GIS and Society

Geographic information systems (GIS) have emerged in the latter part of the twentieth century as an integrative information technology that includes database management, spatial analysis, and map display capabilities to portray geospatial relationships in map form. In the mid-1990s, researchers began questioning the overall intent of the technology and its seeming bias toward larger organizations, showing that its use privileged certain groups of people over other groups in society. Some would say that continued GIS development and use would lead to a further technological ‘colonization’ of everyday lives making people ‘objects’ of new governmental and commercial powers. Others worry about everybody being ‘geo-coded’, hence the term ‘geoslavery’ was coined. A debate about the ‘good’ side and the ‘evil’ side of GIS continues, but the issues become more nuanced than many of the simple early polarizations, particularly when these issues are more fully researched and deconstructed within multiple sectors of society. The term society is taken to mean a community, nation, or broad grouping of people having common traditions, institutions, and collective activities and interests, or more specifically an enduring and cooperating social group whose members have developed organized patterns of relationships through interaction with one another. Based on a review and synthesis of several documents about GIS and society research, seven themes appear to characterize past, present, and future research activity: (1) fundamentals of geographic information and society, (2) spatially integrated social science, (3) alternative representations of geographic information and society, (4) organizations and institutions, (5) ethical and legal issues, (6) group, public, participation, and community issues, and (7) GIS/society impacts and the social construction of GIS.