[Air-l] JoDI (V5i4): Social Aspects of Digital Information in Perspective

Cunliffe D J (Comp) djcunlif at glam.ac.uk
Wed Dec 15 03:27:55 PST 2004


Colleagues,

I thought that this announcement might be of interest to people on this
list, but might not be widely disseminated - apologies for cross-postings.

Daniel.


Journal of Digital Information announces
A SPECIAL ISSUE on Social Aspects of Digital Information in Perspective
(Volume 5, issue 4, December 2004) Special issue Editors: Roberta Lamb and
Susan Johnson, University of 
Hawaii, Manoa

 From the special issue editorial:
"This special issue showcases a series of studies that are guided by the 
methods and perspectives of Social Informatics. This line of inquiry 
extends a research stream of the late Rob Kling, a pioneer in social 
informatics studies who strived for over 30 years to make social issues 
central to discussions about computing and information systems.

"Within the past decade, social informatics research has grown to encompass 
a widening and interdisciplinary interest in studies that carefully examine 
the ways in which information and communications technologies (ICTs) are 
bound up in everyday social and organizational structures. It draws 
researchers who focus on the inter-relationships among people, their 
institutional and cultural contexts, and their uses of ICTs. This focus on 
'ICT use in context' diverts some attention from the task at hand to pay 
more careful attention to the power relations that shape the task and the 
setting, as well as the roles of the social actors who use ICTs to perform 
their situated tasks.

"For this inaugural theme issue, we were particularly interested in 
presenting empirical examinations of ICTs that carefully depict and 
theorize about the cumulative influences of local histories on ICT use, 
with emphasis on the everyday aspects of living with digital information in 
the home, in the workplace, in research labs, in public places, and other 
social settings. We know that for many readers the contents of this issue 
will be very different from the types of articles they usually find in 
JoDI, but we hope this will be a welcome change. We feel it is very 
important to present theoretically guided examinations of everyday 
encounters with digital information to balance the more prevalent 
business-centric concerns and technology-focused projections about 
Information Society futures.

"Although the studies in this issue cover a wide range of topics, they 
share basic concepts that guide social informatics studies:

- Digital exchanges shape and are shaped by community interaction.
- History and context matter.
- Shifts in identity accompany the use of new digital information
technologies.
- Going online precipitates unexpected social, economic and political
outcomes." http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v05/i03/editorial/

The issue includes the following papers:

H. Ekbia, R. Kling (October 2004)
How IT Mediates Organizations: Enron and The California Energy Crisis
http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v05/i04/Ekbia/

P. McLean, S. Johnson (October 2004)
How Oke-Ogun Crosses the Digital Divide - Study of a Nigerian Rural 
Development Project http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v05/i04/McLean/

M. Raisinghani, A. Benoit, J. Ding, M. Gomez, K. Gupta, V. Gusila, D. 
Power, O. Schmedding (August 2004)
Ambient Intelligence: Changing forms of human-computer interaction and 
their influence on people and organizational environments
http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v05/i04/Raisinghani/

K. Stam, J. Stanton, I. Guzman (October 2004)
Employee Resistance to Information Technology Change in a Social Service 
Agency: A Membership Category Approach
http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v05/i04/Stam/

Editor's note. One further paper (Klashner) will be added to this issue and 
will appear in due course in the issue listing 
http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/?vol=5&iss=4

It will also be included in the announcement for the next issue of JoDI.

-- 

The Journal of Digital Information is a peer-reviewed electronic journal 
published only via the Web. JoDI is currently free to users thanks to 
support from the British Computer Society and Oxford University Press
http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/



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