Infomateriality

This paper argues for the notion of 'infomateriality' as an orientation for IS research and as an alternative to and in distinction from sociomateriality. It sees Orlikowski’s relatively recent exposition of sociomateriality as developing out of her earlier work, which was heavily influenced by Giddens’ structuration theory. Tracing the key philosophical tradition of process studies, through Bergson and Whitehead, and how they can be used and combined in response to Orlikowski’s work, it presents its critique of sociomateriality as a springboard and justification for the idea of infomateriality

Understanding digital events : process philosophy and causal autonomy

This paper argues that the ubiquitous digital networks in which we are increasingly becoming immersed present a threat to our ability to exercise free will. Using process philosophy, and expanding upon understandings of causal autonomy, the paper outlines a thematic analysis of diary studies and interviews gathered in a project exploring the nature of digital experience. It concludes that without mindfulness in both the use and design of digital devices and services we run the risk of allowing such services to direct our daily lives in ways over which we are increasingly losing control

Informative web content guidelines: A practitioner model for online content effectiveness

With the rise of the world wide web, many organisations publish large knowledge bases as online informative content, enabling access for their current and potential stakeholders, customers, and service users. Providing universal access to information is a key feature of many national laws, ensuring that content is accessible for the intended audience, however there is little focus on its informativeness. Whilst there are many prior academic and industry frameworks for assessing the success of information systems, many of these focus on facets of the system itself or task completion, rather than the quality of the content. Evolutions of the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) have guided practitioners towards accessibility, neglecting the other attributes of information quality.This interpretive study identifies the key attributes that have the greatest impact on information quality, using four action case studies to examine the attributes and identify areas for content improvement. Each action case study employs observations using task scenarios and the concurrent think aloud protocol to elicit user perceptions and cognitive understanding of information within websites and their inherent attributes of quality. The insights discovered from users feed the development of a model for practitioners to refine their content based on a synthesis between existing generalised literature and focused studies within the online space.The Informative Web Content Guidelines (IWCG) is proposed as a new practitioner model for developing and assessing web content by promoting information quality. The guidelines parallel existing industry standards mandated by many national governments to improve online accessibility. Based on results from the case studies, this model combines key attributes from prior literature with three new attributes identified through the case studies: those of fallback, information usability, and interactivity. By combining existing academic information quality frameworks with focused data from the case studies, a specialised selection of attributes for online information quality is proposed.This thesis narrates the study, including the identification of potential information quality attributes from prior literature, the development of a practitioner-focused model based on WCAG principles and validation through a final action case study

Theorizing digital experience: Four aspects of the infomaterial

With the goal of finding new philosophical foundations upon which indigenous theory can be built in information systems (IS), this chapter proposes building around the notion of infomateriality inspired from Henri Bergson’s focus on our experience of time that is both objective and subjective. Infomateriality may be understood via a process philosophy in which our exchange of information and the digital tools with which we now undertake that exchange become constitutive of the physical context in which we live and distinctions between mental and physical have become blurred. Empirically, such digital experience manifests are being studied in an ongoing Understanding Digital Events qualitative research project that reveals the nature of those experiences with the help of four aspects of the infomaterial—embeddedness, decoupling, representation and generativity.Peer reviewed2023-03-2

