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This article discusses some key ideas from social informatics research and ends with a brief discussion of the character of the field today. Readers who wish to understand social informatics by learning about its origins and influences may wish to start in that later section and then return to the beginning for a more substantive focus. This article serves as a brief introduction to social informatics for information technology professionals and researchers, and includes numerous references to help interested readers readily locate more comprehensive resources

The goal of the proposed work is to develop a theory of design for building on-line social environments. The underlying hypothesis is that in order to foster the development of virtual communities and cultures, the environment must provide the means to communicate social cues and information: the participants must be able to perceive the patterns of activity and affiliation that reveal the structure of a community and to have a fluid and subtle vocabulary for conveying cultural information. The theoretical foundation for the research is drawn from traditional studies of society and culture and from observations of contemporary on-line systems. Starting with an analysis of the fundamental differences between real and virtual societies - most notably, the presence and absence of the body - the first section examines the ways social cues are communicated in the real world, discusses the limits imposed on online communities due to their mediated and bodiless nature, and explores directions...

This dissertation addresses the question, whatwill be the fate ofcommunityand social relations as a result of the growth of new home-based information and communication technologies? How have social networks, social capital and community involvement been affected by the rise of personal computers, the Internet and computer mediated communication (CMC)? Will the Internet reconnect the disaffiliated, or will CMC only contribute to a further disengagement of American community life? Survey and ethnographic data from along-term study of "Netville," a wired suburb near Toronto, are used to investigate the effects of advanced communication technology on social relationships. Netville was one of the first residential developments in the world to be built from the ground up with a broadband high-speed local computer network. Netville provided a unique opportunity to observe the effects of advanced information and communication technology on people's daily interactions with family, friends and neighbours. The "wired" residents of Netville are compared with a similar group of non-wired residents who lived in the same neighbourhood, but who were never connected to the local computer network. Greater involvement with friends, family and neighbours is linked to use of CMC. Internet use is associated with high levels of in-person and telephone contact, the exchange of support, the growth of personal network and increased community involvement.

Blogging has become the newest communication medium for creating a virtual community, a set of blogs linking back and forth to one another’s postings, while discussing common topics. In this paper, we examine how communities can be discovered through interconnected blogs as a form of social hypertext [14]. We propose a method and model that detects structures of community in the social network of blogs by integrating McMillan and Chavis ’ sense of community [26] along with network analysis [8, 11]. From the model, we measure community in the blogs by aligning centrality measures from social network analysis [17] with measures of sense of community obtained using behavioural surveys. We then illustrate the use of this approach with a case study built around an independent music blog. The strength of community measures were found to be well aligned with the network structure, based on centrality measures. Even though the sample size from the case study was small, once the structure and measure of communities are calibrated according to our social hypertext model, communities can be automatically found and measured for other blogs without the need for behavioural surveys.

The authors examine the experience of the residents of Netville, a suburban neighborhood with access to some of the most advanced new communication technologies available, and how this technology affected the amount of contact and support exchanged with members of their distant social networks. Focusing exclusively on friends and relativesexternal to the neighborhood of Netville, we analyze "community" as relations that provide a sense of belonging rather than as a group of people living near each other. Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is treated as one of several means of communication used in the maintenance of social networks. Contrary to expectations that the Internet encourages a "global village ," t hose ti es t hat previously were " jus t ou t of reac h" geographically, experience the greatest increase in contact and support as a result of access to CMC. Keywords: glob al v ill age, Netvil le, social networks, technology and society. American Behavioral Scientis...

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The question whether computer-mediated communication can support the formation of genuine social systems is addressed in this paper. Our hypothesis, that technology creates new forms of social systems beyond real-life milieus, includes the idea that the technology itself may influence how social binding emerges within on-line environments. In real-life communities, a precondition for social coherence is the existence of social conventions. By observing interaction in virtual environments, we found the use of a range of social conventions. These results were analyzed to determine how the use and emergence of conventions might be influenced by the technology. One factor contributing to the coherence of on-line social systems, but not the only one, appears to be the degree of social presence mediated by the technology. We suggest that social systems can emerge by computer-mediated communication and are shaped by the media of the specific environment. Keywords Collaborative virtual envir...

This paper analyzes the role of Internet Discussion Groups in informal academic communication. It examines the claims in the literature that there are general benefits of academic mailing lists and newsgroups for researchers. Different hypotheses relating to potential contact and information benefits are tested with data of a random sample of English and Dutch university researchers within the humanities, the social and natural sciences. The outcomes support hypotheses about a few information effects and, more often, contact benefits of Internet Discussion Groups. Researchers build up weak contacts that make their research more visible and that make them more aware of other researchers“ work. These weak contacts are useful for the reception of new research papers. As a result, Internet Discussion Groups provide access to social capital. However, contrary to what is stated in the literature, the data shows no evidence for expectations about equalizing effects on the general structure of academic communication. Internet Discussion Groups do not reduce inequalities in the opportunities to use informal communication channels. * The research project was conducted while the author was a Ph.D. student at the Interuniversity Center

As the Internet evolves, its users and uses grow and diversify globally. Data from a National Geographic web survey enables us to compare how people in different parts of the world use the Internet. The widest digital divide is between North America and the rest of the world, and secondarily between other developed countries and developing countries. Substantial differences exist between who uses the Internet and how long they have been using it. The lower the percentage of people using the Internet in a region, the more elite the people using the Internet. However, newcomers to the Internet throughout the world are less likely to be elite and are more likely to resemble the diverse nature of North American Internet users. By contrast to regional differences in the characteristics of users, the Internet is used in similar ways worldwide. Throughout the world, frequent users tend to use the Internet in multiple ways -- socially, instrumentally and recreationally - and to combine it with faceto -face and telephone contact. Moreover, frequent users of the Internet have a more positive sense of online community with friends and family.