Constructing, deconstructing and negotiating the boundaries of digital cultures

Constructing, deconstructing and negotiating the boundaries of digital cultures

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Information Technology & People, Volume 24, Issue 1

About the Guest Editors

Steve Sawyer is based at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, New York, New York, NY.Marie Griffiths is based at Salford Business School at the University of Salford, Manchester, UK.Ben Light is based at the School of Music Media and Performance at the University of Salford, Manchester, UK.Siãn Lincoln is in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Liverpool John Moores University, UK.

Contextualising the special issue

The focus of this special issue is upon notions, and experiences of, the erosion and blurring of the boundaries constructed between work, play, the public and private as related to digital media. We seek to increase knowledge regarding the contemporary experiences and potential reshaping of the boundaries and structures of existing social organisation, and the altering of the ways in which people learn to experience life. We know that even as access to digital technologies continues to vary based on age, gender, nationality, residence, ethnicity, work, and other key aspects of society, it is clear the presence and uses of these digital technologies are increasingly important features of contemporary life.

Where historically one might argue that digital technologies have had more influence in work organisations it appears that we are witnessing a shift in this order of things. The uptake of digital technology into our domestic lives is, increasingly, shaping our experiences at work. Moreover, digital technologies are becoming more pervasive and their form more varied across both work and non-work aspects of our lives. These digital technologies are merging into physical infrastructures – at home, in transport, at work and school, and even walking “alone” while texting. Therefore, beyond the massive levels of interest in reshaping what it means to be social – as manifested in the number of people using these digital technologies – lie questions of their roles in supporting new forms of organizing and their effects upon our everyday experiences.

This collection has been three years in the making and has involved a reflexive journey for the authors and here we provide an annotated narrative of this in order to set the context for the special issue. In mid-2007, Ben Light organised a workshop regarding “Futures for information systems”. As the call indicated, the workshop’s concern was that:

[…] there is an overall tendency for research within the field [of Information Systems] to focus upon the investigation of phenomena in work organisations, and generally in isolation from within the societies within which they exist. Clearly, it is important that we understand the functioning of technology and work organisations but information systems research is missing a host of interesting and challenging research opportunities by overly focusing upon such areas. We have to remember that Information Systems should be about more than MIS. Indeed, an acknowledgement of the fluidity of organisational and societal boundaries is one means by which the significance of considering wider social and cultural contexts can be revealed. Information systems research should deal with more than information and technologies created solely within the confines of arbitrarily defined work organisation boundaries.

The call was also written at a time when discussions regarding falling student numbers in information systems had attracted both scholars’ and university administrator’s attention. Thus, no only was the workshop intended to consider the further expansion of the field, an argument for this was made in relation to the ability of programmes to attract students:

The need to attend to such areas also gains support given the widespread problems regarding the recruitment of students onto Information Systems programmes and the continued development of other areas such as New and Social Media, Technology Management and Innovation, and the Sociology of Technology. Many contemporary “non-mainstream” areas of research that require information systems researchers attention become evident if we embrace the idea that the field is concerned with the study of data, information, technology and systems and the ways in which combinations of these are made, and made to work, by those in work organisations and society.

The workshop proved popular, engaging academics such as Brian Fitzgerald, Jimmy Huang, Michael Myers, Briony Oates and Ray Paul. Topics covered ranged from computer art to postcolonialism and the day closed with a panel convened by Ben Light involving staff from the Information Systems, Organisations and Society Research Centre entitled: “Accessibility, computer gaming, online scamming, social networking and online drama – are these (and other such topics) what information systems research is, could be and/or should be?”

A cursory glance at the literatures reveals much work already in this area at the time, and before. For example, at the International Conference on Information Systems in 1994 there was a panel entitled “Information privacy: what is our responsibility?” (Grant, 1994) Furthermore, prior to the Futures for information systems event, Briony Oates’ work on computer art had already been published at International Conference on Information Systems in 2005, and then in the European Journal of Information Systems (Oates, 2006), Alison Adam had undertaken work on internet pornography (Adam, 2005) and Adela Mlcakov and Edgar Whitley on peer-to-peer software (Mlcakova and Whitley, 2004). Moreover, later in 2007, a special issue was produced from the 2007 UK Academy for Information Systems conference where the editors’ rationale was to “reflect the plurality or diversity of research undertaken within the Information Systems field” (Wainwright et al., 2007, p. 380) and in 2008 this journal published another special issue in the area of social inclusion where the Editors, Mike Cushman and Rachel McLean, argue for similar things to what we do here (Cushman and McLean, 2008). We can go on, but the point is made.

At the time, the workshop served both to add to this body of work and as an organizing device to begin a journey of expanding the place of such research within information systems. Information systems is still predominantly concerned with formal work. Moreover, we wanted those who engaged with research with respect to what might be seen as more traditional work, to engage with those more concerned with that one might see as the context of “non-conventional work”, domesticity, play and leisure more generally.

Following this workshop, Ben Light and Steve Sawyer (then a visiting professor at the University of Salford) developed the idea of holding an ongoing series of workshops in the area of digital culture. The first “Digital cultures: new forms of living and organizing” was held in 2008 with a focus, again upon the intersection of work and non-work and engaging studies of Facebook, the UK police force, the US real estate industry and health networks. In 2009, Marie Griffiths and Siân Lincoln joined the organizing team for the second workshop “Digital cultures: social media publics” that focused upon “boundary management” work as related to the public and private, facilitating conversations around such things as Twitter, clubbing and mobiles, digital gaming, online privacy and Identity. In 2010, the third workshop: “Digital cultures: navigating multiplicity” pursued this theme further in recognition that although there was, and still is, negotiation regarding the novelty of Web 2.0 and social media, it is the case that in many societies, those that would not have engaged with such arrangements in the past are, and that different sites of such arrangements are becoming easier to connect with each other, and commodify.

