New Frontiers in the Theorization of ICT-Mediated Interaction: Exploring the Implications of a Situated Learning Epistemology

This paper suggests that recent contributions to the knowledge management literature could be taken to constitute a dramatic epistemic shift for the information systems field, which may open new frontiers in the theorization of information, communication, and forms of ICT-mediated social interaction. Specifically, it argues that a move away from an overly “intellectualist” conception of information and communication (and attendant forms of representationalism) offers the prospect of reconceptualizing the role of ICT as a complementary mode of engagement with the life world, which may facilitate distinctive forms of collective sensemaking/learning. Moreover, it suggests that by conceptualizing such processes as a duality of reification and social participation (following Wenger 1998), the specific material constitution of the technology (i.e., the form of the medium), and its significance for mediating and shaping important features of social interaction and the relationships that underpin them, is brought firmly into the analytical foreground. Among other things, this may offer promising opportunities for a more substantive theorization of the ICT artefact (see Monteiro and Hanseth 1996; Orlikowski and Iacono 2001). As a tentative first step in this new terrain, the concept of “digiscribing” is offered as an alternative to Zuboff’s (1988) influential notion of “informating,” as a means of thinking about the relationship between information, ICT, and organizations. The ideas are illustrated and developed with reference to an in-depth, interpretive study of groupware implementation and use at a large global consulting services firm.