Social informatics is the study of information and communication tools in

cultural Culture () is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and Social norm, norms found in human Society, societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, Social norm, customs, capabilities, and habits of the ...

institutional Institutions are humanly devised structures of rules and norms that shape and constrain individual behavior. All definitions of institutions generally entail that there is a level of persistence and continuity. Laws, rules, social conventions a ...

contexts. Another 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. A

transdisciplinary Transdisciplinarity connotes a research strategy that crosses many disciplinary boundaries to create a holistic approach. It applies to research efforts focused on problems that cross the boundaries of two or more disciplines, such as research o ...

field, social informatics is part of a larger body of socio-economic research that examines the ways in which the technological artifact and human social context mutually constitute the

information and communications technology Information and communications technology (ICT) is an extensional term for information technology (IT) that stresses the role of unified communications and the integration of telecommunications (telephone lines and wireless signals) and computers, ...

(ICT) ensemble.Sawyer, S. and Jarrahi, M.H. (2014) ''The Sociotechnical Perspective: Information Systems and Information Technology'', Volume 2 (Computing Handbook Set, Third Edition,) edited by Heikki Topi and Allen Tucker. Chapman and Hall/CRC. , http://sawyer.syr.edu/publications/2013/sociotechnical%20chapter.pdf Some proponents of social informatics use the relationship of a

biological Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary in ...

community A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with commonality such as place, norms, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, tow ...

to its

environment Environment most often refers to: __NOTOC__ * Natural environment, all living and non-living things occurring naturally * Biophysical environment, the physical and biological factors along with their chemical interactions that affect an organism or ...

as an

analogy Analogy (from Greek ''analogia'', "proportion", from ''ana-'' "upon, according to" lso "against", "anew"+ ''logos'' "ratio" lso "word, speech, reckoning" is a cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject ( ...

for the relationship of tools to

people A person (plural, : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of pr ...

who use them. Th
Center for Social Informatics
founded by the late Dr.

Rob Kling Rob Kling (August 1944 – 15 May 2003) was a North American professor of Information Systems and Information science at the School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science, Indiana University Indian ...

, an early champion of the field's ideas, defines the field thus: :Social Informatics (SI) refers to the body of research and study that examines social aspects of computerization – including the roles of information technology in social and organizational change, the uses of information technologies in social contexts, and the ways that the social organization of information technologies is influenced by social forces and social practices.

Research

Historically, Western European concepts of social informatics research has been strong in the Scandinavian countries and the UK. The beginnings can be traced to the 1980s in Norway and Slovenia. The fundamentals of social informatics in the USA were laid by Kling in 1996 with his colleagues and students from Indiana University. Within North America, the field is represented largely through independent research efforts at a number of diverse institutions. There are several approaches, which were historically named or classified as social informatics: American, Russian, British, Norwegian, Slovenian, German and Japanese. The oldest concept of social informatics was founded in the USSR by A.V. Sokolov and his colleagues in the 1970s. Social informatics research diverges from earlier, deterministic (both social and technological) models for measuring the social impacts of technology. Such technological deterministic models characterized information technologies as tools to be installed and used with a pre-determined set of impacts on society which are dictated by the technology's stated capabilities. Similarly, the socially deterministic theory represented by some proponents of the social construction of technology (SCOT) or

social shaping of technology According to Robin A. Williams and David Edge (1996), "Central to social shaping of technology (SST) is the concept that there are choices (though not necessarily conscious choices) inherent in both the design of individual artifacts and systems, ...

theory as advocated by Williams & Edge (1996) see technology the product of human social forces. In contrast, some social informatics methodologies consider the context surrounding technology and the material properties of the technology to be equally important: the people who will interact with a system, the organizational policies governing work practice, and support resources. This contextual inquiry produces "nuanced

concept Concepts are defined as abstract ideas. They are understood to be the fundamental building blocks of the concept behind principles, thoughts and beliefs. They play an important role in all aspects of cognition. As such, concepts are studied by s ...

ual understanding" of systems that can be used to examine issues like access to technology, electronic forms of communication, and large-scale

networks Network, networking and networked may refer to: Science and technology * Network theory, the study of graphs as a representation of relations between discrete objects * Network science, an academic field that studies complex networks Mathematics ...

. Research in social informatics can be categorized into three orientations.

Normative Normative generally means relating to an evaluative standard. Normativity is the phenomenon in human societies of designating some actions or outcomes as good, desirable, or permissible, and others as bad, undesirable, or impermissible. A norm in ...

research focuses on the development of theories based on

empirical Empirical evidence for a proposition is evidence, i.e. what supports or counters this proposition, that is constituted by or accessible to sense experience or experimental procedure. Empirical evidence is of central importance to the sciences and ...

analysis that may be used to develop organizational policies and work practices. The heart of such analyses lies in socio-technical interaction networks, a framework built around the idea that humans and the technologies they build are " co-constitutive", bound together, and that any examination of one must necessarily consider the other. Studies of the analytical orientation develop theory or define methodologies to contribute to theorizing in institutional settings. Critical analysis, like

Lucy Suchman Lucy Suchman is a Professor of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, in the United Kingdom. Her current research extends her longstanding critical engagement with the field of human-comp ...

’s examination of articulation work, examine technological solutions from non-traditional perspectives in order to influence design and implementation.

Future

Social informatics is a young intellectual movement and its future is still being defined. However, because SST theorists such as Williams and Edge suggest that the

amorphous In condensed matter physics and materials science, an amorphous solid (or non-crystalline solid, glassy solid) is a solid that lacks the long-range order that is characteristic of a crystal. Etymology The term comes from the Greek ''a'' ("wi ...

boundaries between humans and technology that emerge in social shaping technology research indicate that technology is not a distinct social endeavor worthy of individual study, indicating that there is a need for social informatics research that bridges the gap between technological and social

determinism Determinism is a philosophical view, where all events are determined completely by previously existing causes. Deterministic theories throughout the history of philosophy have developed from diverse and sometimes overlapping motives and consi ...

. This observation, coupled with the many fields that contribute research, suggest a future in which social informatics theories and concepts settle to form a substrate, an "indispensable analytical foundation" for work in other disciplines. Such foundations can be found in social informatics frameworks such as The Web of Computing perspective or Socio-Technical Interaction Networks. Relevant topics about future direction of social informatics are discussed in the book by Fichman and Rosenbaum. Conceptualization of international discourse, including current trends in research and direction of social informatics development is presented in an article by Smutny. This article discusses current possibilities of development of social informatics within the international discourse of various concepts including possible areas for future cooperation. Other topical article by Marcinkowski presents a perspective shift from studying only the effects of the implementation and use of technology to the primary discussion of what are the ideological implications of empirical work in social informatics connected with data analytics approach.

In education

Social informatics is also about teaching social issues of computing to computer science students. Depending on educational traditions, social informatics is scattered in the curriculum of different disciplines, as well as in

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

, information science,

informatics Informatics is the study of computational systems, especially those for data storage and retrieval. According to ACM ''Europe and'' ''Informatics Europe'', informatics is synonymous with computer science and computing as a profession, in which ...

(Europe) and web sociology. In some instances there might be a lack of understanding of why teaching social issues of computing is important, both by individual lecturers and students, resulting in a view that social informatics is boring and without importance. Some researchers have pointed out that in order to create awareness of the importance of social issues of computing, one has to focus on

didactics A didactic method ( el, διδάσκειν ''didáskein'', "to teach") is a teaching method that follows a consistent scientific approach or educational style to present information to students. The didactic method of instruction is often contra ...

of social informatics.

Research

Future

In education

See also

References

External links