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Ethics Assignment 2

This document discusses social informatics and related concepts. It provides definitions of social informatics from various scholars. Social informatics 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. It examines the social aspects of computerization, including the roles of IT in social and organizational changes. The document also discusses the development of social informatics as a field of study and provides examples of related areas covered by social informatics research.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
8 views

Ethics Assignment 2

This document discusses social informatics and related concepts. It provides definitions of social informatics from various scholars. Social informatics 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. It examines the social aspects of computerization, including the roles of IT in social and organizational changes. The document also discusses the development of social informatics as a field of study and provides examples of related areas covered by social informatics research.

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THE UNIVERSITY OF ZAMBIA

IN ASSOCITION WITH

ZAMBIA UNIVERSITY COLLEGE

OF TECHNOLOGY

NAME: MATTHEWS KALENGE

STUDENT ID: 2110309

PROGRAM: BACHELOR CYBER SECURITY YEAR 4

COURSE: ETHICS AND CYBER LAW

COURSE CODE: SEC4403

LECTURER: MR SICHILIMA

DATE: 19TH MARCH,2024.


Introduction
There is a complex relationship between information communication technology
(‘ICT’) and the corresponding social context. We could even say that modern
societies and ICT have become intertwined – we cannot understand one without
understanding the other. One specific approach to address this interaction is the
concept of Social Informatics (‘SI’). Various definitions of SI exist; however, SI is
typically understood as a multidisciplinary study of the social aspects of ICT. In its
broadest sense, SI covers an extremely wide range of areas, from the usability of
computer hardware to information privacy, from information sociology to specific
web applications. In addition, the notion of SI considerably overlaps with the
concepts of informatics (particularly community informatics) and the notion of
information society. Various competitive concepts also exist which integrate the
technical aspects of modern ICTs with social, economic, legal and ethical
dimensions such as the e-social sciences and cyber-infrastructure.
What is Access Technology
A technology that captures an expression of functional intent (e.g., physical movement or
physiological change)
from the user via sensors, and processes the ensuing electrical signal into a control signal
that drives
some user interface (e.g., AAC, ECU or computer). The access technology encompasses an
access
pathway and a signal processing block.
Access is the. [a]bility and means to communicate with (i.e., provide input to or receive output
from),
or otherwise make use of any information, resource,
or component in a classified automated information system.
Some of the examples of Access Technology are listed below:

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.

Some of the examples of Humanware are listed below:

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.

The Development of Social InformaticsInformatics or information science is basically the


study of information. It isprimarily concerned with the structure, creation, management,
storage, retrieval,dissemination and transfer of information [Wikipedia, 2006]. However,
very oftenthe label informatics is used with a narrower meaning, i.e. to describe
appliedinformation sciences per se. In any case, the term itself is relatively new. It was onlyin
1962 that the French informatique, informatics (English), informatik (German)and
informatica (Italian, Spanish) was coined by Dreyfus to refer to the applicationof computers
to store and process information [Fourman, 2002]. Informatics in itsbroader sense
includes the study of applications of information in organizations, itsperception among
users and the corresponding interaction between users,organizations and information
systems. Frequently, but not always, informatics isalso perceived as a specific branch of
the computer sciences. However, informatics ismore problem-oriented whereas computer
science is technology-oriented. There arealso some regional specifics; in the US, for
example, the term computer sciencedominates while in Europe we encounter the labels
‘information science’ and‘informatics’ much more often.

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
ICT and modern societies.References[Bieber, Gurstein, Civille, White, Silver and Kolko,
2002], M. Bieber, M. Gurstein, R. Civille,N. White, D. Silver and B. Kolko, Trends and Issues
in the Emerging Field ofCommunity Informatics, A White Paper Exploring Research – final
draft, 2002 (March10, 2006); www.is.njit.edu/vci/vci-white-paper.doc.[Bradley University,
2006], Minor in Social Informatics, Bradley University, 2006 (March 10,2006);
http://www.bradley.edu/las/soc/soc/si.html.[Bulletin, 2005], W. D. Penniman, S. Sawyer, A.
Halavais, E. Davenport and K. R.Eschenfelder, Special issue devoted to the Social
Informatics, American Society forInformation Science and Technology Bulletin, June/July
2005, Volume 31, Number 5(February 1, 2006);
http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Jun-05/index.html.[Chuo University, 2001], Overview of Chuo
University and Social Informatics, School ofSocial Informatics, Chuo University, 2001 (March
10, 2006);http://www.saitolab.com/english/overchuo.html.[CiteULike, 2006], Tag social-
informatics, 2006 (March 10, 2006);http://www.citeulike.org/tag/social-informatics.[CSI,
2005a], About Social Informatics, Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics, 2005(February 1,
2006); http://rkcsi.indiana.edu/index.php/about-social-informatics.[CSI, 2005b], History of the
Term, Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics, 2005 (February 1,2006);
http://rkcsi.indiana.edu/index.php/history-of-the-term.[Dahlbom, 1996], B. Dahlbom, The New
Informatics, Scandinavian Journal of InformationSystems, 1996, 8(2), pp. 29-48 (February 1,
2006); http://www.e-sjis.org/journal/volumes/volume08/articles/no2/02_dahlbom_p29-48.pdf.
[Fair, 2005], Social Informatics Fair 2005, Kyoto, Japan, 2005 (March 10,
2006);http://www.lab7.kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp/sifair2005/.[Fourman, 2002], M. Fourman, Division of
Informatics, in Encyclopedia of Information andLibrary Science, second edition, edited by J.
Feather and P. Sturges (Routledge, London,2002), (February 1, 2006);
http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/publications/online/0139.pdf.[Grosseck, 2004], G. Grosseck, Repere.

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