Culture, Society and Advanced Information Technology

The National Information Infrastructure is the major technological development affecting broad segments of the American public at the end of the 20th century. Built upon convergent technological developments in telecommunications and computing and avidly promoted by industrial, government and academic interests, the NII is already changing the way Americans live, work, learn and consume.

Recognizing the potential of these technological developments to transform society, on June 1-2, 1995, the American Anthropological Association and the Computing Research Association, under National Science Foundation sponsorship, convened the Workshop on Culture, Society and Advanced Information Technology. This workshop brought 33 social and computer scientists from government, industry and the academic community together (plus three attendees from NSF, two from AAA and one from CRA) to examine the dimensions of social impacts of the NII and to ask what useful, critical and researchable questions the NII raises for society.

It is important to understand how social groups use, adapt and reinterpret technologies such as computing and digital telecommunications, often in ways not anticipated by those who design the systems or by those who create policies for their deployment and use. New ways of creating, storing and transmitting information are transforming institutions and cultural practices. A dialogue among information scientists, marketers and policy makers, on the one hand, and social scientists, on the other, will enhance the possibility that these new technologies will contribute to a better world.

The workshop found that recent breakthroughs in the speed, communications capability and storage capacity of digital information devices would have far-reaching and unforeseen effects on families, communities, institutions and democratic processes. To understand the social consequences of these breakthrough technologies, government, academic and corporate researchers need to build on the solid foundation that exists in studies of sociotechnical systems, media studies and online communication; in the social science study of computing; and in the social sciences generally.

To further this understanding, the workshop explored the implications of these new technologies for the education and careers of social scientists as well as for social science methods, funding, ethics and theory.