Results tagged “social informatics” from Michael Tyworth

When I was growing up and complaining about something, my mother would often say "There is no need to make a federal case of it."  In other words, whatever my issue was, I was going way overboard in airing my grievance.

That mentality seems to have gone by the wayside in our culture with the default now being its antithesis.  Got a problem?  Make a federal case of it.

And so we have a federal court holding up a lawsuit of a game company for not including a warning that their game is supposedly addictive.  Really.

Cory Doctorow has an excellent take on the hype surrounding cloud computing.  Doctorow's analysis shows that technological determinism remains alive and well in popular discourse about technology:

The tech press is full of people who want to tell you how completely awesome life is going to be when everything moves to "the cloud" - that is, when all your important storage, processing and other needs are handled by vast, professionally managed data-centres.

Here's something you won't see mentioned, though: the main attraction of the cloud to investors and entrepreneurs is the idea of making money from you, on a recurring, perpetual basis, for something you currently get for a flat rate or for free without having to give up the money or privacy that cloud companies hope to leverage into fortunes.

The Wall Street Journal online edition has an article about how parents are using Facebook and other social networking websites to track their childrens' activities, how children respond to that form of surveillance and even create a term "helicopter parents."

As a social informaticist I find the article interesting as an example of how the use of technology is socially shaped, and how all technologies come with unintended consequences.

As a parent I'm a little creeped out.

Exploring the web, I came across this website. The site is dedicated to hawking the wares of a Marcus P. Zillman and he's co-opted the term 'social informatics' for precisely that purpose.  An obvious reason to exclude Mr. Zillman from your consideration as a commentor on social informatics is that there is not a single bona fide social informatics resource listed on his social informatics resource page.

If you're curious about social informatics research, two better places to start are The Rob Kling Center fo Social Informatics and Wikipedia

Sara Kiesler who is very active in the Social Informatics / Cyberinfrastructure research community is seeking candidates for a post doc position that sounds pretty fantastic:

I am seeking someone to conduct an NSF-funded interview study of scientific collaborations. This task will involve quite a bit of traveling to universities and talking with a variety of people including top scientists (half of whom will be CS, the other half a variety of disciplines), grad students, and staff including bureaucratic personnel such as people in budget offices. The task will also involve coding and analysis of the interviews.

If you are interested in virtual organization, the science of science, e-science, CSCW, and other related topics, you would have a chance to carve out your own paper from this work.

The postdoc would be for one year. It would not be necessary to live in Pittsburgh since the study is nationwide, however, would require you to visit periodically.

Call for Participation:
2009 Summer Research Institute for the Science of Socio-Technical Systems: 11-15 June, 2009 @ Syracuse University's Minnowbrook Conference Center, Blue Mountain Lake, NY

Application screening begins 2 March, 2009

Eligibility: Doctoral students, Post-doctoral scholars and pre-tenure faculty at US-based institutions.

Notification: Late March, 2009

Cost: Most will be covered for accepted participants

Background
A science of socio-technical systems is emerging from research in the fields of HCI, social computing, social informatics, CSCW, sociology of computing, and other domains. The Consortium for the Science of Socio-Technical Systems (CSST) is a new organization devoted to advancing research on socio-technical systems. Building on the success of the 2008 Summer Research Institute, the CSST will, again, be hosting a summer research institute for advanced doctoral students and pre-tenure faculty in summer, 2009. A primary goal of the institute is to build a new cohort of faculty and graduate students who are interested in research on the design and interplay of technology and humans at the level of individuals, groups, organizations, and larger communities. Examples of this kind of work include research on:

• new forms of organizing (e.g., virtual organizations, massive online activities)
• social computing (e.g., online communities, social network sites)
• distributed work (e.g., collaboratories, virtual teams and organizations)
• new technologies (e.g., recommender systems, prediction markets, ubiquitous computing)
• novel forms of production (e.g., open source software, Wikipedia)
• new forms of expression and entertainment (e.g., blogs, wikis, massive multiplayer online role-playing games)
• information and communication technologies for developing regions (e.g., cell phone-based applications to assist economic development, infrastructure development for local economic action).

Two papers have been accepted to the 8th SIG-SI / SIG-USE research symposium at this year's annual meeting of the American Society of Information Science & Technology.

I will be presenting a paper I co-authored with Dr. Steve Sawyer of Syracuse University where we situate Social Informatics in the broader theoretical debate on the socio-technical nature of information and communications technologies (ICT).  This paper is in the vein of, and draws on, the insights of the Leonardi & Barley paper discussed in the prior post.

You can read this paper here.

I will also be presenting as a research poster on some early findings from my dissertation research on the influence of organizational identity on the design of complex inter-organizational information systems.  Specifically, I find that organizational identity claims are reflected in both the organizational and technological designs of integrated criminal justice information systems.

You can read the paper here.

Paul Leonardi and Stephen Barley have written an excellent paper on how we theorize technology and social action.  It is by far the best treatment of this subject I have ever read.

Social theorists of technology continue to battle with issues of materiality and social context, structure and agency.  Leonardi and Barley frame this as a tension between the materialism (artifact) and the idealism (people) and determinism (structure) and voluneerism (agency).  Their analysis shows that theorists tend to favor or lean towards idealism and volunteerism resulting in little to no agency being assigned to the artifact; and that this 'tilting' is a result of conflating materialism with determinism (e.g., if one assigns any agency to the material properties of a technological artifact, one is by definition a technological determinist).

Indeed in my own work I have found that there is an inertial tendency to drift towards the social half of socio-technical.  Part of this I believe is because accounting for both the social and the technical simultaneously is messy, difficult, and ambiguous.  It's difficult to present a parsimonius explanation of a phenomenon when by definition there is more than one contributing factor.  Saying "it's both materiality and idealism" can be dissatisfying.

Key to this article is the argument that materialism matters - a loaded gun retains its lethality independent of whether its used as a hammer - and that theorists need to do a better job of accounting for the affordances and constraints presented by technology's material properties.

First Call for Papers and Participation:

4th Annual Social Informatics Research Symposium (SIG SI) People, information and technology: The social analysis of computing

Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology Saturday, October 25, 2008, 8:30-12:30 PM Hyatt Regency Columbus, Ohio

The purpose of this ASIST preconference research symposium is to disseminate current research and research in progress that investigates the social aspects of information and communications technologies (ICT) across all areas of ASIST.  The symposium includes members of many SIGs and defines "social" broadly to include critical and historical approaches and well as contemporary social analysis. It defines "technology" broadly to include traditional technologies (i.e., paper) as well as state of the art computer systems. This year's theme is "People, information and technology: The social analysis of computing."