The changing relationship between information technology and society - Hasthe ice man arrived? Tact on the Internet

Society and information technology are rapidly co-evolving, and often in su rprising ways. In this installment of "Trends and Controversies," we hear t hree different views on how society and networked information technology ar e changing one another. Becoming socialized means learning what kinds of behavior are appropriate i n a given social situation. The increasing trend of digitizing and storing our social and intellectual interactions opens the door to new ways of gath ering and synthesizing information that was previously disconnected. In the first essay, Jonathan Grudin-a leading thinker in the field of computer-su pported cooperative work-points out tat, like a naive child, information te chnology often ignores important contextual cues, and tactlessly places peo ple into potentially embarrassing situations. He suggests that as we contin ue to allow computation into the more personal and sensitive aspects of our lives, we must consider how to make information technology more sophistica ted about social expectations, and become more sophisticated ourselves in u nderstanding the nature of computer-mediated services. In the second essay, I discuss a related issue-how newly internetworked inf ormation technology allows people acting in their own self-interest to indi rectly affect the experiences of other people. It is to be expected that pe ople will try to trick or deceive systems that support intrinsically social activities, such as running auctions. What is surprising here is that tech nologies that do not obviously have a social aspect, such as information-re trieval ranking algorithms, are nevertheless being manipulated in unexpecte d ways once they "go social." In our third essay, Barry Wellman-a sociologist and an expert in social net work theory-explains how the structure of social networks affects the ways we live and work. He describes the move away from a hierarchical society in to a society in which boundaries are more permeable and pole are members of many loosely knit groups. He introduces the notion of glocalization: simul taneously being intensely global and intensely local. Wellman describes how computer-mediated communication is contributing to this glocalization tran sition in social habits and infrastructure. As networked information techno logy continues to provide us with new views of ourselves, we hope that thes e essay will help designers of information technology better understand the broader impact of the work they do.