Category Archives: Social Informatics and Current Events
We’re back… and with new brilliant minds!
Hello all!
After a nice summer break, the Social Informatics Blog is back, and we bring great news! Lynn Dombrowski and Shad Gross is joining our team of core authors! We are very excited to have them on board and looking forward to their posts. Here is more information about our new members. Welcome Lynn and Shad!
 Lynn Dombrowski is a third year doctoral student at the University of California in Irvine in Informatics. Broadly she is interested in social informatics, human computer interaction, and design. Her research topics pertain to exploring how agency, control, and politics manifest in sociotechnical systems and exploring the practical concerns surround issues of access and use of technologies. Currently she’s working on three research projects. First, her work investigates the role of nonprofits in assisting their low-income clients in gaining access to and use of social services and the underlying technologies of social services. Second, her work explores changes in the social relations between the social services and an ecology of stakeholders, including citizens and nonprofits, when new technologies and practices are adopted by the social services. Third, she thinks about how design might better serve communities by encouraging the creation of communal and social capacities to help ensure healthy and successful communities. Website: www.lynndombrowski.com |
|
|
Ontology of Students in Interdisciplinary Programs
I would like to express my heartfelt sympathy for Heather’s posting. I thought it would be more interesting if we have the following discussions. For me, the difficulty of interdisciplinary studies stems not only from the daunting challenge of designing a research framework by ourselves, but also from our daily ontological questions as students in an interdisciplinary program.
Regarding questions of who you are
Two years ago, I was in a long queue waiting to pass U.S. immigration processing. The immigration officer wants to know who I am.
- Immigration Officer: So, what are you studying?
- Me: I’m coming here for PhD program in Social Informatics.
- Immigration Officer: I’m sorry, what?
- Me: oh…Well…I mean…It is Computer-science-ish stuff. I will be PhD student in CS-ish study.
- Immigration Officer: oh, now I got it. Sounds cool. Good luck.
I knew that was the fastest way to escape the situation, but I didn’t know it was just the very beginning of endless identical questions that I would face. Even within this small Informatics building, I have often encountered similar questions asking to explain what (the hell) is Social Informatics. Of course, I used to reply plausibly that ‘Social Informatics is interdisciplinary studies of the relationship between ICT technology and society’ as we used to teach in undergraduate course. That answer would be full mark in their final exam. Unfortunately, however, it is never good enough for me. Weirdly I felt I kept wandering into a maze while I tried to answer the questions. It was not just the matter of social recognition, but rather matters of fundamental issues regarding the ontology of students in an interdisciplinary program.
According to the report by NSF, 24%-30% of PhD dissertations were written on interdisciplinary research during 2001 to 2008 academic years in United States. The Indiana University, Bloomington campus is ranked third in the nation, followed by MIT and Boston University, with an average 38.1% of doctoral dissertations being interdisciplinary. Though the statistic was based on a simple survey that has a considerable possibility of bias, it still means not a small number of doctoral students here have struggled in identifying themselves in academia. The question of the immigration officer became my lingering question: how can I know who I am.
Regarding questions of what you are doing
I’m interested in development of communication infrastructures in 21st century South Korea, which has been considered as ‘the most successful Internet nation’ (though I don’t know what exactly that means). Almost 8 years ago, I had a chance to sit in a meeting with bureaucrats from Southern Asia. They asked, ‘How did Korea have that amazingly rapid development in building communication infrastructure?’ One officer from Korean government barely replied, “I’m not sure how we did it, we just did it.” It was ‘the moment’ for me. Later, I realized there is not much convincing research that answers or deals with those issues. There are missing links between the success of Korea in the statistical numbers and causal explanations of its success. I started seeking the way to understand development of the infrastructure and its dynamics relationships of global and local technological competition and cooperation as it is situated within political, social, cultural arrangements. Hopefully my research will contribute to demystifying the incredible development of communication infrastructure in Korea.
My academic journey in higher education travels through computer science, history of science and technology, science and technology studies, policy studies and Social Informatics. When I was in the master’s program for history of science and technology, I was getting tired of reading materials about history of science in 18th century England. Moreover, I realized that the discipline of history does not consider the social phenomena in recent ten years as a ‘history’. History was not a good methodology kit to illustrate these issues. While I spent a couple more years in science and technology policy research field after my master’s years, I also realized policy analysis might just provide a partial explanation if I narrow the problem space enough.
In that way, Social Informatics program opened wide window for me as fully opened interdisciplinary program. Our faculty members always say “Whatever you want” with their generous smile. In IU, there were numerous opportunities to be exposed to related fields of research in and outside of the school, like HCI, complex systems, information science, telecommunications, history, political science, sociology and so forth.
But soon, I need to make my choice of which critical lens is the ‘proper’ lens to illustrate my research issues. It was obvious that I cannot use all the methodologies from a wide range of research disciplines in the limited time offered. At the same time, I need to find the audiences who might be interested in my research. CFPs for ‘related’ journals and conferences in my mailbox have stacked up, but I haven’t known what are ‘proper’ journals and conferences exactly. I have realized that I face the chaos of interdisciplinary openness. One more question is added up on top of the identity problem. Where is a good place for me to be?
