Desperately Seeking the Infrastructure in IS Research: Conceptualization of "Digital Convergence" As Co-Evolution of Social and Technical Infrastructures

Abstract

Large scale penetration of digital technologies led them to join roads, electricity, and water distribution, as essential infrastructures of modernity. "Digital convergence" refers to these technologies' wide ranging effects on people's lives, work, and interactions. Yet conceptions from diverse fields reveal no universally accepted understanding of this term. An examination of historical developments leading up to the Internet era reveals mutual dependence between technical infrastructures and diverse social arrangements including industry, regulatory, and market structures. A set of criteria for the definition of digital convergence (and divergence) is formulated. These provide a working definition that reveals the essential, pervasive and interactive reconfiguration of modern society's technical and social infrastructures due to digitization. A layer-based model is presented as one possible way of breaking up an increasingly interconnected socio-technical world into separate domains that allow meaningful study. We call for action to address the paucity of recent Information Systems (IS) research into the infrastructures that provide the foundations upon which all modern information systems build.

Research Commentary—Digital Infrastructures: The Missing IS Research Agenda

“…Our goal was to identify articles that focused on infrastructure and related issues. confined to ISR, as our review of MISQ gave similar results (Tilson et al 2010). This lack of interest can be partially explained by the scarcity of good published exemplars and the huge challenges in studying largescale complex phenomena unyielding to IS scholars' preferred research techniques.…”

Platform Complexity: Lessons from the Music Industry

“…Furthermore, some inter-module interfaces deployed industry-wide become standards, which shape the dynamics of cooperation and competition [3]. While such changes are at heart of the IS field's concerns platforms have, paradoxically, received limited attention [4,5]. Academic literature on platforms almost all originates from the fields of new product development, strategy, and network economics where the world of bits is rarely conceived as different from the world of atoms.…”

Convergence, Conflicts, and Control Points: A Systems-Theoretical Analysis of Mobile VoIP in the UK

“…For the past few years, mobile network operators have been moving away from the traditional walled-garden model towards a more open network infrastructure based on Internet protocol [27]. A double heterogeneous environment (heterogeneous networks as well as heterogeneous services) has emerged from the interoperability of different technological standards and alignment between different actors, challenging the traditional design assumptions of network engineers.…”