Thus, we argued, we were, and continue to be, increasingly faced with the issue of having to navigate multiple places across and connected with the internet. It is then perhaps unsurprising that as the workshops have progressed, so too have the disciplines which have been engaged, including, Anthropology, Cultural studies, Games studies, Information systems, Internet studies, Media studies and Sociology. This diversity is reflected in this special issue.

While the idea for the call originated from the workshops, our intention was to craft the special issue from a wider pool of work. Thus, the call was distributed across a number of mailing lists including those for the Association for Information Systems, Association of Internet Researchers, the British Sociological Association, the Communication and Information Technologies Section of the American Sociological Association, and the Media, Communications and Cultural Studies Association. The call received 22 submissions, of which five papers have been accepted for the special issue. Only one of these five papers comes from a contributor who actually engaged with the workshops. Jenny Kidd presented an earlier version of her work included here at the 2009 workshop.

With the rest of this editorial, we review the five papers.

In our first paper, “Playstations and workstations: identifying and negotiating digital games work”, drawing on field work with higher education digital games students, Daniel Ashton explores the situated understandings of work and the negotiation of “work” and “non-work” boundaries. The main finding concerns the continued significance of a fixed field of “work” for students intending to progress from education into “work”. The importance of “work” was identified in how students positioned themselves (occupational devotion) and engaged with games technologies (technological action). This is contrasted with the emphasis on co-creative relations and broad-brush assertions of blurring between work and non-work. It questions the blurring of “work” and “non-work”, and provides conceptual pointers combined with empirical research suggesting the continued purchase of fixed notions of “work” for workers-in-the-making.

Our second paper, “Do avatars dream of electronic picket lines? The blurring of work and play in virtual environments”, continues the theme of considering the extent to which forms of sociality can be inter-related. Bridget Blodgett and Andrea Tapia examine the concept of “digital protestainment”: the digitally mediated blurring of protest and entertainment. Building from two cases of social protest, a labor strike against IBM in Second Life, and a challenge to the owners of EVE Online they argue, that, in such environments, the process increases relative to size, scope, form and function. Engaging the theoretical lens of the cultural borderlands, drawn from anthropology, they also present a process of a “drawing in” of cultural elements, and the interchange between the “online” and the “offline” where newly created or hybridised cultural bits formed within one space are carried to others.

The next paper, “Analysing appropriation and usability in social and occupational lives: an investigation of Bangladeshi farmers’ use of mobile telephony” furthers our understanding of a form of work not often considered within Information Systems, and also suggests we consider the influence of life beyond “formal work” in its enactment. In this paper Bidit Dey, David Newman and Renee Prendergast provide insight into how Bangladeshi farmers negotiate with mobile telephony. They find that Bangladeshi farmers’ use of mobile telephony is inhibited due to language barriers, a lack of literacy, unfamiliar English terminologies, inappropriate translation to the local language (Bengali) and financial constraints. However, the social, occupational and psychological benefits from mobile telephony motivate the farmers to appropriate mobile telephony through inventive use and adaptation. The findings suggest that our current understandings of usability need to be interwoven with more culturally located understandings of technology appropriation.

Our penultimate paper, “Enacting engagement online: framing social media use for the museum”, attunes us to the potential for the blurring of boundaries between the general public and staff in organisations who consider themselves as professionals, as gatekeepers of knowledge. Jenny Kidd focuses attention on recent changes in the nature and uses of “heritage” and the ongoing re-conceptualisation of “audience”. In doing this she observes that museums are now seeking more dialogic relationships with the communities they serve and, crucially, those not being served. To this end, social media have increasingly been seen as a means of forging such relationships. The museum is an illuminating context for any study of the uses and limitations of social media, operating as it does in a liminal space between the public and the private, personal and communal memory, and between on-line and on-site activity. However, such a context demands a more sensitive and appropriate framing of social media activity than is evidenced in current practice. The case for developing a more nuanced strategy is made using Erving Goffman’s frame analysis theory, which highlights a set of constructs and rhetoric within which social media use is currently being configured in the museum.

Our final paper, “To disclose or not: publicness in social networking sites” tackles head on perhaps one of the most pressing discourses many of use face as we wrap up this special issue in November 2010. Patrick Bateman, Jacqueline Pike, and Brian Butler argue that social networking sites (SNS) are changing what it means to be public. Existing literature hints at competing perspectives on how the public nature of these sites impacts users. Through this paper they advance competing perspectives on the role of publicness on self-disclosure. They find support for the perceived publicness of a SNS negatively influencing users’ self-disclosure intentions. Additionally, exploratory analysis of self-disclosure items ubiquitous to most social network sites found that perceived publicness negatively influences users’ intention to self-disclose items related to users’ likes and affiliations, but had no influence on factual disclosures.

In sum, this collection of papers introduce a diverse mix of sociotechnical settings that really demand those working in information systems to continue to expand the locations of their work to sites beyond the typical office desk.

Steve Sawyer, Marie Griffiths, Ben Light, Siãn Lincoln