O ur research examines how knowledge professionals use mobile email devices to get their work done and the implications of such use for their autonomy to control the location, timing, and performance of work. We found that knowledge professionals using mobile email devices to manage their communication were enacting a norm of continual connectivity and accessibility that produced a number of contradictory outcomes. Although individual use of mobile email devices offered these professionals flexibility, peace of mind, and control over interactions in the short term, it also intensified collective expectations of their availability, escalating their engagement and thus reducing their ability to disconnect from work. Choosing to use their mobile email devices to work anywhere/anytime-actions they framed as evidence of their personal autonomy-the professionals were ending up using it everywhere/all the time, thus diminishing their autonomy in practice. This autonomy paradox reflected professionals' ongoing navigation of the tension between their interests in personal autonomy on the one hand and their professional commitment to colleagues and clients on the other. We further found that this dynamic has important unintended consequences-reaffirming and challenging workers' sense of themselves as autonomous and responsible professionals while also collectively shifting the norms of how work is and should be performed in the contemporary workplace.

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Mobile communication technologies provide a variety of opportunities for new forms of human interaction. Technologies such as e-mail, cell phones, and wireless email devices, often seen as overcoming spatial and temporal boundaries, have become standard features of contemporary organizational life. From the perspective of information professionals, these tools appear to wield direct influence on the daily experience of managing work, stress, and life. It is easy, however, to forget that such technologies are not used in a vacuum. Individuals make sense of communication technologies and decide when and how to use them in light of particular social, spatial, and temporal contexts. In this process, they take into account the characteristics of their tools, current social expectations, institutional norms, current and historical understandings of technology, and the everyday tasks in which they are engaged. The resulting patterns of use and their consequences (labeled "technologies-in-practice" by Orlikowski 2000) reflect the interaction of these multiple elements over time, affecting both the individuals interacting with the tools as well as the contexts within which their use is situated.Focusing on the process of sensemaking and norm formation that accompanies the use of a new technology, this research explores how information professionals use wireless e-mail devices (WEDs)^ in their daily lives. As communication technologies 'Of these devices, BlackBerry, a product of Research in Motion (RIM), currently holds dominant market share and popular attention. On November 17, 2004, RIM announced it had reached 2 million users (http://www.rim.net/nevv^s/press/2004/pr-17_ll_2004-01.shtml).

Through a confluence of different disciplinary interests and trajectories, questions of the materiality of digital media and information technologies have recently come into relief. There are several different strains of work under this broad umbrella and it is valuable to distinguish between the varied concerns. This paper has two objectives. First we begin by teasing apart and describing five related ways to conceptualize the materiality of digital goods. Our goal in this is to provide a typology for delineating current streams of research and language for analysis. Second, we unpack one of these conceptions in terms of socio-technical systems and organizational practices. Specifically, we analyze the role of digitization and simulation, or the materiality of digital representation, in order to shed light on how social and organizational systems respond to, create practices around, and develop delineating logics about digitally rendered data. An AnecdoteOne day, in the period when I (Dourish) was working as computer system manager for a university research center, a data tape arrived from the United States. It contained a corpus of much-anticipated research material that had been much anticipated. I mounted it in the tape drive on our DEC VAX 11/750 minicomputer, but we were unable to read it successfully. The tape drive did not register any readable data on the tape. Since tape is occasionally an unpredictable medium, I unmounted it and then tried again using the tape drive of the other VAX in the same machine room that we shared with a neighboring research group, again without success. I subsequently tried to read it on the two other tape drives in the building, attached to computers produced by other manufacturers, with no more luck. 2After consulting with some colleagues, the consensus was to take the tape to the local computing center where surely something would be able to read it. The results were frustrating (although I did get to see a whole lot of new computer systems up close).Eventually someone suggested that I take the tape to one of their long-term employees, Harry, so that he could "eyeball" it. Computer magnetic tape, like old audio recording tape, comprises nothing more than a long spool of plastic material covered in a brown magnetic oxide, so I was confused by the idea that it might reveal anything to the human eye -or to Harry's in particular -but, out of options, I did as suggested.In his office, Harry unspooled a few feet of tape. He reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a small object that consisted of a metal ring about 4cm in diameter, which held in place two thins glass sheets with a grey liquid in between. The grey liquid turned out to be iron filings in suspension. Harry stretched out the tape on a piece of blank paper, placed his device on top, and, pencil in hand, slid it slowly up and down the tape, occasionally tapping the ring gently. The iron filings began to line up in relation to the data stored on the tape. Moving the ring up and down, Harry located an empty...