Critical Informatics:Guarding Subjectivity in Information Activities
Critical informatics focuses on the impact of information technology applications on subjectivity in information activities,and explores the path of guarding subjectivity from institutions and technologies,which is an academic response to the trend of complexity of the information environment.This paper traces the origin of critical informatics,sorts out its logical rationality and research characteristics,and argues that as a new epistemology of informatics,critical informatics inherits the tradition of critical theory,focuses on the lack of subjective status of users in information activities,and carries out a research path of dialectical thinking on information management activities from the perspective of negative effects.Although critical informatics has more intersections with information society critique,political economy information critique,critical communication studies,critical informatics is an active"pathology"type of research that analyzes information factors that may have negative effects to find a path to an ideal information society.Critical informatics has grown into an emerging research field,and the existing critical informatics mainly chooses one of the following three goals as a research appeal.First,maintain the subjectivity in information activities by criticizing the negative effects of information technology applications.Second,by criticizing the institutional shortcomings in information activities,construct the subjectivity in information activities.Third,by criticizing the wrong behavior path in information activities,awaken the subjectivity in information activities.From the current research results,critical informatics mainly carries out research from the two perspectives of technical criticism and normative criticism,and has covered three levels of macro,meso and micro.At the macro level,critical informatics examines the social consequences of information technology and explores its interaction with institutional and cultural contexts.At the meso level,the researches mostly focus on the observation of the interaction between various information actors in national contexts,industry contexts,and organizational contexts,or between information actors and information systems based on information structure.At the micro level,researches mainly focus on the negative problems caused by specific designs or specific information activities in the information environment.Finally,the paper argues that it is necessary to build critical informatics as an important research direction in the field of informatics in China.First,the extension from"using information technology"to"building information order"should be realized,serving the construction of benign information order as an important mission of the discipline.Second,the transformation from serving passive users to improving user autonomy should be realized,reshaping end users into participants with communication skills,self-orientation and equality,especially focusing on how to improve human autonomy in human-computer interaction by transforming the information environment.Third,the focus should be shifted from studying affirmative issues to facing a broader problem space,carrying out comprehensive thinking,improving government supervision capabilities,and serving the formulation of more long-term and strategic governance strategies.62 refs.
Critical informaticsSubjectivityInformation activitiesCritical theory
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