Social Informatics as a Field

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Social Informatics as a Field

• Social Informatics (SI) refers to the body of
  research that examines social aspects of
  computerization including.
• A relatively new term
• Umbrella for research that is scattered in
  journals and conference proceedings for several
  different fields.

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Rob Kling

• University of Wisconsin-Madison 1970-1973
• UC-Irvine1973-1996
• In August 1996 moved to Indiana University -
  Bloomington
• Died May 2003 at 58

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Rob Kling and Social Informatics

• Social Informatics (SI) refers to the body of
  research that examines social aspects of
  computerization including
• the roles of information technology in social
  and organizational change
• ways that the social organization of information
  technologies are influenced by social forces and
  social practices.

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Ultimate Goal

• Developer deeper understandings about
• how computerized tools and systems do not stand
  alone from society but are enmeshed in it
• how you, as a tool and systems builder and user,
  are impacting and impacted by society and social
  life

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Questions to Ask about Computerized Technologies

• What groups, organizations, and societies
  benefit? How?
• What groups, organizations, and societies lose?
  How?
• Do some groups benefit more or less than others?

• How does society and social life shape
  technology?
• How are social rules and processes encoded into
  computers and computerized systems?
• How does technology shape society and social
  life?

What responsibility do designers and developers
of computerized technology have to society?
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Describing Sociology

• Sociology
• Oxford American Dictionary the study of the
  development, structure, and functioning of human
  society
• Wikipedia study of society and human social
  action. It generally concerns itself with the
  social rules and processes that bind and separate
  people not only as individuals, but as members of
  associations, groups, and institutions, and
  includes the examination of the organization and
  development of human social life.

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One way of describing the thing that we
studySociotechnical Systems

• Hardware
• Software
• Physical surroundings
• People
• Procedures
• Law and regulations
• Data and data structures

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Multidisciplinary Research

• Difficult from a practical standpoint
• Journals and Monographs
• Libraries
• Different terminologies that overlap but are not
  the same
• Different levels of analysis

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Example Sensemaking 1

• Brenda Dervin, Communication
• how they use information resources in the
  information seeking process.
• Three major elements, i.e., 'situation', 'gap'
  and 'use'.

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Example Sensemaking 2

• Karl Weick, Organizational Theory
• Ongoing process
• During which cues are extracted and make
  plausible sense retrospectively

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What can we learn from these examples?

• Communication is a key element in theorizing
  information-related activities
• The same term can mean different things
• Researchers in different fields are concerned
  with different levels of analysis
• Although not in this example you will also run
  across terms in different fields that mean very
  similar things.

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Thomas More

• 1478-1535
• Utopia (1516)
• Showed the ways in which a fictionalized world
  compared to his actual one
• Used a narrative of travel
• His political imagination could roam

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Utopia as a Literary Genre

• Fictionalized descriptions of ideal societies
• Escapist
• political

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Utopias Brought About Without Human Effort

• Earliest utopias were myths about earthly
  paradises.
• People did not age or had an easy death.
• Greek and Roman myths had resting places such as
  Elysian fields (or hell)
• Common in the Middle Ages

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Lands of Cockaigne
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Utopias Brought About by Human Effort

• Seventeenth century novels
• Imaginary voyages
• First utopias promoting science
• Two subgenres

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Utopian Terms 1

• Utopia A nonexistent society described in
  considerable detail and normally located in time
  and space
• Positive Utopia (or eutopia) A utopia normally
  located in a time and space that th author
  intended a contemporaneous reader to view as
  considerably better than the society in which
  that reader lived.

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Utopian Terms 2

• Negative Utopia (or dystopia) A utopia normally
  located in a time and space that the author
  intended a contemporaneous reader to view as
  considerably worse than the society in which that
  reader lived.
• In common parlance utopia is equated with
  positive utopia (eutopia).

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Types of Utopias
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Purpose of Utopian Work

• Escapism
• Critique of Existing Systems
• Commentary on Social Trends
• Related to above Forecasting
• Entertainment / titillation

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Technological Utopianism

• Utopian and Dystopian imaginings whereby new
  societies are brought about primarily because of
  the introduction of new technology. Human effort
  often plays a role in creating the new
  technology.
• Heavily dependent on technological determinism.
• Technological Utopianism and Dystopianism
  different ends of the spectrum

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Utopian or Dystopian
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Technological determinism

• Technological determinism seeks to explain social
  and historical phenomena in terms of one
  principal or determining factor.
• Term was apparently coined by the American
  sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen
  (1857-1929)
• Trap for system designers

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Postindustrial take on technology

• During industrial revolution information
  technology was considered a mechanical means of
  substituting human actions with automated ones
• Now informate work where they modify the context
  in which information is used.

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Howcroft and Fitzgerald

• The genres of technological utopianism and
  dystopianism are particularly prevalent in
  relation to the hype and predictions surrounding
  the Internet.

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Assignment 1

• Analyzing Images (2 to 3 pages)
• The purpose of this assignment is to get you to
  look closely at some ways in which technology is
  portrayed.
• Find two images of computer/information
  technology.  One should be utopian, one
  dystopian.  These images can be from advertising,
  magazines, newspapers, articles, billboards, TV,
  movies, or even music.  For each of these images
• 1) Indicate EXACTLY where you found it (in other
  words, which source, the date it was published,
  the name of the TV show or movie, channel, date,
  you get the idea).
• 2) Describe the technology presented and indicate
  if it is current, future, science fictional.
• 3) How is the technology presented?  What kind of
  people are affected by it and are presented as
  using it?  Who is the target audience (children,
  computer professionals, individuals, families,
  etc?).  What is the technology supposed to do to
  or for them?
• 4) What is the "real message" being presented? 
  Is it to get you to buy something, believe
  something, protest something, fear something?
• 5) How did you react to this image and did you
  believe what is being presented?  Why or why not?
• Your write-up should NOT be in the Question and
  Answer format presented here, but should be
  written as a narrative.  Use these questions as a
  guide.

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Syllabus

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