Ims 5048 - the Information Continuum

IMS 5048 - THE INFORMATION CONTINUUM

Topic 7 – Technology

1.TECHNOLOGY AS AGENT IN THE I.C.M.

2.TECHNOLOGY IN ORGANISATION THEORY

3.WORLD THEORIES OF KNOWLEDGE

4.LINKS FROM TECHNOLOGY, INFORMATION AND KNOWLEDGE.

5.REPLACEMENT OF PHYSICAL RESOURCES BY INFORMATION

RESOURCES.

6.DIGITAL PRESERVATION.

7.TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM AND THE ICM.

1.TECHNOLOGY AS AGENT IN THE I.C.M.

Within the framework of the Information Continuum Model, Technology is one of the concepts to which Agency is attributed. Technology is denoted as interacting with Structure, and being affected by it. Technology relates to ‘how’ parts of the I.C.M. work. Technology has enormous capacity to effect change in what Kaufer & Carley (1993, p.209) call the 'socio-cultural landscape' through participation in communicative transactions. It must be remembered that not all categories in the ICM are not mutually exclusive -- sometimes they are 'fuzzy'

categories.

An obvious example of the impact of I.T. on an information-intensive activity is to be found in the business of real estate. A recent U.S. research study of the changes in sales of real estate brought about by the use of the Worldwide Web is described in the article titled ‘Investigating the Interplay Between Structure and Technology in the Real Estate Industry’, by Kevin Crowston, Steve Sawyer and Rolf Wigand, of Syracuse University School of Information Studies, at: http://crowston.syr.edu/real-estate/aom.html. The survey found that the use of ICTs changed the ability of actors to access information, the key resource in real estate. Buyers search the listings themselves and then come in to an agent with list of houses already picked out. This change in control over this information resource changes the structures of domination in this industry.

Third parties are getting involved with listings -- local chambers of commerce list real estate in the hope of luring new businesses to move to an area, for instance. As buyers search for properties on the Web, it will become more important to sellers to have their properties on the Web. Real estate companies may start to lose business to individuals. Part of the commission an agent receives currently is used to pay for different types of advertisements. In this world view, listings on the Web are simply another form of ad and agents are prepared to pay a fee to have their houses shown in this way.

However, from the point of view of Website developers, information like house listings are content. Content for a Website developer is something valuable that will attract visitors to a site, to view advertisements or be steered to some other services. Developers expect to pay for valuable content. This clash of interpretive schema leads to interesting situations, such as agents paying someone to put their listings on the Web and Website developers paying again to get access to these listings for their site. The WWW is changing the nature of selling property. It is also changing the role of travel agents and stockbrokers in a similar way.

One could get by with just the single notion of interaction between Action and Structure, which is the foundation of Giddens' Structuration Theory as well as Kaufer & Carley's Constructural Theory -- but the four Agency Attributes concept-sets in the ICM seek to carry that idea further. The core idea of Action/Structure is elaborated through the gradation from Individual to Inter-societal manifestations of the reciprocative Action/Structure dynamic; and by the specification of the Dimensions, which further explain those Agency sets which focus on the ‘how?’ (i.e., Metadata and Technology). Questions of both ‘how’ and ‘why’ are further addressed by the Modalities. The Purposes focus on questions of ‘why?’

By way of reminder, Giddens' encapsulates the relationship between action and structure in perhaps his most pivotal concept -- the duality of structure. He explains the notions of 'duality of structure' and 'structure' as follows (see Giddens 1984):

Duality of structure -- Structure as the medium and outcome of the

conduct it recursively organizes; the structural properties of social systems do not exist outside of action but are chronically implicated in

its production and reproduction.

Structure -- Rules and resources, recursively implicated in the institutional articulation of social systems. To study structures, including structural principles, is to study major aspects of the

transformation/mediation relations which influence social and system integration.

