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This article provides one example of social informatics research, highlighting how the social contexts of information and communications technologies (ICTs) shape their ongoing use. As explained by other authors in this section, social informatics researchers view ICTs as embedded in complex and diffuse webs of technology, institutions and people. Further, they posit that in order to understand phenomenon related to the development, use and ongoing reconfiguration of ICTs, one must analyze the social context in which development, use and ongoing reconfiguration occur. A social informatics perspective builds on the premise that any ICTs uses are situated. This situational factor means that responses to questions of how an ICT is used (or not used) and why an ICT is used (or not used) will vary in part due to the variations in the social contexts of use. A social informatics perspective thus assumes that people will likely come to use similar ICTs in diverse and unexpected ways due to variances in the social context.
While this assumption sounds reasonable, one difficulty that social informatics scholars have is defining what social context means. If we assume that social context entails a tremendous number of potential factors of explanatory interest, identifying and operationalizing those factors most useful to the project at hand can be daunting. And, unlike other areas of research that revolve around a few core theories and their variants, social informatics researchers draw on a wide variety of theoretical frames to provide structure to their investigation of social context and its complex relationship with ICT use. These frames include actor network theory, social network approaches, structuration theory and its variants, and institutional theory. These different theoretical frames tend to emphasize different social context factors and facilitate different types of explanations. So part of the trick of doing social informatics work is finding the theoretical framework that most helps describe and explain the significance of those contextual factors you have determined are most important to your explanatory goals.
An example of social informatics empirical research that emphasizes one aspect of social context - the meaning of ICT for various groups and variation in meaning across groups - is a project that we carried out at the University of WisconsinMadison Communication Technology Research Cluster www.journalism.wisc.edu/ctrc/. Our research draws...