Regarding questions of where you will be
From last year, we in the Social Informatics crew have been excited to get a new faculty member. During the job talk process, one of the candidates talked to us about the difficulty of finding a ‘proper’ academic position as a researcher with an interdisciplinary background. The candidate said that there are numerous opportunities to pursue, but there are limited places to stay in a stable position.
Science and Technology Studies, also called STS, had similar institutionalization problems. In recent thirty years, STS scholarship has contributed to seeing techno-scientific society practically and academically. Too few universities, however, had made long-term commitments to STS, and the STS as academic disciplines remains institutionally fragile. STS scholars are scattered in a diaspora across diverse departments. Here, after identify myself as an STS scholar, I might still be asked for a long time: where will I be?
Exhilarating, or terrifying, or both
There is a painting I keep seeing in my mind these days. The image is Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) by Caspar David Friedrich. Historian John Lewis Gaddis started his book, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past with interpretation of this painting. He explains that this painting is “suggesting at once mastery over a landscape and the insignificance of the individual within it. We see no face, so it’s impossible to know whether the prospect facing the young man is exhilarating, or terrifying, or both. (p. 1)”
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818),
Caspar David Friedrich [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Social Informatics is young studies and a discipline still in a process. But ontological questions of the discipline are not our sole concern, as they also might somewhat overlap with the ontological questions facing all doctoral students. For us, suffering under this chaos of ontological problems might be even more inevitable. It could be part of our job that began when we joined this wonderful academic project in the formative stage. Thus, doing Social Informatics is exhilarating, or terrifying, or both.
Billionaire Steve Jobs, an Inspiration to the Occupy Wall Street Campaign?
A week ago we lost a leader in the field of social informatics. Though Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs was not a scholar, he was keenly aware of how important people, their desires and mental frameworks were to the design of computer technologies. In the design process he consistently resisted collaborators who designed with code and machinery in mind instead of actual, human users. Like most social informaticians, he called for design principles to reflect culture and make communication, work and entertainment more efficient, intuitive and beautiful.
His passing happened at an interesting economic and cultural moment as so many people today are out of work (some might even argue that this is due to the success of technology developers like Apple and Steve Jobs) and political tensions have never been higher. A growing number of activists who lament the US government’s apathy toward wealthy corporate entities has emerged also in recent weeks. In just under four weeks, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) campaign has quickly spread all over the country and has observers around the world taking note.
In the OWS protesters’ mission statement, they say, we organize “at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments.” Their efforts are to express animosity toward corporate greed and the US government’s apathy toward this greed. Furthermore, they feel the government should be more active in correcting this problem. Namely, they call for the taxing of the richest one percent of the population so that the other ninety-nine percent might face less financial uncertainty.
Protester's Mourn Jobs' Passing
It occurs to me that the passing of Steve Jobs and the emergence of the OWS campaign intersect in an interesting way. Jobs, worth about 7 billion dollars, was undoubtedly in the one percent of people the protesters are asking the government to tax. In spite of this, many groups of protesters took time away from the protests to mourn his passing. A tweet from Twitter account @OPWallStreet on the night of his death said, “Sad to announce the death of Steve Jobs.”
While some may see this as an inconsistency in the message of the OWS, perhaps noting the genealogy of certain core values of the OWS campaign will help illuminate why OWS protesters, and so many others, feel a sense of grief at Jobs’ passing. Jobs was not just an innovator of technical artifacts. In many ways he also created new ways for communication to occur, new ways for entertainment to happen, new ways to work, to travel, to fall in love, etc.
One can easily trace the ideology and socio-technical structure that the OWS relies upon to share information and establish their movement back to innovators like Steve Jobs. First, Jobs is a product of the sixties. He was a flower child and hung out with anti-war protesters and activists while he was beginning to develop his desire to work with computers. This influence impacted the design of Apple technologies and made past and present underdogs fall in love with him. In the world of conservative tech companies, Jobs was almost always on the lunatic fringe. He fought for the things his artistic, and humanistic intuition told him were right. OWS protesters see themselves in Jobs’ shoes: They are fighting against the status quo in an effort to put the human back in the center of the system’s design.
Second, Jobs developed technologies that were networked. His masterpieces the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, etc. are windows into the social world. Social informaticians know that these technologies bear a certain internal structure which predetermines a certain kind of use, requires certain skills, etc. The structure of a computer network is at the heart of both the OWS campaign and Jobs’ most influential Apple technologies. As information is exchanged, the OWS campaign is replicated across the country. It’s copied and pasted. A new instance emerges in a new location because people have seen pictures of others, read stories, watch videos and are inspired by others through their iPhones & iPads. The OWS information structure, which is the heart of the movement, is itself an instance of the computer network Steve Jobs envisioned in the design of his most influential Apple technologies.
The protesters aim to upset the government’s apathy. They, like Jobs, suggest that the system should reflect today’s socio-technical culture and empower users by giving them more tools to make life easier and more beautiful.