To Giddens, therefore, action and structure are inseparable. All actions by humans -- 'Agents' -- in some way affects the structure within which it occurs, and structure in turn both enables and constrains the ways in which agents may act. The ICM -- like Kaufer & Carley -- uses an expanded view of agency which includes artefacts or systems capable of participating in communicative

transactions. Thus a book possesses Agency Attributes as it is capable of communicating with a reader independently of its human author (see Kaufer & Carley 1993, p 233).

The relationship between action and structure can be observed on many levels.

An argument can be made that all Action is human action, and that all the rest is Structure -- but this would not take into account another key concept offered by Giddens, namely Space-Time Distanciation:

In structuration theory 'structure' is regarded as rules and resources

recursively implicated in social reproduction; institutionalized features

of social systems have structural properties in the sense that

relationships are stabilized across time and space. (Giddens 1984,

p xxxi)

As we have seen already, social patternings can be 'stretched' across time and space by Memory (Storage/Memory). Memory is achieved through systems of labelling or classification (Categorisation/Metadata), and systems for enabling communication (Technology). Storage/Memory, Categorisation/Metadata, and Technology are certainly aspects of Structure, but are singled out for special attention in the ICM because of the particular potency as surrogates for human Agents by means of communicative transactions. They are the means by which a human Agent -– perhaps long dead, or spatially distant -- can nevertheless participate in communicative transactions.

Recently some interest has focused on virtual interactions in online communities where Technology and social Structure interact. For example, at http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/publications/index.html, you will find an interesting study by Barry Wellman (2001), sociologist, at the University of Toronto, titled ‘Does the Internet increase, decrease of supplement social capital? Social networks, participation, and community commitment’, published in the American Behavioral Scientist, v 45, no 3, November 2001, pp 436-455. Evidence from 39,211 visitors to a researched website shows that people’s online interactions mirror their face-to-face communications, without increasing or decreasing it. Those who are already involved in voluntary or political associations perpetuate their habits online. The Internet just provides another supplementary form of communication, though this may change when use of Voice-Over-internet-Protocol increases. Wellman observes that ‘the Internet may be more useful for maintaining existing ties than for creating new ones … The Internet is especially used to maintain ties with friends … Distance still matters: communication is lower with distant than nearby friends.’ (pp 3-4).

The effect of the use of technology on information-seeking behaviour can also be observed in the many devices provided for online information searching, some of which are growing more and more ‘intelligent’. Google has the reputation of being the most thorough search engine, yet it searches perhaps only one percent of the entire web. See Dibya Sarkar (2005), ‘Going where no search engine has gone before; Connotate Technologies uses information agents to extract data from Deep Web’, an advertorial which asserts (on behalf of Connotate Technologies' Web-mining Technology Pty Ltd.) that searchable databases contain about 500 billion pages, including intranets and other password-protected sites; at: http://www.fcw.com/article88982-05-30-05-Print.

Such systems need not possess 'intelligence' per se to create useful communication, but they facilitate it. A traffic light can serve as a powerful Agent on its own in the assertion of both Authoritative and Allocative Resources during communicative transactions with motorists: Authoritative because its instructions are backed by the force of law; Allocative because it determines how much of the road capacity shall be used by whom at a particular time. It has been asserted (in the Wikipedia, at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_light#Unusual_traffic-light_usages) that traffic light colours can apply also in social contexts:

In some areas of the USA patrons of various social gatherings use traffic light color-coding to indicate availability: red clothing would indicate that the wearer was in a monogamous relationship, amber would indicate a non-monogamous relationship, and green would indicate that the wearer was single.

An unintelligent technological communicative artefact such as a traffic light, using a very simple set of categories (red, amber, green), obviously possesses strong agency attributes.

Technological agents are resisted by many human agents. Think of the continual protests about the use of speed cameras in Victoria, and the accusations that they are aimed not at reducing the road toll, but simply at revenue gathering for the government (see: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/05/04/1083635132318.html?from=storyrhs). On a more academic level, Giddens provides guidance about resourcing structure:

'Structure' can be conceptualized abstractly as two aspects of rules -- normative elements and codes of signification. Resources are also of two kinds: authoritative resources, which derive from the co-ordination of the activity of human agents, and allocative resources, which stem from control of material products or of aspects of the material world (Giddens 1984, p.xxxi).

