The Social Life of Information

by John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Technology, Sociology, Business, Science, Philosophy, Library Science

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

I'm a visiting scholar at USC and the independent co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge.

In a previous life, I was the Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and the director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). I was deeply involved in the management of radical innovation and in the formation of corporate strategy and strategic positioning of Xerox as The Document Company.

Today, I'm Chief of Confusion, helping people ask the right questions, trying to make a difference through my work- speaking, writing, teaching.

I've also received a few honorary degrees along the way, and in 2004 I was inducted into the Industry Hall of Fame; I was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.

Reviews

[Nathaniel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dated. Unless you're a historian of the evolution of the internet and digital technologies and want to hear in great detail what people in 2000 thought about the future of the internet, this book serves little purpose a decade later. Most of the authors' predictions are laughable by 21st century standards, and they tend to jump from one subject to another as though they have info ADHD. It obscures and cheapens any argument they're trying to make. While certain points would have been very interesting 10 years ago, by modern standards this book is woefully obsolete. I had it assigned for a class (and it was a good class), but I think the only reason the professor still uses it in this case is because he's actually worked with Paul Duguid. There's a reason I could find it for $7.95 on Amazon.com when all of my other books cost $50+.

There have to be many better, more recent books written about the philosophical aspects of information technology than this one. If I'd been interested in this subject circa 2002, it would have been at least tolerably fascinating despite the authors' ADHD writing style. Today, it's thoroughly obsolete.

[Meg · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is easily the most influential i read during library school. duguid and brown explore the many ways in which people use and share information, as well as the necessity of having a social aspect to information architecture. it changed the way i think about presenting information and "information overload." don't leave library school without it.

[Benjamin Fasching-Gray · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the examples of technology boosters going off the rails, and even some of the more HBS Press type excursions inside corporations made for good storytelling. The deeper thoughts about the social life of information remain relevant and it's nice to have some examples from the early days of computer networks and the high point of fax machines.

This would have been a more exciting read when it came out 24 years ago, some of the "click here to save the world" and "here comes everybody" type boosterism that this book is trying to counter has since died down. The most disappointing chapter comes near the end with the authors imagining a decentering of academic credentials without really considering how neoliberal economic pressure has already turned most professors into temp-workers and pressuring more and more USA university students into dropping out. Their vision is better than the credentialing we see on LinkedIn though.

I think I can safely move this from the open stacks to the storeroom.

[Ron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Remember those predictions about the paperless office? Or the electronic cottage, where workers become telecommuters and never have to change out of their pajamas? And what about those claims by Internet enthusiasts who predicted the end of the "old economy"?

Why is it that organizational models for running a business keep going in and out of fashion? What was wrong with total quality management? Process reengineering? Flattened organizational structures? Computer scientist John Seely Brown and social scientist Paul Duguid have some thought-provoking answers to these questions.

Brown has long been associated with Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and is currently its director. Duguid is a research specialist in Education at UC Berkeley. And they're neither cranks nor nay-sayers. Both are firm advocates of change. They just want to point out what they consider to be some myths about information technology.

Brown and Duguid suggest that information technology's enthusiasts don't honor the difference between information and knowledge. Some people "know" what they're talking about; some don't. Knowledge is information with a context, which includes the person or people who have it. As Brown and Duguid say, you can't separate knowledge from the knower.

We forget that communication involves negotiation and then don't understand why others can't always accept what we say at face value. To illustrate, Brown retells the story of how the graphic user interface (GUI) developed at Xerox PARC was misunderstood and unappreciated by the rest of the company -- only to be embraced and taken to market by Apple.

The truth about learning is that it's social. You may read something in a manual or book or newspaper. It may seem like you're doing something by yourself. Just collecting information. But what you read was first made sense of by other people -- writers and editors. They used their own judgment and experience to decide what was worth putting into words and then how to organize it for your consumption. This is all the work of knowledge.

To illustrate that knowledge is a group activity, the authors describe a community of Xerox copier technicians, who developed an ongoing body of knowledge about servicing copiers that was not covered in their training. In essence a support group, they met informally before and after work for shop talk. And they discussed their experience of copiers with widely different problems. Some were so complex they required the knowledge of two technicians working in collaboration.

