Sunday, January 20, 2013
My Understanding of the Field of “Social Informatics”
Social Informatics is the study of online communications tools and how their use impacts us as a society. One only needs to consider the millions of users that rely heavily on social networking tools such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn for both personal and corporate communications to see how the tools have become essential parts of the digital landscape. The tools' potential to reach millions of users around the globe is nothing short of phenomenal. For example, in an article posted on the Forbes website, columnist Lim Yung-Hui stated that, as of September 3, 2012, social networking giant Facebook had a total of 943 million users around the world (http://onforb.es/R6DjnC). Anything that has this far reaching societal impact deserves to be studied. Not only do Facebook and other online communications tools deserve their own field of study, but there is an obligation for the academic community to scrutinize their use. It is through the realization among academics that online networking is a worthy field of study that Social Informatics has grown.
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I agree that this is certainly an area in need to academic scrutiny. I realize that some people find it absurd that the Library of Congress is archiving tweets, but to me that is incredibly useful on so many levels. Sure there are many inane tweets out there, but the possibilities in that information are mind numbing! Think of the implication of that information for historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, not to mention market researchers. Of course where I see social informatics coming in to play in that is in discovering who the users are. What type of people use Twitter, are these tweets representative of a particular population, perspective, etc?
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