[1] Another definition is the interdisciplinary study of the design, uses and consequences of information technologies that takes into account their interaction with institutional and cultural contexts.
[3] There are several approaches, which were historically named or classified as social informatics: American, Russian, British, Norwegian, Slovenian, German and Japanese.
[4] This contextual inquiry produces "nuanced conceptual understanding" of systems that can be used to examine issues like access to technology, electronic forms of communication, and large-scale networks.
[10] The heart of such analyses lies in socio-technical interaction networks,[10] a framework built around the idea that humans and the technologies they build are "co-constitutive", bound together, and that any examination of one must necessarily consider the other.
This observation, coupled with the many fields that contribute research, suggest a future in which social informatics theories and concepts settle to form a substrate, an "indispensable analytical foundation"[10] for work in other disciplines.
[7] Conceptualization of international discourse, including current trends in research and direction of social informatics development is presented in an article by Smutny.
Other topical article by Marcinkowski[13] presents a perspective shift from studying only the effects of the implementation and use of technology to the primary discussion of what are the ideological implications of empirical work in social informatics connected with data analytics approach.