Ethics Assignment 2
Ethics Assignment 2
IN ASSOCITION WITH
OF TECHNOLOGY
LECTURER: MR SICHILIMA
Ethernet.
The telephone line.
Wifi.
Cable internet access.
Fiber to the home (FTTH)
Dial-up modem.
Digital subscriber line.
Wide Area wireless Access network.
What is humanware...??
Humanware is defined in IT as hardware or software that is. built around user capabilities and
user needs.
This often involves creating a. particular visual or physical interface for a given set of users.
The design
Humanware is the combination of hardware and software elements that make human
interaction with a device as
good as possible. Often, developing humanware begins by defining who the computer's
potential users are, what they are interested in, and what they need before designing the
infrastructure.
HUMAN WARE
Computer managers/ system administrator.
Computer programmers/software developers.
Computer operators.
Computer engineers.
System analysts.
Software engineers.
Database administrators etc.
Social infrastructure encompasses formal and informal institutions (e.g. norms about water),
social networks,
and cultural values [59] that can potentially regulate
and maintain physical systems. From: Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 2022.
Since the 1970s, the term informatics has been increasingly adopted to describe
the application of information technology to various fields such as law informatics,
medical informatics, organizational informatics, library informatics etc. [He, 2003].
However, if we use strict criteria to identify a scientific discipline (i.e. international
associations, study programmes, occupational profiles, large conferences,
professional journals, ethical codes etc.), then medical informatics was perhaps the
first to fully establish itself as a new informatics-generated discipline. The other
areas have either not been successful or are still in earlier development stages.
Within this context Social Informatics (SI) has also emerged as another potential
discipline related to informatics. Historically, the first activities appeared in the early
1970s when computerization started to be observed in a broader social context. In the
late 1970s, a critical and explicit SI discourse was advanced by computer scientists in the US,
including: Kling (1980), Mowshowitz (1976) and Weizenbaum (1976)
[Kling, 2003]. At the very beginning, SI sought to discredit the technological
determinism that was dominating the field of computer applications. SI researchers
addressed social aspects in computer science with simple issues like ‘What kinds of
impact does computerization have on personal privacy?’ and ‘What is the ability of
voters to get more complete information through online sources?’ [Kling, 1999].
In the US the term SI is closely linked to the University of Indiana where the
concept of Social Informatics [CSI, 2005a] was formally introduced. According to
[Jackewitz, Janneck, Krause, Pape and Strauss, 2003] the English term ‘Social
Informatics’ was finalized by Kling in 1997. The term ‘emerged from a series of
lively conversations in February and March 1996 among scholars with an interest in
advancing critical scholarship about the social aspects of computerization, including
Phil Agre, Jacques Berleur, Brenda Dervin, Andrew Dillon, Rob Kling, Mark Poster,
Karen Ruhleder, Ben Shneiderman, Leigh Star and Barry Wellman’ [CSI, 2005b].
Before that, different labels like ‘social analysis of computing’, ‘social impacts of
computing’ or ‘behavioural information systems research’ had been used.
Social Informatics: Definitions and Practices
According to Rob Kling, Social Informatics (SI) is defined as the ‘interdisciplinary
study of the design, uses and consequences of information technologies that takes
into account their interaction with institutional and cultural contexts’ [Kling, 1999].
SI refers to the body of research that examines the social aspects of computerization,
including the roles of information technology in social and organizational changes,
the uses of information technologies in social contexts and the ways that the social
organization of information technologies is influenced by social forces and social
practices [Kling, Crawford, Rosenbaum, Sawyer and Weisband, 2000].
A similar concept of SI originating in the organizational aspects of ICT was
elaborated by [Dahlbom, 1996] and in the June/July 2005 issue of the American
Society for Information Science and Technology Bulletin with guest editor W. David
Penniman from the University of Buffalo [Penniman, 2005].
Another approach of this type defines SI as ‘a body of rigorous empirical
research that focuses on the relationships among people, ICTs, and the social
structures of their development and use’ [Lamb and Sawyer, 2005].
A somewhat more informatics-oriented definition [Ohta, Ishida and Okada, 2001]
describes SI as ‘an interdisciplinary study to explore the function of information
within a social system and to design a system for exchanging information within a
society. Focusing on information, SI researchers observe various aspects of human
behaviour and social systems, and examine various information networks in the
society, including an economic information system, a management information
system, a political information system, an administrative information system, a life
information system, and so on.’ According to this approach, SI consists of three main
theories: a social system theory, an information system theory and a theory of the
semantics of social information.
Also close to the above definition is the understanding of SI as a ‘c o m p l e x
interdisciplinary approach, which consolidates/integrates the knowledge from
mathematics and physics, computer sciences, management and humanity sciences. SI
considers the problems of receiving, transformation, investigation, and modelling
and explores the informational flows in large social systems and their models’
[Makarenko, 1998].
In addition to the above definitions, the notion of SI appears in various other
contexts which can be observed on the SI website [Social-informatics.org, 2006],
which systematically collects evidence of research and educational practices relating
to the concept of SI. The SI-related areas recorded on this website are presented in
Fig. 1. They are roughly structured in three directions: (1) ICT’s interaction with
society; (2) ICT applications in the social sciences; and (3) ICT as a tool in social
research. While the first branch (ICT and society) – particularly (1b) and (1c), which
are circled in Fig. 1 – closely overlap with Rob Kling’s initial definition, this is
somewhat less clear with the other areas. In part, the second branch (ICT
applications) – particularly (2a) and (2c) – seems to be closer to the understanding
revealed in [Ohta, Ishida and Okada, 2001] and [Makarenko, 1998]. On the other
side, the third branch (ICT as a research tool) is closer to the understanding of SI at the
University of Ljubljana described above.
REFFERENCES
the community informatics is perhaps better-organized discipline with much moreclear profile
than SI. Similar is true for the area of information society.On one hand, SI seems to be
gaining momentum and a critical mass of activities,which could support attempts to fully
formalize it as a discipline. However, on theother hand, we face an even sharper
increase in its fragmentation, which mightrender such an undertaking very difficult,
particularly because of the abundance ofcompeting concepts addressing the relationship of
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