Abstract
Informatics, its artefacts and methods, have fundamentally changed our society and world, from the individual personal level up to the current geo-political powerplay between the US, China and Europe. Information Technology serves as the operating system of our society. This change has happened over the last 30 – 40 years, and the result should be compared with our historic views and expectations. At the same time, despite the enormous success of our discipline, it has serious shortcomings. I discuss some of them, especially the issue of online platforms, and describe a positive “answer”: Digital Humanism. This approach does not only describe and analyze the man – machine relationship, but also underlines the importance of humans in this development: we have to interfere – technology is not god given. This fundamental idea is already supported by a growing number of academics and practitioners from different disciplines and fields.
Highlights
“This is absolute nonsense” was the response by the audience, I remember, at the first ENTER conference on IT and tourism, in Innsbruck in 1994
Today we experience – and are astonished by its transformative power – the complex, technical socio-economic process called Digital Transformation. This is at the surface, where 35 years ago this was called nonsense. This transformation has changed our understanding of Informatics and IT from a mere engineering discipline dealing with a »stand-alone« computer, to a worldwide endeavor that touches on every aspect of our lives
Informatics is broader with respect to both, it does not deal with the computer and its use alone, but as defined by Turing Award winner Kristen Nygaard “Informatics is the science that has as its domain information processes and related phenomena in artifacts, society and nature” (Nygaard, 1986) Following this definition, Informatics has a holistic view on these developments, taking into consideration its broader impact
Summary
“This is absolute nonsense” was the response by the audience, I remember, at the first ENTER conference on IT and tourism, in Innsbruck in 1994. The new players of today have a self-understanding as IT companies, are coming from outside, and diffusing into all economic and societal sectors, with new technical and market services.
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