Acting as individuals, using only their training, they wouldn't have been able to do their jobs. The training was, in fact, only information. Tried and tested against copiers "in the real world," then shared within an unofficial "community of practice," information became knowledge.

I strongly recommend this book to anyone in knowledge management, education, IT, or training, because it shakes up so many assumptions about the information economy and knowledge transfer. It's a thought provoking read that will leave you with a good deal more savvy about how people learn.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review originally posted here: http://marklindner.info/blog/2011/01/...

This is the 8th book for my 12 Books, 12 Months Challenge.

Short version: Librarians, and others in any “information industry,” should read it and ponder its critiques of “information fetishism.”

I bought this book back in May 2005 and finally got around to reading it. I am following it up with Nardi and O’Day’s Information Ecologies which I bought in May 2006. Where this book focuses on the binary rhetoric of “information,” and thus of information technology, Nardi and O’Day focus on the binary rhetoric of “technology.” Nardi & O’Day is 1-2 years older, is cited by Brown & Duguid, and I am hoping they’ll make a nice complementary pair.

Contents:

* Preface: Looking Around
* Introduction: Tunneling Ahead
* 1 Limits to Information
* 2 Agents and Angels
* 3 Home Alone
* 4 Practice Makes Process
* 5 Learning—in Theory and in Practice
* 6 Innovating Organization, Husbanding Knowledge
* 7 Reading the Background
* 8 Re-education
* Afterword: Beyond Information

This book lived up to what I thought it might be after seeing so many references to it over the last 6 years. Originally released in 2000 (my ed. from 2002) I would say that it has held up quite well. Although I would love to see it updated, I truly doubt that much of the analysis would actually change. But with the changes in higher ed, and all of the mergers of massive media conglomerates over the past decade plus, it would be interesting to see if and how their take on the issues might change.

Optimism and pessimism “are both products of the same technology-centered tunnel vision. Both focus on information and individuals in splendid isolation. Once agents are set in a social context, both conclusions—sublime and despairing—seem less probable” (xi).

“This book is particularly concerned with the superficially plausible idea … that information and its technologies can unproblematically replace the nuanced relations between people. We think of this as “information fetishism”" (xvi).

“Our underlying argument in the discussion of education and the common thread that runs throughout … this book is that change is not necessarily occurring where, how, or when predicted, nor for the reasons most commonly cited. Hence, we suspect, many people have become increasingly unhappy with the binary simplicities of predictions about new technology” (xxii-xxiii).

Ch. 2 is primarily about bots, ch. 3 about telecommuting, ch. 4 business process reengineering, ch. 5 knowledge management and learning, ch. 6 knowledge as sticky and leaky, ch. 7 paper and documents, and ch. 8 higher education.

Ch. 7 “Reading the Background” provides excellent examples of what documents do, of the social roles they fill, and of the societies that they help to create. Seeing as I approached this primarily as a librarian that is the area I will focus my excerpts on.

“Among many things relegated to history’s scrap heap by relentless futurism have been, …, paper documents. Here, focus on the information they carry has distracted attention from the richer social roles that documents play—roles that may sustain paper documents despite the availability of digital ones. … …, we believe that documents, like other older technologies, probably will not be replaced (when they should be) or augmented (when they could be), if their richness and scope are underappreciated (xix-xx).

Argues that until we understand what documents do—physically and culturally—we will not understand what they are and how to replace or improve them. A narrow focus on the information that documents carry will fail to result in useful change.

“Documents not only serve to make information but also to warrant it—to give it validity. Here again, the material side of documents plays a useful part. For information has trouble, as we all do, testifying on its own behalf. Its only recourse in the face of doubt it s to add more information” (187).

“So documents do not merely carry information, they help make it, structure it, and validate it. More intriguing, perhaps, documents also help structure society, enabling social groups to form, develop, and maintain a sense of shared identity” (189).

“Documents then contribute not only to forming and stabilizing the worlds but also, …, to reforming, destabilizing, and transforming them. The presence of heretics reminds us that the “information” is not the sole contributor here. The orthodox and the heretics both form around the same information or content. They are distinguished from one another by their unique disposition toward that information” (193-4).

“The political scientist Benedict Anderson provides yet another example of the way groups form around documents. He considered networks so large, so diverse, and so spread out that individual members could not possibly know one another. They nonetheless may develop a sense of membership and belonging if they can create an image of the group as a single community with a single identity. Anderson described the communities as “imagined” and claimed that shared documents play an essential part in this imagining.

