Ma. Hearst et J. Grudin, The changing relationship between information technology and society - Hasthe ice man arrived? Tact on the Internet, IEEE INTELL, 14(1), 1999, pp. 8-15
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.