Colleagues, I thought that this announcement might be of interest to people on this list, but might not be widely disseminated - apologies for cross-postings. Daniel. Journal of Digital Information announces A SPECIAL ISSUE on Social Aspects of Digital Information in Perspective (Volume 5, issue 4, December 2004) Special issue Editors: Roberta Lamb and Susan Johnson, University of Hawaii, Manoa From the special issue editorial: "This special issue showcases a series of studies that are guided by the methods and perspectives of Social Informatics. This line of inquiry extends a research stream of the late Rob Kling, a pioneer in social informatics studies who strived for over 30 years to make social issues central to discussions about computing and information systems. "Within the past decade, social informatics research has grown to encompass a widening and interdisciplinary interest in studies that carefully examine the ways in which information and communications technologies (ICTs) are bound up in everyday social and organizational structures. It draws researchers who focus on the inter-relationships among people, their institutional and cultural contexts, and their uses of ICTs. This focus on 'ICT use in context' diverts some attention from the task at hand to pay more careful attention to the power relations that shape the task and the setting, as well as the roles of the social actors who use ICTs to perform their situated tasks. "For this inaugural theme issue, we were particularly interested in presenting empirical examinations of ICTs that carefully depict and theorize about the cumulative influences of local histories on ICT use, with emphasis on the everyday aspects of living with digital information in the home, in the workplace, in research labs, in public places, and other social settings. We know that for many readers the contents of this issue will be very different from the types of articles they usually find in JoDI, but we hope this will be a welcome change. We feel it is very important to present theoretically guided examinations of everyday encounters with digital information to balance the more prevalent business-centric concerns and technology-focused projections about Information Society futures. "Although the studies in this issue cover a wide range of topics, they share basic concepts that guide social informatics studies: - Digital exchanges shape and are shaped by community interaction. - History and context matter. - Shifts in identity accompany the use of new digital information technologies. - Going online precipitates unexpected social, economic and political outcomes." http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v05/i03/editorial/ The issue includes the following papers: H. Ekbia, R. Kling (October 2004) How IT Mediates Organizations: Enron and The California Energy Crisis http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v05/i04/Ekbia/ P. McLean, S. Johnson (October 2004) How Oke-Ogun Crosses the Digital Divide - Study of a Nigerian Rural Development Project http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v05/i04/McLean/ M. Raisinghani, A. Benoit, J. Ding, M. Gomez, K. Gupta, V. Gusila, D. Power, O. Schmedding (August 2004) Ambient Intelligence: Changing forms of human-computer interaction and their influence on people and organizational environments http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v05/i04/Raisinghani/ K. Stam, J. Stanton, I. Guzman (October 2004) Employee Resistance to Information Technology Change in a Social Service Agency: A Membership Category Approach http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v05/i04/Stam/ Editor's note. One further paper (Klashner) will be added to this issue and will appear in due course in the issue listing http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/?vol=5&iss=4 It will also be included in the announcement for the next issue of JoDI. -- The Journal of Digital Information is a peer-reviewed electronic journal published only via the Web. JoDI is currently free to users thanks to support from the British Computer Society and Oxford University Press http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/