Social Informatics in the Information Sciences: Current Activities and Emerging Directions

Introduction The last half of the 1900s has been characterized by the increasing importance of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in social and organizational life. Computers, both on the desktop and embedded in automobiles, appliances, cellular phones, and satellite dishes have become part of the fabric of our work and social lives. In three decades, the Internet has grown from a network connecting four American universities and research labs to a global communications network. The evolving roles and increasing importance of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic commerce, digital libraries, and computer-mediated distance education are all examples of phenomena that both rely on computing and are becoming commonplace. How are ICTs changing the ways in which we work and play? What are the effects of the increasing routinization of ICTs in modern societies? What are the practical and conceptual issues and implications of widespread and pervasive computerization? In this paper, we provide an overview of the intellectual geography of the research and theorizing in social informatics, focusing on issues applicable to the information sciences. We use the term intellectual geography to mean the physical location of those who conduct social informatics (SI) research. We use the term information sciences to mean the combination of traditional information science domains and related information systems and user behavior literatures. This overview unfolds in three parts. In the first part, we define and discuss concepts central to social informatics. In part two, we highlight the emerging intellectual geography of social informatics in the information sciences. In part three, we outline some conceptual and applied contributions that arise from this work. What is Social Informatics? Social informatics (SI) is a multi-disciplinary perspective. Social informatics researchers focus on the social consequences of the design, implementation, and use of ICTs over a wide range of social and organizational settings. Of particular interest are the roles of ICTs in social and organizational change. Researchers have studied social aspects of computerization for over 25 years, using terms such as the "social analysis of computing," the "social impacts of computing," "information policy," "computers and society," and, more recently, "computer-mediated communication" (Kling, 1999; p. 1; Bishop & Star, 1996: p. 309). Because the research findings and insights are found in many different literatures, they are difficult for scholars and teachers to access (Kling, Rosenbaum, Sawyer, Weisband, & Crawford, forthcoming, p. 12). Organizational informatics (OI) refers to those social informatics analyses bounded within organizations--where the primary participants are located within identifiable organizations. Many contemporary studies of the roles of computerization in shaping work and organizational structures fit within organizational informatics. For convenience, in the rest of this paper social informatics is used to denote both social and organizational informatics. Thus, both organizational and social informatics research respond directly to Bates' (1999, p. 1042) second "big question" that defines information science: "How do people relate to, seek, and use information?" What is novel about the recent interest in social informatics is that it reflects an underlying move to consolidate these disparate streams of research into a more unified and accessible domain. Then what is social informatics? According to Kling (1999), A serviceable working conception of 'social informatics' is that it identifies a body of research that examines the social aspects of computerization. A more formal definition is 'the interdisciplinary study of the design, uses and consequences of information technologies that takes into account their interaction with institutional and cultural contexts. …