Organization-Customer relationships are best characterized as utility relationships where each party seeks a mutually agreeable value exchange. By employing the rhetoric of care, organizations attempt to portray what they do in terms reflective of more intimate, personal relationships. This paper examines the consequences of using language appropriate to personal relationships to describe what transpires in the information-mediated Agent of the Organization-Customer relationships.

This paper presents a framework for understanding the technological change and its impacts on environments where multiple versions of a technology exist simultaneously. Both orienting and limiting role of physical (skeumorph) and conceptual metaphors on the products, processes, and user experience in changing from a familiar functional implementation to the one employing new media is illustrated using examples showing the transition from wet photography to digital imagery and from surface mail to e‐mail. People use physical (skeumorph) and conceptual metaphors to orient themselves with new technology by understanding new functions in terms of earlier technological versions. Since new technology is adopted at varying rates and varying times, multiple versions exist at any given time. Sometimes expectations appropriate for earlier technological iterations obscure the challenges and possibilities presented by the new media implementation. This paper examines how new technologies challenge and are challenged by the contexts into which they are introduced. By understanding the function that physical (skeumorph) and conceptual metaphors play in facilitating technological change, we can become more conscious of the discontinuities between the new technological iteration and earlier implementations to gain deeper awareness about how “the new” functions differently and to help us engage new technology closer to its own terms and open up new possibilities for its use.

Organizations largely determine the relationship that customers have with them. This reflects the tenets of managerial capitalism that assign value primarily to the firm and emphasize firm efficiencies while obscuring customer inefficiencies. An alternative view suggests that value exists in the customer and in the relationship, itself. Organizations have opportunities to employ information technology in new ways to foster relationships with their customers and create value. This paper examines some of these possibilities.

This paper will examine Heidegger’s conditions for Dasein (human being) discovering its authenticity through acting in the world in such a way as to create meaning for itself through its relation to itself, others and the world. (I will follow Heidegger’s convention of using the third person singular neuter pronoun form when referring to Dasein.) First, we will consider the relevancy of Heidegger’s existential analysis and investigation of technology in the information age. We will then discuss structures of being in the world and examine inauthentic and authentic modes of being. Next, we will consider three modes of “fallenness” that prevent Dasein from realizing a meaningful relationship to itself, others, and the world, and how the World Wide Web contributes to these conditions. Finally, four principles for authentic being with the Web are proposed and discussed.