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Innovators: David Schuff puts Web 2.0 into perspective

Part of the beauty of the Internet is the plethora of information that helps us make decisions. But, could this glut of content actually be hampering our ability to make clear-cut, unbiased decisions? That is one of the interesting questions that David Schuff, an associate professor of management information systems at Temple University and an MSIM and Ph.D. alumnus of the Department of Information Systems, is researching under the umbrella of what he calls "decision support in the Web 2.0 environment." Innovators is a new feature of knowIT, bringing you brief accounts of new research from the department's distinguished doctoral graduates.

2011-02-02

Part of the beauty of the Internet is the plethora of available information that helps us make decisions. From banal things like what movie to see and which digital camera to buy, to weightier topics like which candidate to vote for, we troll the Web for news, research, opinions, and data to help us make up our minds. But, could the glut of information disseminated in blogs, social networks, and user-generated content actually be hampering our ability to make clear-cut, unbiased decisions? That is one of the interesting questions that Michael Lee, an associate professor of management information systems at Temple University, is researching under the umbrella of what he calls "decision support in the Web 2.0 environment." "I'm working to determine how people make decisions using the information available to them through all of these new Web 2.0 tools," explains Schuff, who received both MSIM and Ph.D. degrees at the W. P. Carey School of Business. The premise behind much of his work is that people are faced with an overwhelming amount of information online and, because they can't read everything, they have to make choices about what content they chose to view and be influenced by. "The impact of information overload is not in itself a new area of study, but the idea of Web 2.0-type content exacerbating the problem is a unique angle. We've always had too much information, but now it is just exponential," he explains. Tracking information overload Schuff has worked on several research projects in this vein. The first, conducted with two Temple MIS colleagues, examined the ways that presidential candidates used social media in the 2008 primaries and how that related to their Gallup polls. Specifically, they looked at correlation between poll numbers and the number of YouTube views and blog mentions the candidates received. "We found that, for the lesser-known 2008 presidential primary candidates, the number of YouTube views a candidate received was positively associated with their poll numbers. The number of blog mentions a candidate had seemed to help the poll numbers of well-known candidates. And both technologies seemed to be associated with increased visits to the candidates' web sites," Schuff explains. He and his colleagues are gearing up now to do a more in-depth version of this study for the 2012 presidential election. Another research project analyzed the utility of user-generated reviews found on Amazon.com. Schuff and a colleague in Temple's marketing department collected data on a wide variety of product reviews to determine what made other users deem them useful. (At the end of each review on Amazon, the site allows users to check "yes" or "no" to answer the question, "Was this review helpful to you?") Their goal was to find common characteristics that made reviews seem more or less helpful to other potential customers. Their findings? Reviews with extreme ratings are less helpful than reviews with moderate ratings when it comes to books and music; longer reviews were seen as more helpful for all types of goods. In a separate experiment?not based on Amazon reviews?Schuff found that online shoppers find reviews posted by people labeling themselves as experts are always considered more helpful. "These findings can help guide online review sites like Amazon to better understand what is useful information for consumers," Schuff notes. Schuff's current research focus is the aforementioned question of whether the information overload fueled by Web 2.0 content can bias decision making. People's natural tendency to seek out information and opinions that confirm their existing beliefs causes people to be very siloed in their opinions?and this is exacerbated by the need to wade through an overwhelming amount of information online, he says. He is working on experiments to determine whether organizing and presenting online content by subject instead of by ideology will have an impact. "We wondered, if blogs were arranged in a different way in order to break down some of those overload parameters and get people to look at a greater diversity of information, would it make their opinion more or less extreme?" he says. Schuff and his colleagues developed a tool that presents blogs in such a fashion and used it to see the impact being exposed to a wider array of content had on people's opinions of global warming. The early-stage research has not yet born concrete results, but, says Schuff, "we believe that this type of tool can make it easier for people to view a wider array of opinion. And we think we'll find that this, in turn, will lead people to be less polarized in their views." Currently, Schuff is spending part of his year's sabbatical from Temple furthering this line of research at W.P. Carey with Information Systems Professor Robert St Louis, who was Schuff's dissertation adviser. The pair will work with local companies to see if the same phenomenon affects decision making in a corporate environment. "In the same way that this information overload can have a bias effect on individuals, this effect might also create an organizational decision making bias," he explains. A natural in the classroom Though his focus for this year is research, Schuff's original decision to get a PhD was motivated by his desire to teach. While he was an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh, he served as a teaching assistant in a freshman math class and the experience sparked Schuff's desire to be an educator. "I really enjoy being able to explain to people things they think they won't be able to understand, in a way that they can understand them," he says. In the undergraduate application development and graduate-level introduction to information systems courses he teaches at Temple, for instance, Schuff says students always come up to him at the beginning of the semester to express their fear of not being able to understand the course. "Then they come back to me at the end of the semester and are so surprised that they were able to learn it. It's a good feeling," he says. During his tenure at Temple, Schuff has also taught a networking course at the graduate level, and was able to travel to Tokyo and Colombia to teach the introductory information systems course for Temple's executive education programs. His most recent course, application development in a web environment, helps students learn to create web sites that interface with databases. During his 10 years of teaching at Temple, Schuff has witnessed an interesting shift in the information systems classroom approach?from a focus on basic technology skills to the ability to look at technology strategically and critically from a business perspective. Case studies abound now, he says. "10 years ago, teaching information systems was all about the ?stuff'?here's how a network works, here's what computer memory is, etc.," Schuff explains. "Today, I think the approach is more strategic. So instead of just understanding the technology going on behind digital downloads, for instance, we explore the more interesting, strategic questions like: What effect does it have on the music industry? What's the impact on prices, etc? It's a much more integrated feeling."

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