Anderson argues that such a document culture made a key contribution to the creation of independent nations” (194).

This is an important work and is still highly relevant. I am going to let it simmer for a while in the back of my mind. But I do think it fits well with my slowly awakening thesis that “information” as a foundational concept for libraries and librarians is a dangerous one.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

A seminal text regarding information science and the nature, dynamics, and cultural implications of information-based innovations. Brown and Duguid staked out a position on innovation that counters the so-called inevitabilism of the likes of Peter Diamandis (X Prize originator), Ray Kurzweil, and other Silicon Valley transhumanists and singulatarians. Moore's law, the ongoing exponential doubling of computing capacity per computing device, will not by itself yield anything but more computing capacity. Nothing of a higher degree of organization (lower entropy), such as self-organizing or conscious machines, will spontaneously emerge from more computing power. Human research, development, and design are required to harness computing capacity to create any higher-order, lower-entropy outcomes. Just as a mind only exists in the context of the body with which it is integrated and from which it emerges, so a meta-mind or any other emergent transpersonal agency could not derive from technologies alone, but requires social and societal integration.

One of the authors' key points, that achieving the greater promise of information technologies, including 'bots' (their term for automated systems), will require human-technology complementarity, has recently surfaced in the very hot topic of human-machine centaurs>, which are human-AI teams. In centaurs humans typically choose the strategies applied by AI systems, leveraging each partner's strong suits to achieve more successful outcomes than either could individually. The general term for this phenomenon is augmentation and the authors used it in the same general sense we do today.

Some of the content feels dated now but, on the whole, the number of persisting valid concepts and the prescience of analysis makes this a worthwhile read for anyone seeking to be well informed in information science, particularly regarding the dynamic interactions among human agency and the technologies we create.

[Liam · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The ends of information, after all, are human ends. The logic of information must ultimately be the logic of humanity. For all information's independence and extent, it is people, in their communities, organizations, and institutions, who ultimately decide what it all means and why it matters." (18)

"[W]e tend to think of knowledge less like an assembly of discrete parts and more like a watercolor painting. As each new color is added, it blends with the others to produce the final effect, in which contributing parts become indivisible." (106)

"Information, all these arguments suggest, is on its own not enough to produce actionable knowledge. Practice too is required. And for practice, it's best to look to a community of practitioners." (135)

"The degree provides a public front of respectability. Behind its broad facade, students and faculty undertake many activities that society directly values. The broad facade also includes some activities that may be socially valuable but are not easily valued in the market. The ability of the degree to shelter these activities from close scrutiny, immediate justification, and micromanagement helps provide society with more diverse and versatile candidates than it knows to ask for. If every detail of a student's learning were held to public account, a lot of valuable experimentation and improvisation would probably disappear." (217)

"[A] tunnel-like focus on information, self-evident and free of context, remains too loyal to the digital presumption of a binary world. So it takes, for example, the useful clues involved in restraining information as merely clutter -- the husk to be discarded rather than deployed." (244)

"To play with boundaries -- of firms, networks, communities, regions, and institutions -- as innovation increasingly seems to demand, requires first acknowledging them." (252)

[Schopflin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not being a fan of the trite truisms and lazy predictions of most business information books, my expectations were not high for this book, its reputation notwithstanding. However, I was genuinely impressed with its quiet scepticism and insightful analysis into how information really works in organisations. The authors demonstrate how so many 'endist' predictions miss how people adapt to change and why technologies are not always adopted as planned. The chapter on higher education was also interesting in its warning of the knowledge losses incurred from separating qualifications from educational eco-systems. What is sad is that Seeley Brown and Duguid's observations were made in 2000. Yet, in 2014, I still hear about the imminent demise of this or that information object or process at every conference I attend. There have been massive changes in the way many of us find and manage information since 2000, many unanticipated. But this book's continuing relevance tells us something about how we can't always predict the future.

[Michele · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dated and not very deep. Despite my sympathy with most Luddite causes, this one exudes a dustiness that's too much even for me. Everything's moving too fast! Faxes are still useful, darnnit!

