Social Interaction Patterns during Mobile Information Seeking

Mobile applications now incorporate features for communication and collaboration. One way that such applications are being used is in collaborative information seeking. There is, however, a lack of understanding of users’ social interaction needs when performing such tasks. To address this gap and using tourism as the domain, we conducted a diary study to examine tourists’ collaborative information seeking activities during their trips. These collaboration patterns were analyzed using the BIG6 information seeking process. Results showed that tourists were more influenced by their inner circle of social contacts such as family during the task definition, information seeking strategies, and location and access phases as compared to strangers. Conversely, strangers were more influential during the use of information, synthesis and evaluation phases. Implications of these findings are also discussed.