The Social Life of Information [Hardcover]

John Seely Brown (Author), Paul Duguid (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 2000

To see the future we can build with information technology, we must look beyond mere information to the social context that creates and gives meaning to it. For years, pundits have predicted that information technology will obliterate the need for almost everything - from travel to supermarkets to business organizations to social life itself. Individual users, however, tend to be more sceptical. Beaten down by info-glut and exasperated by computer systems fraught with software crashes, viruses, and unintelligible error messages, they find it hard to get a fix on the true potential of the digital revolution. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid help us to see through frenzied visions of the future to the real forces for change in society.They argue that the gap between digerati hype and end-user gloom is largely due to the 'tunnel vision' that information-driven technologies breed. We've become so focused on where we think we ought to be - a place where technology empowers individuals and obliterates social organizations - that we often fail to see where we're really going and what's helping us get there. We need, they argue, to look beyond our obsession with information and individuals to include the critical social networks of which these are always a part. Drawing from rich learning experiences at Xerox PARC, from examples such as IBM, Chiat/Day Advertising, and California's 'Virtual University', and from historical, social, and cultural research, the authors sharply challenge the futurists' sweeping predictions.They explain how many of the tools, jobs, and organizations seemingly targeted for future extinction in fact provide useful social resources that people will fight to keep. Rather than aiming technological bullets at these 'relics', we should instead look for ways that the new world of bits can learn from and complement them. Arguing elegantly for the important role that human sociability plays, even - perhaps especially - in the world of bits, "The Social Life of Information" gives us an optimistic look beyond the simplicities of information and individuals. It shows how a better understanding of the contribution that communities, organizations, and institutions make to learning, working and innovating can lead to the richest possible use of technology in our work and everyday lives.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

How many times has your PC crashed today? While Gordon Moore's now famous law projecting the doubling of computer power every 18 months has more than borne itself out, it's too bad that a similar trajectory projecting the reliability and usefulness of all that power didn't come to pass, as well. Advances in information technology are most often measured in the cool numbers of megahertz, throughput, and bandwidth--but, for many us, the experience of these advances may be better measured in hours of frustration.

The gap between the hype of the Information Age and its reality is often wide and deep, and it's into this gap that John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid plunge. Not that these guys are Luddites--far from it. Brown, the chief scientist at Xerox and the director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and Duguid, a historian and social theorist who also works with PARC, measure how information technology interacts and meshes with the social fabric. They write, "Technology design often takes aim at the surface of life. There it undoubtedly scores lots of worthwhile hits. But such successes can make designers blind to the difficulty of more serious challenges--primarily the resourcefulness that helps embed certain ways of doing things deep in our lives."

The authors cast their gaze on the many trends and ideas proffered by infoenthusiasts over the years, such as software agents, "still a long way from the predicted insertion into the woof and warp of ordinary life"; the electronic cottage that Alvin Toffler wrote about 20 years ago and has yet to be fully realized; and the rise of knowledge management and the challenges it faces trying to manage how people actually work and learn in the workplace. Their aim is not to pass judgment but to help remedy the tunnel vision that prevents technologists from seeing larger the social context that their ideas must ultimately inhabit. The Social Life of Information is a thoughtful and challenging read that belongs on the bookshelf of anyone trying to invent or make sense of the new world of information. --Harry C. Edwards

From Publishers Weekly

From the chief scientist of Xerox Corporation and a research specialist in cultural studies at UC-Berkeley comes a treatise that casts a critical eye at all the hype surrounding the boom of the information age. The authors' central complaint is that narrowly focusing on new ways to provide information will not create the cyber-revolution so many technology designers have visualized. The problem (or joy) is that information acquires meaning only through social context. Brown and Duguid add a humanist spin to this idea by arguing, for example, that "trust" is a deep social relation among people and cannot be reduced to logic, and that a satisfying "conversation" cannot be held in an Internet chat room because too much social context is stripped away and cannot be replaced by just adding more information, such as pictures and biographies of the participants. From this standpoint, Brown and Duguid contemplate the future of digital agents, the home office, the paperless society, the virtual firm and the online university. Though they offer many insightful opinions, they have not produced an easy read. As they point out, theirs is "more a book of questions than answers" and they often reject "linear thinking." Like most futurists, they are fond of long neologisms, but they are given to particularly unpronounceable ones like "infoprefixification" (the tendency to put "info" in front of words). The result is an intellectual gem in which the authors have polished some facets and, annoyingly, left others uncut. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press; 1 edition (February 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0875847625
• ISBN-13: 978-0875847627
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (57 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #143,467 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

190 of 201 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Social Life of Reviewers, October 19, 2000

By 

James Bach - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Social Life of Information (Hardcover)

If you would like proof of the authors' thesis in the Social Life of Information, all you have to do is read all the reviews for the book. Take a moment and do that, then come back here...