The main point of the book is we've forgotten that people and institutions are intertwined with technology. Really? Did anyone ever doubt that? Skimming the prestigious, all-male blurbs on the covers, I couldn't help wondering if the authors would have felt the need to write an entire book to make such an obvious point if they traveled in more diverse circles.

Chap. 7, though. Communities developing around texts, from 11th century heretics to erudite letters of invisible college scientists to newspaper readers of colonial America to 20th century zines. If only the rest of the book was as useful as Chap. 7.

One more thing - the word "information" is used in the most opaque and frustrating way throughout the book. I believe it is standing in for "information technology."

[John Ronald · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this audiobook, but I'm a bit unclear why it exists in the form that it does. The audiobook was issued 2017, but the text itself came out in 2000 (that's 17 years ago!). The sociological insights are still valid and useful, but the actual examples are painfully out of date. I am greatly surprised an audiobook of this type was published. What I mean is, I'm surprised there wasn't a revised edition of the printed text done first, in anticipation of an audiobook release, bringing the examples and discussion closer to present day concerns and situations. I found myself "reading between the lines" to apply the ideas to present day circumstances. I wish I had read the original book in library school; it would've better given me tools to articulate and refine my own views (I finished library school in December 2004). I'd still recommend this text to SLIS students even now, despite the year 2000 text copyright.

[Alexander Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book that, in it's own way, is unique and has lots of things to say. Largely this is based around the experiences of working around Xerox in Palo Alto, and fits into a genre of book that "tells experiences of people close to the action." However, it was rather conservative on the details, it still offers life for institutional economic thinking, new management theories, and new management practices that would eventually become ubiquitous to the upper middle class.

But that's it. Once that ubiquity was present, this book simply became descriptive of the times. It does not really rigorously question theories of information as they are, nor does it seriously offer a careful consideration of the institutional practices that it suggests. It simply offers a prediction along with a new language of a world that presently is.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reminding me very strongly of the reading I did in college for Sociology and Anthropology classes, with a focus on enterprise use cases.

I find it strange to read, in 2010, a book written in 2000 about the effect of the Internet on human behavior with information. I can see places where the authors were quite prescient, and areas where they got it wrong - in particular, their prediction that newspapers will continue to be relevant and successful. I think in that case it's a matter of incomplete understanding of the business model of newspapers; craigslist and ebay have largely destroyed classified advertising, and that's a big revenue loss.

[Jim Kisela · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book explains some of the limits of information technology in the context of what was predicted in the 1990's about information technology's future impact on our society. Much of what was predicted didn't occur as predicted or didn't occur at all. This book's predecessor version in 2000 laid out an analysis of why things were working out differently, and this 2015 update uses of the original version as a foundation for commenting on what did happen, or what didn't happen.

The format is a little confusing in that the original book is still there, just surrounded by explanations and comments based on what did happen later. That leads to some jarring comments about organizations and products that no longer exist or are now completely different than when the book was originally written.

The human element from individuals, groups, and organizations sets a context for making information useful. This book analyzes all of these human elements and how they interact with technology to give meaning to information.

[Caolan McMahon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Explores how an information-centric view of the world blinds us to the likely avenues technology will advance.

Makes a case for the importance of peer groups and institutions, of how communities affect learning, and how practice and process interact, when understanding the likely impact of technology.

[Doron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting for managers, consultants and other about what not to miss about information, processes, learning etc.

[Youssouf · Rating 2 out of 5]

A superficial book about the topic of information...I didn't get much knowledge out of the book!

[Kunal · Rating 2 out of 5]

I perhaps read it at a wrong time, but to me this book is trying to push unfounded information down the readers throat.

[Karen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was free on Audible Plus. Its focus tends to go beyond what I expected to read about information's social life. For example, there's an entire chapter dedicated to remote education. It's also very out dated but has a few nuggets of interest. One particular point I found interesting is that with the increase in personalized feeds of news and decrease in a single, printed news source, communities have lost a cornerstone connection in the form of a shared experience. Now with algorithm-driven feeds, this point is all the more salient.

[Beth G. · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book offers a counterargument to the claim that more information (and more Information Technology) will magically make life easier. It is not an argument against technology, but it is a call for more realistic expectations when it comes to things like telecommuting, the "paperless office", and the virtual university.
The authors' engaging tone helps to overcome the dryness of some of the material. As someone who has spent a good deal of time in online communities, however, I felt that the book (and its authors) might have benefitted from a closer look at some of the more social online communities.

