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303.48/33 22

Footnote

Rez. in: JASIST 58(2007) no.1, S.151-152 (R. Gazan): "Anyone who has ever struggled to describe social informatics to a skeptical colleague or a room full of students will appreciate this clear and well-organized introduction to the field. It is at once a literature review, a teaching guide, and an outreach manifesto for integrating the social aspects of information and communication technologies (ICTs) into system design, analysis, and research. The context of this book is of particular importance. Rob Kling founded social informatics as a research field, and led the creation of the Center for Social Informatics at Indiana University. Kling pinpoints 1996 as the year when his long-simmering ideas coalesced into social informatics, though in the Foreword, William H. Dutton argues that the birth date of the field was actually more than a decade earlier. Kling, Howard Rosenbaum, and Steve Sawyer worked on this book intermittently for years, but upon Kling's death in May 2003, Rosenbaum and Sawyer completed the work. Under the circumstances, the book could easily have become a festschrift or celebration of Kling's career, but the authors maintain tight focus on the findings and applicability of social informatics research throughout. While much of Kling's work is cited, and very little of it critiqued, overall there is a good balance and synthesis of diverse approaches to social informatics research. Creating a conceptual critical mass around an idea like social informatics is only the first phase in its evolution. The initial working definition of social informatics-"the interdisciplinary study of the design, uses and consequences of ICTs that takes into account their interaction with institutional and cultural contexts" (p. 6)-was developed at a seminal 1997 workshop, and background information about the workshop's participants and process is summarized in two brief appendices. The results of this workshop yielded a raft of empirical studies, and at this point in the development of social informatics, the authors' focus on applying and extending the results of these initial studies is particularly well-timed. The authors identify a disconnect between popular, professional, and scholarly discourse on how ICTs coevolve with organizations, institutions, and society, and they aim to bridge this gap by providing a "pointer to the practical value of the scholarship on organizational and societal effects of computerization" (p. 3).
In the authors' view, the primary means to more widespread acceptance of social informatics is to integrate it with the more traditionally technical curricula of ICT oriented students in computer science and related fields, and this is the focus of Chapter 5. Here the book delivers on its promise of providing a clear framework for both understanding and teaching social informatics. The goal is not simply to learn how to build systems, but to learn how to build systems that account for the context in which they are used. The authors prescribe field experience problem-driven learning techniques embedded in the needs of particular organizations, and a critical, reflexive orientation toward ICT design and construction. In a chapter endnote, the authors mention that a socia informatics perspective would also be useful to students in other fields such as communication and education, but that space limitations required a focus on computer science. Though an understandable choice, if the goal is to convince those outside the field of the value of a social informatics perspective, it would seem natural to include management or economics curricula as fertile ground to analyze some of the tangible effects of a failure to account for the social context of system implementations. Chapter 6 is something of an outreach manifesto, a treatise on communicating social informatics research to professional and research communities, and an explicit call for social informatics researchers "to shoulder the responsibility for communicating the core of social informatics . . . to ICT professionals and other research communities" (pp. 106-107). The authors are not shy about framing social informatics less as a research field and more as an up-and-coming competitor in the marketplace of ICT-oriented ideas; achieving more widespread acceptance of social informatics is presented almost as a sales and marketing challenge, the goal being "getting to yes" in the minds of ICT professionals. It is an effective presentation strategy, but one that comes with a cost.
Throughout the book, the authors portray social informatics research as being underutilized and misunderstood outside the field, and they should be commended for acknowledging and addressing these problems head-on. Yes, there is resistance from ICT professionals and faculty and students in technical disciplines, most of whom have not been trained to consider social and institutional issues as part of their work. However, this stance sometimes results in a defensive tone. Social informatics research is repeatedly described as "systematic," "rigorous," and "empirically anchored," as if in preemptive response to doubts about the seriousness of social informatics scholarship. Chapter titles such as "Perceptions of the Relevance of Social Informatics Research" and "Raising the Profile of Social Informatics Research" contribute to this impression. Nonscholarly observers are dismissed as "pundits," and students who lack a social informatics perspective have "typically naïve" conceptualizations (p. 100). The concluding chapter ends not with a powerful and memorable synthesis, but with a final plea: "Taking Social Informatics Seriously." The content of the book is strong enough to stand on its own, but the manner in which it is presented sometimes detracts from the message. The book's few weaknesses can be viewed simply as the price of attempting both to survey social informatics research findings and to articulate their importance for such a diverse set of audiences, in such a brief volume. The central tension of the book, and the field of social informatics as a whole, is that on the one hand the particular-use context of an ICT is of critical importance, but furthering a social informatics agenda requires that some context-independent findings and tools be made evident to those outside the field. Understanding and Communicating Social Informatics is an important and worthwhile contribution toward reconciling this tension, and translating social informatics research findings into better real-world systems."

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