Information, communication and society

The aim of this paper is to explore the role of information science within the context of communication in society: consequently, ‘information science’ is here defined predominantly as a social science. Clearly, there are aspects of information, its organization and communication, that are explored outside a social science framework. The most obvious of these is information retrieval research, where the methods employed could not be labelled ‘sociological’ under any definition. [Of course, we might speculate as to whether information retrieval research might benefit from a sociological approach and, if so, what benefits might follow – but that would be another paper.]