Devices incorporating some elements of artificial intelligence have the potential to engage even more fully as Agents in communicative transactions. A number of these devices are described at http://agents.umbc.edu/ -- to help with selling online, for example, agents can monitor and audit mentions of your product in trademark databases, domain name databases, specialty databases, publications and catalogs, messageboards, visible web, newspapers, usenet news groups and webfeeds. Each week a new report can be created for you which outlines the latest developments with regards to your trademarks, brands and famous names in these various sources.

Andrew Treloar, a Ph.D. graduate of this School, Project Manager, Strategic Information Initiatives, Information Technology Services, ARROW Technical Architect, Monash, gives three examples of communicative transactions, and their extended significance, at http://andrew.treloar.net/:

· Print

Print can ‘speed diffusion, stability, and consensus’ (Kaufer & Carley 1993, p 291). For Kaufer & Carley print provides an extension of an author's reach beyond oral communication, origination of an awareness of societal reach, by creation of stability and consensus by encoding information. They state that print enables wider communication through speed of transmission.

· Professions

In the case of the modern professions, Kaufer & Carley argue for a necessary role for print (p. 311) in the sense that large diverse professions need to be structured around printed texts. Print is merely a supporting technology, not a deterministic one. The nature of professions depends on the characteristics of a group and not the medium through which they communicate. Like the later technology of electronic mail, print increased the reach of individuals within a profession and thus supported a wider geographical spread of members. Print also bound the members of a profession more closely together through shared experiences of common printed materials in the forms of journals and newsletters. Using simulation models, they argue that a constructural analysis of the impact print confirms the following hypotheses:

o Efficiency hypothesis: print, though multiplicity, can move information faster and bring about more rapid stability and consensus (pp 318-323).

o Expanding Member hypothesis: print makes the expansion in the membership of professions possible (pp 324-329).

o Expanding Culture hypothesis: print allows a profession to have a larger culture yet still reach consensus and stability as effectively as a smallernon-print using profession (pp 324-329).

o Weak Integration hypothesis: print reduces the need for cultural integration of a profession by mitigating the consequences of initial minimal integration and reducing the reliance on co-presence (p 330).

o Strong Specialisation hypothesis: print increases the ability of a profession to be specialised by sharing information more effectively (pp 330-335).

· Academe

In their analysis of academe, Kaufer & Carley find all these hypotheses also confirmed. They also discuss the scientific journal as a particular print artefact. They argue that in diffusing new ideas journals are simultaneously faster than book publication or face-to-face interaction (due to their frequency of issue and increased reach respectively), and slower than newspapers (due to the gatekeeper function of peer review). The obvious question is whether the current system is too fast or too slow. The consensus according to Kaufer & Carley is that many scientists regard the speed of journals as too slow, particularly in very fast-moving fields. They refer briefly to electronic journals as a possible solution.

2.TECHNOLOGY IN ORGANISATION THEORY

Robbins, S., Barnwell, N., Organisation theory: concepts and cases, 4th ed. French Forest, N.S.W.: Prentice Hall, 2002, pp.157-8) define Technology as follows:

Technology refers to the information, equipment, techniques and

processes required to transform inputs into outputs in an organisation.

That is, technology looks at how the inputs are converted to outputs.

There is also agreement that the concept of technology, despite its

mechanical or manufacturing connotation, refers to all types and kinds

of organisations.

Technology is not limited to devices or equipment -- which is often its colloquial meaning. It encompasses the totality of means by which things get done by individuals and groups. Robbins & Barnwell cite Thompson's classification of technology, which associates categories of technology with different kinds of interdependencies, namely:

· Long-linked technology, associated with sequential interdependence. Example: production lines in factories, where repetitive tasks must be performed in a specified sequence).

· Mediating technology, associated with pooled interdependence. Example: banks which brings together for mutual advantage clients who wish to lend money with clients who wish to borrow money. All brokering activity ranging from stock exchanges through retail stores to dating agencies employ mediating technology.