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Top1. Introduction
The world we live in today is much more a man-made, or artificial, world than it is a natural world. Almost every element in our environment shows evidence of human artifice. (Herbert Simon, 1996 - The Sciences of the Artificial)
Information and communication technology (ICT) has become an important catalyst for 21th social transformation, most notably with radical technical advances in the 20th century to enhance human capabilities (Grübler, 2003). ICT plays a central role in coordinating and delivering value within a complex network of integrated actors (Basole & Rouse, 2008; Carroll, 2012). There are several key drivers for ICT developments. These include the need for greater access, participation, responsibility, and accountability towards information from government, organisations, and society (for example, Tapscott & Caston, 1993; Fuchs, 2009; Van Dijk, 2012; Graham et al., 2013). Ultimately, as information consumers, we play a much more central role in fuelling the on-demand need for ICT-enabled services (Weber & Kauffman, 2011). In addition, there has been growing interest in harnessing more openness towards information. For example, in more recent years, the notion of ‘open source’ (Weber, 2004) and ‘open data’ (Auer et al., 2007) has received growing attention suggesting that data ought to be better linked and freely available to uses and republish without any restrictions (Bizer et al., 2009). Never before have we, as a society, become so immersed in sharing and sourcing information to inform our everyday decisions in this ‘global information society’ (Webster, 2007). For example, information is now freely available online to find friends, to review a book, to find a specific venue, to listen to music, or to explore academic publications. Information is now so readily available, so much so that some commentators propose that privacy will be a privilege (for example, Brin, 1999; Solove, 2004). Thus, information being ported across ICT channels has become an extremely valuable resource in modern society. However, at the heart of all of this lies a significant theoretical gap which fails to examine the social consequences of digital information search.