The Social Life of Information

Rating:
Summary: Healthy Skepticism
Review: All too often we forget that every implementation of a technology is based on a model of human behavior. From computer programmers to organizational engineers, all implementers build tools for people to use based on their own models of how people do things.

In The Social Life of Information, authors Brown and Duguid apply this observation to a variety of technological implementations to explain why some have worked, why some haven't, and how some might work in the future.

As the title suggests, they focus on information technologies. They argue that many of these disappoint (like the programmable VCR) because their implementers have failed to recognize that people do some things best in social groups. Learning, in particular, they claim, is poorly served by the popular model of information transfer over the net to a lone surfer working from home in the middle of the night.

Likewise, the predicted death (de-implementation?) of an established technology (like the newspaper) fails to occur because the prediction flows from a flawed model of how we really use it.

Skepticism regarding an underlying model of human behavior recurs in several discussions:

1. Bots: how can software agents find what we want when we don't even know ourselves?
2. Reengineering: isn't it within rather than across functions that we develop knowledge?
3. Despacialization: why then Silicon Valley?
4. Paperless office: why do we keep using more paper?
5. Personalized news service: what will we talk about?
6. Information: why does it fall short of knowledge?

This list is not exhaustive, but it conveys the general tenor, which is predominantly critical, although in the final chapter the authors apply their ideas in speculating how technology might shape the future of the university.

Anyone who implements technology solutions or who has an interest in technology's effect on society should read this book. Much of its factual basis is familiar, but in a strange way that is precisely the point-we can understand the world to come by looking more closely at the world as we know it.

Rating:
Summary: Healthy Skepticism
Review: All too often we forget that every implementation of a technology is based on a model of human behavior. From computer programmers to organizational engineers, all implementers build tools for people to use based on their own models of how people do things.

In The Social Life of Information, authors Brown and Duguid apply this observation to a variety of technological implementations to explain why some have worked, why some haven't, and how some might work in the future.

As the title suggests, they focus on information technologies. They argue that many of these disappoint (like the programmable VCR) because their implementers have failed to recognize that people do some things best in social groups. Learning, in particular, they claim, is poorly served by the popular model of information transfer over the net to a lone surfer working from home in the middle of the night.

Likewise, the predicted death (de-implementation?) of an established technology (like the newspaper) fails to occur because the prediction flows from a flawed model of how we really use it.

Skepticism regarding an underlying model of human behavior recurs in several discussions:

1. Bots: how can software agents find what we want when we don't even know ourselves?
2. Reengineering: isn't it within rather than across functions that we develop knowledge?
3. Despacialization: why then Silicon Valley?
4. Paperless office: why do we keep using more paper?
5. Personalized news service: what will we talk about?
6. Information: why does it fall short of knowledge?

This list is not exhaustive, but it conveys the general tenor, which is predominantly critical, although in the final chapter the authors apply their ideas in speculating how technology might shape the future of the university.

Anyone who implements technology solutions or who has an interest in technology's effect on society should read this book. Much of its factual basis is familiar, but in a strange way that is precisely the point-we can understand the world to come by looking more closely at the world as we know it.

Rating:
Summary: Tell me something I don't already know
Review: As a doctoral student working in the area of innovation management, I was pleased to see this work come out. It offers an opposing view to the futuristic, pie-in-the-sky hype associated with each successive wave of IT innovation. It is a book that is relevant and necessary, as the alleged promise of information technology has apparently caused individuals conversant with innovation management, diffusion of innovation, and the like to forget the fundamental principles underlying the diffusion of innovations. Not great, but a good critique.

Rating:
Summary: First the "Good News"...and Then the "Bad News"
Review: As I read this book, I realized I was again engaged in one form of what the authors refer to as "the social life of information": They shared their own ideas with me; I then correlated them with what my mind already possessed. One result was, that my curiosity about this complicated subject was stimulated to learn more about it even as, meanwhile, I now share information with those who read this review. There has been a "social life of information" since the first time one human being communicated with another. Over time, man has devised all manner of ways to overcome various barriers to effective communication (barriers which include distance and cost) with inventions such as the printing press, telegraph, telephone, radio, television, and computer. Never before has there been more information available than there is now; moreover, never before has there been more and better ways by which to share it. In this volume, Brown and Duguid examine major technological achievements in terms of the gap between what each has contributed to society thus far, and, what each could yet contribute.

Of special interest to me is the as yet unfulfilled potential of telecommunications convergence For example, consider my situation. Atop a large table in my study, I have a computer, a printer, a facsimile machine, a DSL modem, and an adjustable lamp as well as a cordless telephone housed within a unit which records messages. Beneath this same table, there are more than 200,000 wires and cables. In the living room nearby, I have a television set; on top of it, a VCR, a DVD player, and some kind of box which AT&T Broadband installed. We need to have four different remote control devices near at hand. Only my wife knows which one to use when. Behind the television set, approximately 53,000 wires and cables. Oh sure, if I wished to spend the money, I could have someone come in and achieve in both areas the convergence to which I referred. Having read this book, I now view the current communications situation as being anti-social while conceding that at least I do not need a separate television set for each channel I wish to view.

Brown and Duguid know exactly what I am talking about. With uncommon precision as well as eloquence, they urge their reader to consider quite carefully what information is, how it can be exchanged, and why the nature and extent of that exchange are among the defining characteristics of any society. They observe, "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." This is precisely what James O'Toole has in mind when, in Leading Change, he refers to what he calls "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom."

Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out Albert Borgmann's Holding On to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium, Douglas S. Robertson's The New Renaissance: Computers and the Next Level of Civilization, and Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian's Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the New Economy.

