Social Informatics: Past, Present and Future

Citation

Mae Keary (2015), "Social Informatics: Past, Present and Future", Online Information Review, Vol. 39 No. 3, pp. 441-442. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-04-2015-0124

This is a collection of papers from the 8th Social Informatics Symposium, held in Baltimore in 2012. It presents a view of social informatics (SI) that emphasises the core relationships among people, ICT, organisational and social life from perspectives that integrate aspects of social theory.

SI is a lively and dynamic problem-centred approach to the study of computerisation and society, providing researchers with organising principles, insights and concepts that drive critical, theoretical and empirical research. The aim of the editors is to provide an assessment of the current state of SI and to answer questions about the impacts of technologies and digital services on our lives.

The collection is arranged in three parts – past, present and future. The first two chapters trace and assess the evolution of SI and speculate on its future as a discipline. Rosenbaum examines SI as a scientific and intellectual movement from historical to contemporary research, whilst Sanfilippo and Fichman advance the agenda of SI by conceptually and practically identifying key concepts, ideas and challenges that unify SI.

Part 2, on the present, provides a sense of the variety in current SI research, called a period of diversification. The authors each attempt to convey this feeling of difference, by drawing out ideas on value and design, knowledge sharing, and as a guide and aid to scholars in the investigation of complex digital intellectual and cultural property issues. Taken together these papers concentrate on work that pushes SI in a different direction and suggests new paths for SI researchers.

The final set of papers deal with the future and describe five different scenarios. There is a proposal to use critical realism as a means to further develop socio-technical theorising within SI, which includes a discussion of designing for knowledge infrastructures. Another paper uses material semiotics with Actor-Network Theory to investigate sociotechnical production, whilst Cox examines the character of the practice approach as social theory and its influence on information science. SI is not well used in the business context, and future applications are described by Cox, who carried out research into different approaches for understanding complex situations. Finally, Sawyer and Hartswood apply their thinking for advancing SI using three methodologies – conceptualising the phenomena; computerization, and distinguishing SI from social and technological analyses. They conclude that SI scholarship is suited for the challenges of understanding the interactional arrangements amongst ICT and the personal, organisational, and societal structures in which we live.

This volume sets out to entice and intrigue researchers and theoreticians to engage with the challenges that SI poses, to stimulate active debate and to produce new thinking so as to make SI of contemporary interest, and to drive forward its growth and development.