Human choice and ICT policy: Introduction to the HCC8 Conference proceedings

Since its launching in 1974, the Human Choice and Computers (HCC) series of conferences of the IFIP Technical Committee 9 (TC9) has provided a forum for the study of the multiple facets of the dynamics of social change associated with information and communication technologies (ICTs). These conferences have captured the unfolding hopes and concerns about the interplay between the technologies we construct and our personal lives, organisations, and social institutions. Whether the message voiced by individual authors is optimistic and positive about the emerging socio-technical arrangements or worrying and critical, the “human choice” concept has always been pivotal in the discussions of the HCC conferences. In HCC studies, as well as in kindred research streams such as Social Informatics [6, 17], Participatory Design [10, 23], and the Social Study of ICT [3], the shaping of ICT-mediated social arrangements is seen as resulting from the interaction among a broad range of categories of human actors. Early focus on engineers and managers of the innovating work place, each seen as endowed with the formal technical logic of their profession, has expanded to address the pervasiveness of ICT-mediated practices that comprise the so-called information society. Computer users juggling with multiple ICT artefacts at the work place, entrepreneurs taking risk with new-technology-incorporating products and processes, consumers, corporate executives creating competitive advantage with new business models, government regulators setting the norms of the innovation arena, NGO activists forging the values of ICT-mediated civil spaces, citizens