The complex imbrications of ICT and society

Information Systems and Information Technology, 2014

Through this chapter we provide an overview of the sociotechnical premise: the mutual constitution of people and technologies. The sociotechnical premise and its various approaches, including the seminal work of the Tavistock scholars, the Nordic and Scandic approaches, and their evolution, are developed as the historical basis of this work. In the chapter we also cover the role of sociological thinking, the contributions of science and technology studies and social construction/social shaping of technology, actor network theories, and contemporary approaches. The chapter concludes with a cursory review of current debates around economic sociology, multidimensional networks and advancing our current conceptualization of the digital artifact.

tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, 2010

How is the relationship between ICTs and society to be conceived of? And how is the relationship to be evaluated? These two questions form the basis upon which an ideal-typical categorisation of different theoretical approaches can be built. The scheme presented here allows to be aware of advantages and disadvantages of certain ways of theorising.

Proceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, 2010

First …, 2002

Thus far, OECD has identified information and computing technologies (ICTs) as providing an infrastructure necessary to displaying, moving, processing and storing data, information and codified knowledge. The OECD's ongoing work on indicators for the information society ...

information society, 2012

The literature on the information society indicates that it is a still-developing field of research. It can be explained by the lack of consensus on basic definitions and research methods. There are also different judgments on the importance and the significance of the information society. Some social scientists write about a change of era, others emphasize parallelism with the past. There are some authors who expect that the information society will solve the problems of social inequalities, poverty and unemployment, while others blame it on the widening social gap between the information haves and have-nots. Various models of the information society have been developed so far and they are so different from country to country that it would be rather unwise to look for a single, all-encompassing definition. In our time a number of profound socio-economic changes are underway. Almost every field of our life is affected by the different phenomena of globalization, beside the growing role of the individual; another important characteristic of this process is the development of an organizing principle based on the free creation, distribution, access and use of knowledge and information. The 1990s and the 21st century is undoubtedly characterized by the world of the information society (as a form of the post-industrial society), which represents a different quality compared to the previous ones. The application of these theories and schools on ICT is problematic in many respects. First, as we stated above, there is not a single, widely used paradigm which has synthesized the various schools and theories dealing with technology and society. Second, these fragmented approaches do not have a fully-fledged mode of application to the relationship of ICT and (information) society. Third, SCOT, ANT, the evolutionary- or the systems approach to the history of technology – when dealing with information society – does not take into account the results of approaches (such as information science or information systems literature or social informatics, information management and knowledge management, communication and media studies) studying the very essence of the information age: information, communication and knowledge. The list of unnoticed or partially incorporated sciences, which focuses on the role of ICT in human information processing and other cognitive activities, is much longer.

The global diffusion of digital technology, which occurred more rapidly than the global diffusion of any technology previously, has been mired by its uneven distribution across, and unequal effects on, societies worldwide. In addition, policy initiatives to close this global digital divide, which peaked with the two World Summit on Information Society conferences, still did not change the course of this differentiated globalization process. In this article, I attribute the cause of such stalling of policy on the issue of the global digital divide to the bifurcation of current international policy: attention is split between concern for the impeded access of the poor to this revolutionary technology, on the one hand, and the race to lead the world in creating the next ''hot'' technology, on the other. These two concerns, which have been given the pithy titles of the ''global digital divide'' and the ''global innovation divide,'' are leading to two separate policy tracks, targeting the world's laggards and leaders as separate entities and operating under separate logics. This separation is problematic because the issues of access to technology and ownership of rights to technology are intertwined. This article describes the two global technology divides and analyzes the policies that are currently charted to address them.

European journal of social theory, 2000

Kurswechsel Zeitscrift für gesellschafts- …, 2007

2005

Systems scientists in their conceptualization of Information Technology (IT). It shows that both academic fields develop more and more convergent theorizations. The first part is centered on an historical analysis of sociology itself. It shows the great comeback of the Object within the sociological field at the beginning of the 80s. Different models have been developed from the generalized kinds of sociology to those that have been focused on the social construction of the Object. These make up sociological groups, which we call "autonomous". The second part presents the sociological approaches used and worked out in the domain of Information Systems (IS). These are presented by means of three historical moments (causalist, actor-based and processual). For each of these stages the influence of sociologies, notably those that deal with the Object, is obvious and models are more or less "illuminated" by means of broader perspectives. In the third part, there is a discussion of ontological differences between the work of sociologists studying IS objects and the work of IS researchers drawing on sociologists' conceptual contributions. Lastly, it seems that if sociology and Information Systems sometimes diverge in the way they study sociotechnical systems, they converge gradually in their conceptualization of the IT artifact.

Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics, 2010

This article presents a brief history of the Information Society and a research framework that is intended to address the challenges of ensuring that information and communication technologies are applied in ways that are enabling and responsive to the varied contexts in which people live their lives. ICT policies have come to be reasonably well-accepted as components of broader development policy initiatives, but there is much debate about how best to underpin these initiatives. Insights arising from research that is critical of the mainstream vision of the Information Society are rarely influential in such debates. I consider some of the reasons for this and whether there may now be an opportunity to re-enter some of these debates, particularly those in which it is clear that there are many important issues that reappear on the ICT policy agenda. The article highlights some of the most difficult outstanding questions around the promotion of investment in ICTs in support of sustainable development goals and offers an alternative research framework arising out of a UNESCOsponsored workshop. It also offers an assessment of the likelihood that greater attention will be given to measures that support more differentiated information or knowledge societies. I conclude that there are signs of learning and an awareness of unequal power relationships that may contribute to a shift in priorities towards a more context sensitive research framework that could be of value to those who are preoccupied by efforts to improve the material conditions of people's lives.