What Is Social Informatics and Why Does It Matter?

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work has benefited from continuing conversations about social informatics with many colleagues and students. Phil Agre, Bill Arms, Holly Crawford, Blaise Cronin, Elisabeth Davenport, Joanna Fortuna, Amy Friedlander, Roberta Lamb, Suzanne Iacono, Geoff McKim, Javed Mostafa, Howard Rosenbaum, Steve Sawyer, Deborah Shaw, Bob Travica, and Suzanne Weisband commented on interim drafts of this article. The discussion of scholarly communication on the Internet is based upon joint research with Geoff McKim. This work was supported, in part, by NSF grants IRI-9714211 and SBR-9872961. Notes 1 This account of Lotus Notes' use is based on my integration of data reported in Mehler (1992) Mehler, M. 1992. Notes fanatic. Corporate Computing, 1 (2): 160–164. Google Scholar and Orlikowski (1993) Orlikowski, W. J. 1993. Learning from notes: Organizational issues in groupware implementation. The Information Society, 9 (3): 237–250. Reprinted in Kling, 1996aTaylor Zariski, 1997a, 1997b). 5 I have restructured Nadasdy's list to better fit this analysis. 6 It is worth noting that other refereed e-journals also publish only a few articles per year. While these rates are a small fraction of the number of articles published annually by quarterly paper journals, they seem to be typical of refereed e-journals in the mid-1990s. For example, the Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science (CJTCS) published the following number of articles: 1995 (4 articles), 1996 (6 articles), 1997 (5 articles). (See http: //www. cs. uchicago. edu/publications/cjtcs/articles/contents. html. ) This journal has an editorial board of 41 members, but few of them publish in the journal. Even so, the MIT Press assumed publishing responsibility for the CJCTS in 1998. The MIT Press has also changed the circulation policy from one that is "free" and publicly accessible to one that is restricted to subscribers. It lists over 60 institutional subscribers whose subscription price is 125/year. 7 The term "socio-technical systems" was most strongly advocated in the 1950′s–1970s by a group of psychologists who were originally associated with the Tavistock Institute in London, England. They were particularly concerned with improving the effectiveness and psychological well-being of production workers. They advocated ways to "jointly optimize" the technological and social systems of workplaces, and advocated such practices as autonomous work teams, rotating jobs, and pay for learning new skills. This usage has also influenced some thinking about information systems design, and is reflected in two classic papers by Bostrom and Heinnen (1977a, 1997b). In this view, a technology is an artifact whose typical use has consequences for the social interactions and social relationships of the people who use it. The socio-technical analyst considers these social effects when designing a new artifact (including information systems). Our use of the concept of "socio-technical systems" goes beyond this view. It differs in the typical social settings to which it is applied, since we do not emphasize production workers or solutions such as autonomous work teams or "joint optimization. " However, more fundamentally the systems that we characterize as socio-technical so intertwine social and technological elements that they are a complex admixture (see Bowker, Star, Gasser, Mansell Wellman, et al. , 1996 Wellman, B. , Salaff, J. , Dimitrova, D. , Garton, L. , Gulia, M. and Haythornthwaite, C. 1996. Computer networks as social networks: Virtual community, computer supported cooperative work and telework. Annual Review of Sociology, 22: 213–238. [Crossref, Web of Science ®, Google Scholar). 8 We have referred to these relationships and dependencies as a "web of computing" (Kling Kling, 1992 Kling, R. 1992. "Behind the terminal: The critical role of computing infrastructure in effective information systems' development and use". In Challenges and strategies for research in systems development, Edited by: Cotterman, W. and Senn, J. 153–201. New York: John Wiley. Google Scholar). 9 The term "user" is a bland descriptor of varied social roles that people play in new media such as digital libraries and electronic journals. For example, the people who are likely to use digital libraries are likely to include readers, as well as a variety of digital librarians to support the documentary collection as a viable service. In the case of electronic journals, "the users" refer to a variety of participants including authors, readers, editors, and journal production staff.