Narrative, Blogs, and Social Knowledge Management

Reviewing my notes from Tierney and Lincoln (1997), I return to their declaration of principles to which they feel bound as authors of Representation and the Text (pp. viii-ix):

1. a commitment to "break the science habit"; resist the "tyranny of science"; challenge "the imprisoning strictures of science that create silences"
2. an "ideology of doubt"
3. "a commitment to intertwine the personal with the professional"

That third one makes me think about the direction information systems are headed. Information systems are becoming ubiquitous in large part because they do not require coding by the user. Blogs, Twitter, and other social media bring in more users who make personal and social use of information systems outside of the controlled, professional, clinical domains where our field started. It is all the more important that we take seriously our mandate to be something other than computer science, to look at the intersection of technology with people and institutions... to be, truly, a social science. We must understand the personal and social contexts of all the tools we unleash on the world. We must adopt social research methods, tell stories, provoke and engage conversations, to build widespread understanding of the systems changing our lives.

How to code is trivial; what to code and why matters over all. Computer science is linguistics; information systems needs to be literature.

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