ISIT Seminar: Les Gasser, "The Sociotechnical Imagination"

GSLIS Professor Les Gasser will speak at an Information Systems/Information Technology seminar at the College of Business. His talk is titled, "The Sociotechnical Imagination: How to understand, use, and teach the modern foundations of Social Informatics."

Abstract: After more than forty years of research, the modern field of social informatics has developed numerous insights and principles for explaining interactions among information/communication technologies (ICTs) and social systems such as organizations, societal institutions, and groups. Over time, consensus has grown around these scientific foundations, but there's still little perspective on how to use them to actually do "sociotechnical analysis of ICTs"—to expose specific enabling conditions and consequences of socially embedded ICTs, and to shape sociotechnical design and policy processes.

This talk will present the core theoretical perspectives of social informatics and how they matter in the practice of sociotechnical analysis for policymaking, sociotechnical "forensics," and design.
I'll show how these principles apply in substantive areas of concern for organizations and societies, such as transformations of work, privacy, "big data," and the new problematics of autonomous systems, IoT, and information/cyber warfare. Woven throughout will be strategies for communicating, learning and exercising social informatics foundations, based on many years of experience with introductory social informatics courses at graduate and undergraduate levels.

This talk is based on a forthcoming book, The Sociotechnical Imagination.