The social informatics of knowledge

Abstract

In the Introduction to this special issue on the Social Informatics of Knowledge, the editors of the issue reflect on the history of the term “social informatics” and how the articles in this issue both reflect and depart from the original concept. We examine how social informatics researchers have studied knowledge, computerization, and the workplace, and how all of those have evolved over time. We describe the process by which articles were included, how they help us understand the field of social informatics scholarship today, and reflect briefly on what the future of the field holds.

Intelligent Infrastructure, Ubiquitous Mobility, and Smart Libraries – Innovate for the Future

“…Drawing upon e-science theories (Atkins, 2003;Bowker, 2005;Nentwich, 2003) and socio-technical model of knowledge practices, this study investigated data working and knowledge making dynamics in a future-facing, boundary-transcending intellectual domain of global significance. In the "socio-technical sphere," knowledge practices are "embedded within and enabled by technical systems" (Meyer, 2014;Meyer et al, 2019). This study expands this installment and includes a third dimension of physical spaces in the knowledge dynamism.…”

Leveraging Digital Intelligence for Community Well-Being

“…Research from the field of social informatics is uncovering the significance of portions of knowledge production and consumption migrating online. The internet's ability to allow the distributed and shared production of knowledge has resulted in expanding the scope and scale of research using digital materials, yet it has also reconfigured the ways knowledge is created across disciplines (Meyer et al 2019). Social informatics, in the era of distributed knowledge offers ways to understand the many aspects of knowledge production, distribution, and use.…”

“…Such frames of understanding could become reinforced and even conjured and normalized. The field of social informatics, for instance, has made tacit knowledge processes (creation, sharing, and management) as well as ignorance processes such as the denial and obfuscation of knowledge (agnotology), explicit (Greyson 2019;Meyer et al 2019). In business studies the presence of 'wealth equals well-being' construct has been held responsible for the dominance of a cognitive frame related to 'business case' within discourses related to sustainability (Painter-Morland et al 2017;Hahn et al 2015).…”

Lessons from the History of Internet Studies

“…The only danger was that, in my enthusiasm for innovation (and after reading too much European theorizing about the future of an information society and Rob Kling's important work from the USA, for example Kling et al 1998), I was considering calling the new program 'social informatics'. This move, while probably justified now in our automated, algorithmically shaped networked society (Meyer et al 2019), was fortunately deflected by some wise colleagues who convinced me that marketing a course of that name might prove challenging. So was born Internet Studies: a name deliberately vague to mobilize both the popularity of the internet among intending students and, also, to defer decisions as to the precise nature of the curriculum.…”