Against nature : the metaphysics of information systems

Against Nature – Chapter Abstracts Chapter 1. A Transdisciplinary Approach In this short book you will find philosophy – metaphysical and political - economics, critical theory, complexity theory, ecology, sociology, journalism, and much else besides, along with the signposts and reference texts of the Information Systems field. Such transdisciplinarity is a challenge for both author and reader. Such books are often problematic: sections that are just old hat to one audience are by contrast completely new and difficult to another. My hope is that in the interconnections, arguments and thrust of this polemic, readers will discover both interest and insight, alongside a range of new avenues to explore. This introductory chapter sets the scene – today’s digital world of Tech Giants and Fake News, its roots in the philosophical arguments of the 1920s, and the book’s key claims: (i) that the early 20th century philosophical grounding of today’s digital revolution is culpable in digital’s (growing) contribution to the ecological catastrophe unfolding in the 21st century; (ii) that process philosophy offers a new way to rethink that philosophical grounding, and reshape the digital revolution to support strategies to counter that catastrophe. Chapter 2. The Problem with Digital This chapter begins with a brief overview of the research approaches in information systems as an academic field, before turning to the deeper roots of its malaise, in individualism, and its looming consequences. The three branches of Information Systems research, in academia, prove to be a useful lens through which to understand the field: Positivism, Interpretivism, and the Critical stance taken by this book. The ‘scientism’ at the root of positivism is examined, and the positivism in Information Systems critiqued as a historically contingent response to the ascendancy of a new brand of economics in Business Schools after the Second World War. But the computational market-fundamentalist form of economics sponsored in the 1950s (and applied by governments since the 1970s) centred around notions of the individual rational actor as an information processor. The philosophical underpinning of methodological and possessive individualism in this approach is exposed, and its influence upon the development – long before computing – of the science of ecology, and our notion of ecosystems, introduced. Chapter 3. The Future Does Not Exist The philosophical core of the book, this chapter introduces process philosophy. Through an examination of the irreversible reality of subjectivity, Bergson’s famous notion of the durée reélle, and Whitehead’s critique of the bifurcation of subject and object, are introduced. The causally closed ‘time’ of positive science determines existence from the beginning to the end of the universe, be it three seconds or three trillion years. But the reality, of course, is that the future does not exist: our choices are real, and only one of myriad potential futures comes into being at each moment. As Bergson insists, durational succession exists, I am conscious of it; it is a fact. Bergson’s star – once the brightest of any living philosopher in the world – faded almost as quickly as it rose, under the onslaught from the logical positivists whose verificationism insisted that any proposition has no factual meaning if no evidence of observation can count for or against it: all ethics, aesthetics, romance, and metaphysics – and the very subjectivity with which duration is experienced - were thus closed down and dismissed. In this chapter it is reintroduced, to a new audience. Chapter 4. The World in a New Light Many fundamental problems in the world can be seen as resulting from the false philosophy of bifurcation, fixity, and the reification of abstractions critiqued by process philosophy. Being – with all the isolation and focus upon the individual that it entails – must, if we are to address these problems, be seen as secondary to Becoming, with all the connection, interrelatedness, and complex collectivity that it implies. Choices become clearer, between positivism and interpretivism, between accents upon individualism or collectivism, between reductionist and complex adaptive systems approaches. The systemic individualism in Anglo-American societies can be regarded as actually harmful: the Tech Giants severing ties and bonds rather than connecting us; algebraic ecological models actually breaking the co-dependencies and co-requisites upon which real – complex - ecological health depends. Positivism, built as it is upon methodological individualism, seen in the light of process philosophy, becomes a danger to personal psychological balance – cutting us off from one another; a danger to the social fabric – undermining and impoverishing our civic life; and a danger to the ecological health of the planet – ignoring the immense (eco)systemic impact of our activities over the last centuries upon everything around us in the natural world. Chapter 5. A Theoretical Manifesto for Green IT We are not islands, and in a process-relational social organisation much must be held in common. We are individuals, but we cannot survive alone. Four different perspectives on individualism show it to be little more than greed. An ecological economics reintegrating the household, the social, the supportive State, and – crucially – the life-giving earth into our polities is introduced and promoted. I introduce the concept of ‘Infomateriality’ – a non-bifurcated digital world where the physical bodies of people - fingers touching keyboards and eyes scanning screens - are as much ‘hardware’ as cabling, circuitboards and haptic interfaces, and the social practices, power relations, and embedded politics within IT artefacts define all such techné as fundamentally social. Abstract divisions are false, and whole, socially embedded systems should be the focus of IS, and from a philosophically and sociologically much deeper perspective. ‘Tech for Good’ is held up as movement in the right direction. My hope is that this book will help promote action, in the field of information systems, toward a better world, where Green Tech for Good is deployed for Nature, rather than against it