Finished? Any thoughts?

Okay, here's their basic thesis: most interesting information is socially situated, socially constructed, or otherwise impossible to tear from its human roots and package into transferrable units of "knowledge". This has major implications for the viability of certain kinds of information systems, educational programs, and the evolution of an "information society". Yet, most information workers and information products appear to be oblivious to these implications.

The proof? Ask yourself how you feel when you read a book review on-line. How do you feel when one review raves about the book and another review lambasts it? How do you feel when a reviewer gives you instructions that he expects you to follow, as I just gave? Do you follow them? What point is there to my asking "any thoughts?" when obviously you can't answer?

You don't know me. You can't trust me. I'm not a part of your social system. The only way I can participate in your learning at all is if you see in these words something that touches you... and if so, that is little more than a happy coincidence: neither of us could have planned it.

My point is that these reviews offer an illusion of a social system, but there's nothing much behind that illusion. It's cool write one, yes, in the way that scratching my name on a tree used to feel cool. But I find it very difficult to put these reviews to any practical use. I can't know who to trust. Isn't that how you feel, too? Consequently, these reviews are not capsules of knowledge pouring into your thirsty head. This review system is an example of the sort of shallow informationism that the authors complain about in their fascinating book.

So why am I writing a review if I don't think it's likely that you'll find what I say useful? Well, I'm really writing to my students and colleagues, with each of whom I already have a connection. You know who you are. I teach software quality assurance and testing. This is a wonderful book that I recommend as a tool for making sense of how a process specialist's place in the social order influences his prospects for getting anything useful done.

This book drove the final nail in the coffin of my hope that if I could only write a good enough process document, someone would follow the processes I prescribe. Now I know better. Not because Brown and Duguid say so (I don't know them, either) but because what they say rings so true to my *own* experience. People learn primarily by doing and experiencing in a system that includes other people. We are not merely information consumers. Process standardization, in the knowledge world, is therefore a fruitless or dangerous pursuit without considering the social context of practices.

Thanks for reading. (why am I thanking you? I'm stuck in this illusion of online society!)

For more on this, see my review of Cognition in the Wild. I can't promise that will help, but you might get lucky.

-- James

81 of 84 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lucid, intelligent look beyond technohype, March 24, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Social Life of Information (Hardcover)

This is one of the few indispensible books of the new information age, one that tempers the misleading fantasies of cyberutopians and rebuffs those who fear technology. By putting technology into its social context, the authors clear away the tunnel vision of so many people involved in the development of new technologies. By bringing together case studies from Xerox and other companies, they show why some technologies catch on and others don't, why imposing technology on workers is counterproductive and how people use technology to reinforce their social webs. Far from undermining our social, human world, technology ends up bending to it. They show why the Internet will not destroy universities, cities, nations and other institutions in the way so many people predict. This is a lucid, well-written book, mercifully free from technobluster and dreary jargon. A really excellent read.

29 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Excellent Overview of the Limitations of Technology, April 6, 2000

By 

Steven K. Szmutko (EWING, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: The Social Life of Information (Hardcover)

The book is an excellent study of the limitations of information technology and should be read especially by those technocrats who believe that any organizational problem can be solved by stuffing more and more information into a computer database. The authors remind us that these technologies should be tools, the means to an end ... but not the ends in themselves.

Advances in technology have, in many ways, been wonderful. Taken to an extreme however, the mindless application of technology for the sake of technology does not nothing but reduce productivity and raise tension levels in organizations. The Authors rightly point out that information is best when it is the servant, enhancing the abilities of people rather than forcing them into narrow constraints.

I would recommend this book highly to anyone who must deal with the increasing deluge of information in any organization. After all, any technology is best when it incorporates the humanity of its creators and users.