Ten years ago a couple of students (Omer Tariq and Kabir Sehgal) entered my office with the idea of creating an academic journal to publish MSc and PhD students’ essays and articles on Information Systems. Today we have just published our 10th anniversary edition. I am extremely proud that something I pushed for during the first couple of years continues to thrive on its own, and I congratulate Gizdem Akdur, this year’s editor-in-chief and her team for their great work and enthusiasm!

http://lse.ac.uk/ischannel/

This is my editorial from this anniversary edition:

EDITORIAL – From the Faculty Editor

So the iSCHANNEL has made it to 10 years old. We should really celebrate with a cake with candles but that isn’t really in the spirit of this journal. If we are anything, we are forward looking. Our place is charting the future not the past and our regularly changing authors, reviewers and editors ensure this. Only myself – as so called Faculty editor – had remained around to steer the ship (though these days it mostly pilots itself and I simply pen these editorials).

This year’s articles reflect the iSCHANNEL’s forward-looking trend. Big data is reviewed by Maximilian Mende – though, reflecting our teaching here at the LSE, the focus is not on the hyperbole of this new trend, but on the limited rationality available to managers and the imposition of a technical rationality which remains inherently bounded. Also trailblazing is an article by Atta Addo on BitCoin– that most current of topics – exploring the entanglement of materiality, form and function. Drawing upon Prof. Kallinikos’ work, this article stands back to explore what currency is as a digital artefact of varying form. Similar questions are asked of cars in Tania Moser’s article which explores ubiquitous computing’s impact on transportation. This includes the famous quote “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of every day life, until they are indistinguishable from it” (Weiser, 1991).

What however excited me within this issue were two articles which rejected the inherent assumption of this quote, realising that while technology disappears for some, it becomes very much present for those it marginalises. Whether through economics, disability or location the brave new digital world is a barrier to many. It was therefore pleasing to see articles addressing the obstacles of old age in the adoption of telecare (in an article by Karolina Lukomska), and finally a paper by Matteo Ronzani on digital technology and its impact on replicating existing patterns of resource distribution which
support global inequality. These are topics of our time and it is wonderful to see this journal tackle them.
I very much wish the iSCHANNEL a productive second decade and hope our readership will continue to benefit from its insights.

Best wishes,

Dr. Will Venters
Faculty Editor

References
Weiser, M. (1991). The Computer for the 21st Century. Scientific American 265 (3): pp. 94-104.

Written by Dr Will Venters