who was engaged in cyber prostitution was reported to say "1 do not understand why that (i.e. cyber prostitution) is bad at all! It is not real, you know." Another tragic case of addiction is as follows. An 11-year-old girl committed suicide after getting a scolding from her mother for spending 1,700,000 won (US $1,450) over a period of 6 months on avatar items (Dong Ah Daily News, 2003). The girl repetitively purchased avatar items before her spending spree ended tragically. In our study we are motivated to find out what makes these teenagers be addicted to avatars. Korean teenagers who are either high school or junior high school students are under enormous pressure to excel in academics because of extreme competitiveness of the college entrance exam. In Korean society, which college one graduated from matters most for one's success in life. For example, if one is a graduate of Seoul National University, which is the most prestigious college, one will have a very high chance of getting the best jobs. Therefore many parents force teenagers to concentrate only on studying. This makes teenagers often unhappy and stressed (Hankyoreh Daily News, 2002). We posit that teenagers in Korea must be addicted to avatars because they find having alternate selves in cyberspace as a way to escape from stressful real world. The following is our proposition to explain avatar addiction phenomenon in Korea.

H2: Stress caused by pressure to study plays a significant role in being addicted to avatar prop purchase.

In terms of determining if one is addicted to avatar prop purchase, we relied on interview with 6 self-confessed avatar-addicted teenagers. They are likely to purchase more than 10 times per week on average. This means that they purchase more than one prop everyday. This behavior is similar to the pattern of other addictive behavior such as gambling. Gambling addicts do go to casinos everyday since they cannot control their urge to gamble (Baumeister, Heatherton, and Tice, 1994). We have conducted a cyberspace survey with the following questionnaire:

Background: Please answer the following questions if you are a high or junior high school student who has an avatar.

Q1 : Have you purchased a prop for your avatar more than 10 times per week on average?

a) yes b) no

Q2: Do you feel stress reduced when purchasing an avatar prop?

a) strongly disagree[1] b) disagree[2] c) agree[3] d) strongly agree[4] This survey questionnaire was published as a web page listed in various Korean search engines and directories and had been on-line for five months from 10/2003-02/2004. 267 people responded to the cyberspace survey. Table 3 shows the result of the survey.

We categorized the subjects into two groups based on their answer to the first question: those who answered YES (31 subjects) and those who answered NO (236 subjects) to the first question. Then the average numeric value of answers to the second question was calculated for each group. Finally, Comparison of Means of two groups using SAS software was conducted. The statistical test showed that H2 was accepted with p-value < 0.05. In other words, Teenagers who are not addicted to avatar consumption are likely to feel less stress than those who are addicted. Teenagers who feel lots of pressure tend to try to escape from it by indulging in avatar consumption. It is possible for teenagers who feel lots of stress to indulge in other behaviors that might reduce stress. However the survey result confirms that avatar consumption behavior plays a statistically significant role when it comes to stress reduction. Thus the cause of avatar consumption addiction phenomenon among Korean teenagers can be attributed to their desperate desire to escape from tremendous stress that they have to endure while coping with pressure to study all the time.

3.2 Meaning of The Result

Addictive consumers of avatars in Korea appear to enjoy stress reduction through easily controlling (i.e. purchasing & consuming) avatar items, while their self-control is undermined as they try to purchase avatars repetitively. Baumeister (2002) shows that self-control failure may be an important cause of addictive purchasing. Of particular interest is a self-control failure case in which consumers may hold goals that are in conflict with regard to a particular indulgence. This situation is an accurate reflection of the condition of many addictive consumers. Consumers in general want to feel good, and when they are upset, the goal of feeling better becomes increasingly central to their actions. Thus, to the extent that a consumer is torn between spending money for the sake of feeling good and doing something good in the long run (saving money in the process), emotional distress may shift the balance in favor of making the purchase. Applied to consumer behavior of avatars, the implication is that consumers who are emotionally upset or stressed may be more likely to put prudent self-control aside in the hope that purchasing goods or services will make them feel better. In this respect, too much emphasis on good grades at school must make teenagers in Korea emotionally stressed and eventually lead some of them to addictive consumption of avatars. Even addictive consumption of avatars appears to do some good to the respective consumers since addictive behaviors reduce stress and may lead to a temporary state of feeling good. Even though in order to explain addictive behavior, we resorted to self-control theory, from a general CST view, this cyberspace phenomenon has its roots in social, historical, and political aspects of life in Korea. Teenagers would achieve false emancipation while consuming avatar products because as proven in the empirical data analysis, this cyberspace behavior reduces stress and promotes sense of well being. However no real life change can be expected out of this behavior in the direction of critical reflection and emancipation. Critical reflection has to happen to adults of society who have realistic power to challenge the status quo and only after then, real life emancipation may arrive at the teenagers.

4. CONCLUSION

This paper demonstrated that a general CST in contrast with the existing CST application could be adopted for an IS research method using empirical study of two cases. In the first case, a study of city of Seoul web pages provided the evidence that use of cyberspace might facilitate emancipation of people who were concerned with showing respect when they communicated with seniors and authorities. In the second case, a study of Korean teenagers' addictive consumption of avatars in cyberspace reveals that teenagers would achieve false emancipation while consuming avatar products because this cyberspace behavior reduces stress. However no real change can be expected out of this behavior in the direction of critical reflection and emancipation. Diagrams summarize the process of applying a general CST. A general CST is shown as a relevant application area of CST in cyberspace behavior research among IS topics.

REFERENCES

Baumeister, R. (2002). Yielding to Temptation: Self-Control Failure, Impulsive Purchasing, and Consumer Behavior. Journal of Consumer Behavior. 28(4): 670-676

Baumeister, R., Heatherton, T., and Tice, D. (1994). Losing Control: How and Why People Fail at Self-Regulation. Academic Press, San Diego

Davidson, C. and Neale, M. (1986). Abnormal Psychology. Wiley, New York

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Gerber, E., & Morton, R. (1998). Primary election systems and representation. Journal of law, economics & organization. 14:304-324

Gronlund, A. (2001). Democracy in an IT-framed society. Communications of the ACM. 44:22-25

Habermas, J. (1984). The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, Beacon Press, Boston, MA.

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Hirschheim, R. and Klein, H. (March 1994). "Realizing Emancipatory Principles in Information Systems Development: The Case for ETHICS," MIS Quarterly (18:1), pp. 83-109

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Ook Lee, College of Information and Communications, Hanyang University, Seoul, KOREA

Dr. Ook Lee is a professor of Information Systems at the college of Information and Communications of Hanyang University in Seoul, Korea. He received a PHD in MIS from the Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, USA. He held faculty positions at North Carolina A&T State University, University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and University of Queensland. He published more than 50 articles in journals such as Information & Management, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communications, CyberPsychology and Behavior, and Journal of Software Maintenance. He is a conference co-chair of CODE2006.

TABLE 1. GROUPING OF POSTINGS

Posting with no "respect" phrases   Posting with "respect" phrases

87                                  16

TABLE 2. MESSAGE POSTER SURVEY RESULT

                     Group: Yes to        Group: No to
                     "web page"           "web page"

Means                3.9                  1.2
Number of Subjects   101                  24

TABLE 3. AVATAR ADDICTION SURVEY RESULT

                     Group: Yes to        Group: No to
                     "avatar addiction"   "avatar addiction"

Means                3.8                  2.6
Number of Subjects   31                   236