Like any book on technology, of course, this book faces the problem of quickly becoming dated, particularly when the authors look into the (possible) future, but it serves as an excellent introduction to the topic. It also includes a bibliography, for readers wishing to delve more deeply into the history and studies behind the book.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this after seeing a version of it on the Web, appropriately enough. The authors, research scientists at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, explore how human beings actually incorporate and share information, and why the technological enthusiasm for things like virtual offices and a paperless society may not have panned out. One of the more interesting aspects, as I recall, was their discussion of how they created a shared knowledge network among Xerox copier repairmen that reduced their isolation in the field and moved away from manuals of procedure to practical, creative solutions that workers on the ground had figured out: a lesson that could be valuable to many offices.

[Ben Kraal · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is essentially a 250 page argument that the idea "that information and its technologies can unproblematically replace the nuanced relations between people" (preface, p.xvi) is wrong.

Obviously we believe this is wrong but everyone who wants to monetise your "friend" relationships thinks otherwise.

It's also, if you read between the lines a bit, a quite remarkable book of design theory that looks at how small-scale cultural changes happen, or don't happen.

I've blogged a bit more about this book.

[mcburton · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW. This book is amazing. Filled with stories and observation about the "Invisible Work" that surrounds information technology and is difficult to frame and articulate. This is a MUST READ for IT folk and engineers. While some of the anecdotes are a bit dated (MAC OS's Sherlock is long dead) the point they are trying to make is ever relevant. Don't dismiss the "old ways" before trying to understand how it was they became "ways." This is a vital starting point for learning about how to "see" the hidden "social work" that is happening all around us.

[Tao · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though many of the examples and some arguments in this book seem out dated now, the sociohistorical approach the authors employed to examine and criticized early utopian predications about an information society remains to be highly inspirational and thought-provoking. The authors demonstrated how looking at the present, and maybe also the future, through the lens of the past could not only be fruitful but also awakening. This is a book about the history of the human society and information technologies, and the lessens we learned and missed from that.

[Lucy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting look at the importance of taking societal perceptions and views into consideration when introducing technological advances. Technology alone cannot overpower the comfort of habit (e.g. predictions of "paperless offices" have been foretold to the rooftops for decades now, where I don't believe it will ever happen). Just because we can doesn't mean it will happen (or that we should).

[Sven · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting view of information technology and the limits of a purely techie view. It emphasizes that information is not all worth considering, and shows how the social environment in which information is generated, transmitted, and used determines the effectiveness of new technologies much more than the technology itself.

Note that this is somewhat dated (2000, 2002) - Google isn't even mentioned in the index.

[Julian Haigh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written back in 2000, it nonetheless provides a dampening to the technophile material I've been reading recently. Arguing the important place of the social in our acquiring and using information it emphasizes the importance (and difference) of knowledge compared to information. Contextual consideration and the importance of updating our ways of learning for us to keep pace with technology, as well as for anchoring our expectations of technology in the social context of knowledge.

[Erika]

Honestly, having done zero research on the book, I just clicked "read" based on the title that so warmly allured me into wanting to read it. Although, after the preface I decided not to give the entire book a go because it was already dated by the time it got published, or at least the sources were outdated. And even though it could serve an amazing purpose of verification and "we told you so", I would rather not put my time into this book.

[Keith · Rating 2 out of 5]

dated.

I read mostly for the section on distance learning. JSB thinks that most learning happens outside the classroom which isn't covered by the distance learning crowd. I think that is no longer true. At least from the programs I have seen. one thing that the distance learning approaches and this book don't stress enough is the network. networking is a key aspect of higher education.

[Bruce · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ultimately a useful book but poorly structured and even more poorly presented. A work of will is required not to drop this book in the middle of almost every page as it stutters and backfires like a poorly maintained Model T. Despite this, there are gems of perception and analysis embedded that are worth the read but make sure you capture them well so that this self-abuse need only be done once.

[John Stepper · Rating 2 out of 5]

A classic Harvard Business book: full of notes and references and classifications that just don't add up to very much. It reads like a very thorough research paper with little in the way of insight or original ideas.