Towards an Epistemological Definition of the Research Front of Information and Society

Thomas Virgona
(Adelphi University, Garden City, NY 11530, USA)

Abstract: Defining information and society is similar to defining the weather in many regards. The vastness, ambiguity and rapid change of these definitions are what make them comparable. We now live in a society dominated by information, and information technology. Never before has so much been required of the human being (Ellul, p. 320). One approach to defining the current state of information and society is to use the scholarly approach of defining the research front. The goal of defining the research front in information and society is to provide a perspective on classical philosophies, and are they still valid? This purpose of this research is to define current contributors to the field of information and society, classify what topics are being researched and discuss the current trends. All these elements of research will use history as their backdrop. It is also important to discover if fundamental social and cultural issues are now being changed based on information and technology. The artifacts reviewed for this study will be documents retrieved from peer-reviewed journals, since peer reviewed information is the corner stone of scholarly research. The deeper you delve into the history of any topic, the more you begin to see the connections between the ideas, people, and institutions captured in the archives (Small, 2003). Since information studies are a discipline rich in history and research, it is necessary to implement this kind of depth. In building the research methodology, the starting point will be to construct a bibliography from a database based on a search by keywords, cited authors, cited papers or books, or by a source journal (Garfield, Pudovkin and Istomin, 2003). Other studies defining research fronts have also used this step and initial point of the methodology (Virgona, 2003). Forty-four documents were retrieved from the scholarly database that met the selection criteria. The years 1998 and 2001 provided significant contribution to the population of articles, 20% and 22% respectively. When the journals were categorized by the search areas, half of the articles were from the field of economics. At a high level, the research front for information and society over the last eight years can be broadly defined from the data collected from this study. Although no particular year or author dominated the epistemological research front, research was strongly skewed towards economics, with other fields contributing a sprinkling of research. Philosophy of Information and Society research closely followed the trend of the overall field of information and society. The research was authored by no central contributor and presented 32 unique keywords, dominated by the economics and microeconomics research. Philosophical questions surrounding government’s role in information and society were also discussed in the research. Research of history, as it relates to information and society, is not a major focus area. For the research that was conducted, some clustering around the archives keyword occurred. Contemporary research into the economics of information and society was wide and varied, and addressed relevant subject matter. Confidence in corporate information used for investment purposes is a critical worldwide concern. Economics and the relationship to a culture or personal values were questioned by several authors. Advances in information, communications and transport technology largely define how society’s, institutions and organizations relate to place and space. Social and political aspects of information and society, by any measure, were a minor contributor to the knowledge base. The research front was varied and dispersed over many disciplines. No central author was found in the field in general, and after extracting anomalies and outliers, no contributor dominated the sub-disciplines. Using the data collected, two subsequent studies can be performed: (1) Perform a co-citation analysis of the collected articles to further defined at a more granular level contributors to the fields and (2) Review the journals that contributed to this research to locate a dominate publisher in the field. Although the research conducted was clearly grounded in existing theory, it did not investigate some timely issues previously raised by their predecessors. For example, Moore’s Law, which states computer power would double every 18 months and how controlling information flow has quickly become an issue (Brown and Duguid, 2002). Also topical and growing in public concern is information privacy. To quote Scott McNeally: “You already have zero privacy, get over it” (Castells, 2003, p. 173).

Key words: informatics; research front; history; philosophy

JEL codes: O3, O33, N0, N01