SOCIAL SCIENCE AND THE SOCIAL IMPACTS OF COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY

This article argues that the impacts of computer technology on society are an extraordinarily important area for rigorous social scientific research. However, to this point there is only a modest amount of empirical research and a dearth of cumulative findings on this subject, and the conceptual and theoretical approaches informing the research are weak. After specifying the primary sources of our understandings about the social impacts of computing, the article suggests a taxonomy of impacts and a conceptual framework that might guide social scientific research on this subject. The final section summarizes eight broad generalizations that can be derived from the existing empirical research on the social impacts of computing.