Digital natives and immigrant editors, and special issues

Editor: Prof. Dov Te'eni

A bore is one who has the power of speech but not the capacity for conversation (attributed to Benjamin Disraeli)

Kudos and thanks to the three editors of the special issue Ulrike Schultze, Lars Mathiassen and Michel Avital. They, together with the reviewers and of course the authors, deserve to be congratulated for setting the path to a new line of discourse about discourse in our field. This is a discourse not about what we discuss but how we discuss and why we should do so. The European Journal of Information Systems is proud to present this exciting special issue; it fits so perfectly with our repeated calls for quality research that is interesting, for problematization and contextualization, and for diversity (Te’eni et al, 2015). Avital, Mathiassen and Schultze demonstrate how the language games played by a diversity of genres expand our world and make it more engaging. I recommend you begin reading this special issue with its editors’ introduction.

I would like to pick up on one of their points, namely, on what is missing. In all its richness, the set of six alternative genres included in the special issue lacks explicit visualization and interactivity, which are there but only implicitly and in our imagination. Some of these genres such as conversations and storytelling beg visualization and interactivity, and others happen to discuss the impact of interactive technologies such as smartphones and wearables, but none use visual or interactive technologies.

My guess to explain the lack of interactivity in our publications is that in the current setting, it does not seem worth the effort, even though we enjoy interactivity and benefit from it in most other instances of communication. The failure of our attempts to incorporate interactivity so far at EJIS and more generally in our field, such as using Wiki for collaborative reviewing and online forums to openly discuss a manuscript (Te’eni, 2012), suggests to me that we have not yet found the right solution and need to try harder. Incentives are probably a major part of the solution. All I can do now is voice the absence, and embarrassingly, I too take the easy path by waving with a visual rather than tackling with interactivity. The painting I chose is Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s ‘Luncheon of the Boating Party,’ with its diversity of verbal and nonverbal communications. And in my imagination, I also see texting, picture-sharing and augmented reality at the luncheon.

Many of the current editors managing publication are digital immigrants who once read and edited printed matter, while the majority of authors and readers are the natives. The world around academic publication embraces digitality, particularly, interactive digitality and visualization. We can mock Wikipedia for its quality, scorn Facebook for its fake news and criticize generation Y for its impatient consumption of knowledge, its need to learn and work in collaboration rather than independently, and its preference for pictures over text and games over serious learning. Alternatively, we can design new ways to publish in line with the changing nature of knowledge creation and consumption. Generation Y, for whom information consumption and production intertwined, receive news and immediately react digitally. It seems that interactivity affords and invites immediate reaction that is creating for youngsters a second nature of digital action and participation, and that these actions and reactions blend easily into collaborative work and play. What can be more remote from the skills and preferences of generation Y than our current reviewing system, which proscribes interactivity and restricts collaboration between reviewers and authors, or our typical monthly broadcasting of static materials that renders timely reactions infeasible?

I hope that the courageous call for alternative genres in this special issue will trigger future work that leverages digitality in publication genres. In fact, several of its articles argue that the new world of digitality requires new genres to study experiential computing and practice crowdsourcing research. EJIS is determined to keep trying. Educators and researchers are quite aggressive in embracing digitality in the classroom through much trial and error. Perhaps the pressure from the digital natives to adapt the old ways is higher in teaching than in publishing. In any event, EJIS as a system (using terminology from before generation X) must also adapt to meet the new requisite variety it faces. It will continue to diversify the composition of its community, its genres of writing (Rowe, 2011) and their corresponding means of assessment (Ågerfalk, 2014), and in particular, its modes of interacting with the community.

I am taking this opportunity to invite proposals for special issues. Three special issues are in the making: one on security and privacy edited by Paul Lowry, Robert Willison and Tamara Dinev, a second on design science exemplars edited by Ken Peffers, Björn Niehaves and Tuure Tuunanen and a third on philosophy and the future of IS edited by Nik Hassan, Bernd Stahl and John Mingers. A new call for papers on IT-enabled innovation in the public sector edited by Raquel Benbunan-Fich, Kevin DeSouza and Kim Normann Andersen appears at the end of this issue.

We seek new proposals for special issues that pull together a critical mass of high quality and engaging papers, leading to new insights and inspiring new research and action. We believe that the focus of a special issue, the expertise of its board, and the tighter interaction between its editors and pool of interested authors will lead to an even higher quality of articles. The focus of a special issue also makes it easier to find appropriate submissions and to deliver the final articles as a package to those of our readers interested in the topic. Many of our special issues cross disciplines and integrate views by diversifying the editorial boards to include experts from other domains. This may help in sharing ideas across the disciplines to and from our field. We usually insist, however, that at least one of the editors is a current or past editorial board member who knows the spirit and practice of our journal (for more logistics please see Te’eni et al, 2015). And special issues may prove to be an express vehicle for bringing to EJIS the editors, ideas, and genres of generations Y and Z.

Enjoy.