Social Aspects of Digital Information in Perspective

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.

Social informatics research gives prominence to theoretically informed, contextually attentive methodologies that build theory from empirical data. This focus distinguishes social informatics studies from other socially aware or proactive approaches, such as community informatics, discourse analytics, and other descriptively rich research domains. It blurs the line between theory and practice in ways that allow concepts to transcend such boundaries. That conceptual flow encourages informatics researchers to interact across disciplinary boundaries in ways that acknowledge biases and differences, while at the same time recognizing when this diversity can be a source of intellectual strength. "