Push - Pull: The Information Tug of War A Framework for Information Delivery and Acquisition Systems Design

摘要

Recently, in a span of a week, two popular magazines [Business Week and Wired] featured the information push phenomena on their cover. Another information systems related magazine, Information Week, carried an article on push technology the same week. The push technology is being hailed as a savior for people suffering information overload on the Web [Kelly and Wolf 1997]. The authors also forecast the demise of browsing as we know it and instead, they predict the rapid rise of the push technologies. Other authors [Cortese and Hof 1997] depict the push technologies as a way out the maze we call the Web. The essence of the argument for the push technologies is that the pages on the Web have proliferated at a rate that overwhelms the average user causing an information overload. And that the push technologies will deliver information to your doorsteps -not literally - but to your PCs. The use of this technology is not limited to individual users but is being used rapidly by organizations to broadcast information to their employees [Maddox 1997]. Amid this euphoria about push-based information delivery, there is some apprehension that these systems are being developed mainly because technology to do this is available. And not because they satisfy clear user needs [Schwadron 1997]. The issue that then arises is what is the impact of information tug-of-war (push or pull) on the information consumer. We wrestled with the issue for a long time, trying to develop a research agenda to investigate the impacts. Before long we realized that we did not clearly understand what entails the process of information being pushed or pulled. This paper is an effort to present a framework to understand the push-pull information delivery and acquisition process. In the first section we present the framework that can be used to understand the differences between push and pull systems. Then we use the framework to develop implications and provide future research ideas related to design of Internet based information delivery and acquisition.