From I-Awareness to We-Awareness in CSCW: a Review Essay

This paper considers the shared awareness perspective put forward by Tenenberg, Roth and Socha. Seeking to treat this view from its philosophical background in Quine, Davidson and Bratman, this paper offers a different approach to shared phenomena, one derived from Wittgenstein and Garfinkel. It explains how this view motivated one of my own study’s of work, in particular the work of economists at the International Monetary Fund, and demonstrates how these individuals operated in a shared knowledge space constituted by and reflexively organised through documents, most especially Staff Reports. This perspective on shared phenomena focuses, thus, on cultural practice and its reasoning forms. It thus also eschews the ‘mental phenomena’ central to Tenenberg, Roth and Socha’s perspective. The consequences of the Wittgenstein/Garfinkel view for systems design and CSCW are remarked upon.