The Crowd and Sensors Era: Opportunities and Challenges for Individuals, Organizations, Society, and Researchers

摘要

In this paper we focus on the consequences of the adoption of new emerging technologies for individuals, organizations, and the wider society. We look at how online collaborations - what we will call the crowd approach - and the availability of digital traces about an individual's activity in large databases - what we will call the sensors approach - can, positively or negatively (yet, disruptively) change many aspects of life. Moreover, we consider how far 'digital traces' can be used by scholars to undertake IT-focused research. We conclude our paper with a research agenda that will hopefully stimulate debate in the IS community related to opportunities and challenges of emerging technologies and how they are used and studied.