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Social Informatics As a Concept: Widening the Discourse

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Social Informatics As a Concept: Widening the Discourse Final accepted manuscript – please cite as: Smutny, Zdenek. Social informatics as a concept: Widening the discourse. Journal of Information Science, 2016, 42(5), 681-710. https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551515608731 © 2016. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Social Informatics as a Concept: Widening the Discourse Journal of Information Science Zdenek Smutny 1–33 Faculty of Informatics and Statistics, University of Economics, Prague, Czech Republic © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1550059413486272 Abstract jis.sagepub.com This contribution examines the different concepts known as social informatics that have historically been separate. The paradigm that is preferred worldwide (based on Kling) is well described and often promoted, with a strong base both in the USA and Europe. This article, however, introduces lesser-known paradigms (based on Sokolov and later Ursul) that originated in the era of the USSR and have so far been employed chiefly in post-Soviet countries, including Russia. These paradigms have been neglected in English-written scientific literature, mainly because of the limited number of articles available in English. Other approaches are also introduced and related, which were historically named or classified as social informatics (American, British, Norwegian, Slovenian, German and Japanese). The present article introduces and further discusses the origin, historical development, and basic methodological grounding of these approaches. All the approaches are then discussed and their differences as well as their similarities are pointed out. The aim is to create connections across the current generation of researchers, which includes the formation and conceptualization of different approaches and an exploration of possible areas for future cooperation. Keywords comparison; conceptualization; information society; review; Russia; social informatics; sociotechnical studies; Soviet Union 1. Introduction The main reason for writing an article that provides an overview of approaches to social informatics is the fact that the entirety of the Soviet/Russian concept is not well-known in English-language literature. Although in the most recent book [1] on the subject (2014) Howard Rosenbaum maps out the historical background of the emergence of social informatics as a scientific and intellectual movement in various countries across the world, his discussion is limited in scope. The author does mention the Soviet or Russian concept of social informatics, but only in fragments. The discussion does not extend beyond the 1980s and he only refers to articles by Arkady D. Ursul [2] and Konstantin K. Kolin [3]. He adds that other versions of social informatics (Norwegian, Slovenian, Russian, and Japanese) and their outputs are not widely accessible in English, which puts them at a disadvantage in the international intellectual arena. This article aims to describe the historical background of the emergence and grounding of social informatics in the USSR, starting in the 1970s, and the development of that concept up to the present day. Other sections compare this concept with other known perspectives on social informatics and their development. Finally, various opportunities for future cooperation are outlined. Relevant literature which reflects that development has been selected for the purposes of this article: Soviet/Russian (or translated into Czech), Czechoslovak/Czech literature and available English literature1. The majority of original Russian publications used here have not hitherto been used in any other contribution written in English that is related to social informatics. In order to discuss (and possibly to connect) the current Russian concept of social informatics on a broader level with other, more widely-known concepts, it is useful to make a basic comparison of these approaches and their historical backgrounds. Thus, this article compares and discusses the current or well-known (sometimes already dated) concepts from the USA, the USSR/Russia, the UK, Norway, Slovenia, and also the lesser-known Japanese and German concepts. Common ground for cooperation is then introduced, followed by an outline of possible convergence with or divergence from those different concepts. Corresponding author: Zdenek Smutny, Faculty of Informatics and Statistics, University of Economics, Prague, W. Churchill Sq. 4, 130 67 Prague 3, Czech Republic. Email: [email protected] Smutny 2 The article is then divided into four additional parts. Section 2 introduces the background on which the current concept of social informatics in the USSR was formed, by considering the differences and the overall content of the discipline called informatics in Western and Eastern Europe. Section 3 presents the individual concepts of social informatics, with an emphasis on the Soviet/Russian concept. Section 4 offers a discussion of the Soviet/Russian concept and its comparison with other known concepts. Conclusions are drawn in Section 5. 2. Different concepts of informatics The field of study now called informatics has developed differently in Europe, the USA, and Russia due to the state of computer technology in different parts of the world in the 1960s. That disparity was caused by the bipolar division of the world in the Soviet Union era as well as the heterogeneous development of computer technology across the world and the different rates of acceptance of information and communication technologies (ICT) by society in the past fifty years caused that disparity. As a result of new technologies (computer) and new views of the world (cybernetics, information theory), new fields of science developed and older approaches were reconstituted in the 1950s and 1960s. These developments caused the confusion that has continued until the present day. For example, a term which means one thing in Western Europe might have an entirely different meaning in the USA and yet another meaning in the Soviet Union – as shown below on the example of informatics. With the advancement of computer technology in the 1950s, the USA supported the development of university programmes that used that technology and studied computational and information processes [4]. However, the universities gave those programmes many different names, e.g. Systems and Communication Sciences, Computer and Information Sciences. It is mainly because of George E. Forsythe that a single name of this discipline – computer science – was universally accepted [5]. While the USA adopted the term computer science, in 1966 the French academy of sciences formally established the term l’informatique (informatics), coined from the words l’information (information) and automatique (automatic). This term, in the sense of automatic information/data processing, spread to other Western European countries [6, 7]. However, the first use of the term informatics can be found even earlier, for instance in a book by the German scientist Karl W. Steinbuch (1957) [8] and a paper by the French pioneer Philippe Dreyfus (1962) [9]. At that time, the Western European concept of informatics was understood to be almost equivalent to the American concept of computer science. The implementation of the term informatics and the defining of its field of interest was not consistent in Europe either. The acceptance of the term by scientific communities in individual countries varied with regard to how its content was defined, as well as to the time when that happened. While in Norway, for example, the term informatics was already in common use in the 1980s, in Sweden it was established in the 1990s as a more general term, which replaced earlier, more specific terms such as administrative data processing [10]. It is important to note that the current understanding of informatics in European countries is broad, and there are slight differences between individual countries. Informatics also overlaps with the following fields: information systems, information technology, computer science, and information science [9]. In the Eastern Bloc, the establishment of the term informatics had an entirely different history. Beginning in the 1950s, the Soviet Union was tackling the issue of active use of available knowledge (externalised in the form of documents) in science and in practice. The principal determinant of success was whether the available information sources could be used to achieve a particular goal (e.g. scientific progress, economic growth of state companies, or successful implementation of the five-year plan). The traditional bibliographical methods of storing, searching, and processing information sources (documents) had proven to be ineffective for the socialist organization of society. According to the calculations of Soviet scientists [11], each year in the 1960s saw the inflow of 7 billion pages of text into the information stream, which made processing such a great amount of data extremely problematic. Under such circumstances, a researcher was able to peruse only a tenth of the literature published worldwide in his or her field. The accessibility of sources of information and the possibility of their use, whether for scientific research or socio-economic areas (e.g. centrally-planned economy), was then a problem that concerned the whole Eastern Bloc. With the increasing volume of potential information sources (information explosion), the problems of processing, accessibility,
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