Social informatics: Now and then

A decade after the passing of Rob Kling, social informatics scholars come together on this panel to discuss the past and current state of social informatics research. This panel will provide an overview of the trajectory of social informatics from its emergence in Norway in the early 1980s to its current status as a scientific and intellectual movement uniquely positioned to investigate computerization and society. From the late 1970s, Kling and his colleagues engaged in the study of the social aspects of computing (Dutton, 2005) that would become arguably the most significant version of social informatics when labeled as such in 1996. Social informatics was defined as "the interdisciplinary study of the design, uses and consequences of information technology that takes into account their interaction with institutional and cultural contexts" (Kling, 1999). At that time, the call to incorporate the social, political, and cultural dimensions of ICT design and use threw down the gauntlet, moving the study of computerization and society in a decidedly social direction. Early social informatics research was primarily ethnographic and site specific or based on limited discourse analysis involving smaller case studies. However, in the last decade, the rise and pervasiveness of social media, has intensified the need to understand the interaction between the social and the technical making social informatics more relevant than ever. Recently, some social informatics scholars have heeded the call and have become engaged more intensively in case studies and comparative analysis while others are conducting large-scale research, involving big data and quantitative techniques. Both types of research are driving social informatics into the next stage of its evolution.