Introduction

You may think of China as a rising global power, the workshop of the world, an enormous market, an irresistible culture, or an immense diaspora. All in all, it is hard to avoid. One in five human beings is Chinese. How can Library Trends not take a look at China?

In fact, China has (again) burst onto the world's consciousness during a global moment of wrenching change. As with farming before it, the making of physical things is an occupation for fewer and fewer people worldwide. To borrow from William Mitchell (1995), bits, rather than atoms, occupy our imaginations. What will this mean for social cohesion, for the communities that we live in? What will it mean for the community institutions that we have relied upon, libraries among them? Scholars and others in the Global North have asked a similar question before, when farming ceased to support entire families and communities and migrants flowed to the cities. Their investigation of community in the industrial city launched the field of urban sociology (Burgess & Bogue, 1952; Park, 1964).

And six years ago, Library Trends examined "Libraries in Times of War, Revolution, and Social Change" (Rayward & Jenkins, 2007), considering libraries during past and contemporary political disruptions.¹ The current issue widens that gaze to include communities as well as libraries as they navigate through the technological disruption known as the information revolution.

The Perspective of Community Informatics

The work presented in this issue of Library Trends reflects the rise of a new field of practice and research known in the English-language scholarly literature as community informatics (Williams & Durrance, 2009). Community informatics asks how local communities can and will fare in the digital age, the postindustrial age associated with the information society. Community informatics emphasizes agency: research focuses on the extent to which the community is navigator of its own life. Community informatics recognizes that there are multiple interests in and beyond communities, and these interests may determine a variety of outcomes when communities use information and communication technologies (ICTs). Community informatics follows Rob Kling and others who carried out social informatics research and found complexes of interests that influenced what digital tools were used, by whom they were used, and for what purposes (Kling, 1980). Twenty-thirteen is an exciting moment in the life of communities because these tools are now so well diffused as to be in almost everyone's imagination, if not in their hands. Yet the tools continue to evolve and promise new affordances (Norman, 1998). Crowdsourcing, for instance, invites people to join in and shape the future.

Community informatics entails both challenge and possibility. The challenge consists of joining a social transformation that has been led by others: the military, corporations, and large government agencies. These powerful interests have fashioned information technology (IT) to their goals. In the U.S. in the 1990s, this challenge was named the "digital divide." The term signifies many evolving differences in access to and use of IT, and is related to the older term "computer literacy." Demographically, the digital divide mirrors other inequalities in society: rich/poor, more/less educated, old/young, male/female, able/disabled, and dominant/marginalized ethnicities. While many people on the wrong side of the digital divide demographically are in fact adept users of new technologies, and all strata are adopting technology over time, this is at different rates and so the digital divide continues to deepen.

Just as illiteracy in urban industrial societies marginalized people, data suggest that computer illiteracy does the same thing in the information society. This is because so many key aspects of life—looking for work, applying for work, doing the work, buying goods and services, attending school, accessing one's own culture, and just plain socializing—have moved online. In this situation, what is community? What holds local communities together? Can ICT help, as well as hinder, community building and maintenance? Since the vast majority of humanity lives in local communities and so daily life depends on that community's integrity and stability, this is a fundamental question.

The possibility that is community informatics is just as much embedded in the origins of computing...