Rating:
Summary: Making the Information Age Humanly Habitable
Review: Brown and Duguid have succeeded in writing a book which is eminently useful for understanding how new information technologies will (and will not) change a wide variety of human institutions and endeavors. By showing the importance of paying attention to social contexts, practices, and communities which make it possible for information to be meaningful and useful, the authors point us past both hype and doomsday scenarios to the real possibilities of new information technologies. The chapter "Re-education" is the most balanced brief account of "distance education" I've read.

A careful, no-easy-answers book which is yet remarkably reader friendly.

Rating:
Summary: Exponentially dull
Review: Considering its provenance – the director of the famed Xerox PARC and a leading scholar from a leading Silicon Valley university – this is a deeply disappointing book. Its simple thesis is that when designing information technology and systems, one should not neglect to take into account the individual and social human factors that inevitably affect their adoption and use.

Well, as they say, Duh!

They take the easy if dubious route to proof by setting up straw futurists who, they claim, create hyped-up visions of the future based only on technology, not on human behavior. Page 52, for example, in the context of designing intelligent agents/bots: “Development will be ill served by people who merely redefine elaborate social processes in terms of the things that bots do well.” Who are these people? They do not say, but to me these people sound suspiciously like academic researchers, instead of the sci-tech hacks hired at commercial labs like Xerox PARC.

It is true that technologists sometimes neglect, for reasons good and bad, the social dimension. But if their goal was purely technology development, so what? If a technology does not get adopted, it is not necessarily a failure in the grand scheme of things. It may be a real enough failure to the financial backer banking on the income it would generate, but to the true developer it shows, at the very least, one way not to go, and at best it points to one or more better ways to go. George Boole redefined elaborate mathematical processes in terms of things his logical operators did well, and it did not exactly take his world by storm. But it sure as heck took ours. The videophone was not, as SB and D clearly think, a failure. It was a necessary step in the development of a system that might eventually really work. It led to the development of standards, of newer and better technologies, and to a better understanding of the human and social factors of videophone adoption and use.

The bulk of the book is old hat: differences between data/information/knowledge/wisdom; the rise and fall of the paperless office; the algorithmic nature of technology vs. the heuristic nature of people; etc. It’s a hat recycled so often it would take a model of rare style to attract critical acclaim in modeling it. Alas, style is something else the book signally lacks. The prose is tedious, dull and uninspiring, the concepts are vague and timidly offered, and there is no real ending. Perhaps that’s appropriate, since the authors declare themselves enemies of “endism” – of the straw futurists who claim that the “6 Ds” (Demassification, Decentralization, Denationalization, Despacialization, Disintermediation, and Disaggregation) are going to put an end to everything from the pyramidal organization to newspapers to the nation-state. The futurists I have read who say anything like that generally add “as we know them,” and if Seely Brown and Duguid cannot see that in that respect the futurists have been demonstrably and importantly right, then the vacuity is theirs, not the futurists’. They are at pains to say they have no answers, as though this excuses the vacuity. It might – if only they had some original questions.

Finally, perhaps the book’s biggest shortcoming is its failure to consider the exponent in both technological and social development. For example, they contrast the rich complexity of human negotiating skills against the poor simplicity of today’s intelligent agents (such as shopping bots). Yet the magnitude of the difference is not necessarily any greater than that between the rich complexity of birds and the poor simplicity of flying machines. Which of the latter is evolving while-u-wait? And anyway, is it a difference that makes a difference?

The only thing that caught my interest was near the end of the book, on page 226: “[D]espite the concern about ‘have nots’ lacking access to technology [there’s an example of the awkwardness typical of the book’s prose], there is a danger that technology will become the only access they have . . . .” [Italics in original.] I.e., Oxbridge students get the best of both the online and offline worlds, with access to information online and knowledgeable (not to mention socially connected) professors offline, whereas Open University students get mainly the online access. So perhaps the Digital Divide is a red herring; the real danger is a resurgence of the old social classes rather than their death through digitized, democratizing decentralization.

Now that would be worth writing about.

David Ellis...

Rating:
Summary: Important but overdone critique of info-enthusiasm
Review: Despite their protestations to the contrary, Brown and Duguid's book comes across primarily as a critical rather than constructive commentary. Not that this is a bad thing. Powerful criticism of warped thinking and its implementation in strategy and business processes can be highly valuable. The usefulness of this book's criticism of "info-enthusiasts" would have been heightened had the authors presented a clear, actionable framework for implementing their thoughts, but this is frustratingly lacking. Early on the authors target Alvin Toffler as a prime representative of those who see everything through the lens of information. This lens produces a tunnel vision that shuts out social practices and other aspects of life that the authors insist cannot be reduced to information. Toffler provides an ideal target, explicitly presenting his "6-D vision" of demassification, decentralization, denationalization, despacialization, disintermediation, and disaggregation. These six forces, according to Toffler, have been unleashed by information technology, and will break down society into its basic constituents of individuals and information. Whether or not the authors are overly harsh on Toffler, their book does a superb job of showing the shortcomings of an entirely infocentric view.

In eight chapters, Brown and Duguid explore the limits to information and to the reductive focus on it, the limitations of software agents or "bots", the mistakes in thinking that information technology means the end of the traditional location-based workplace, the dangers of re-engineering around information processes without considering social practices and communities, and the limitations of info-centric thinking about learning, organizational innovation and knowledge management, and education.

All of this is well worth reading and paying close attention to. Yet this reviewer got the feeling that the authors often set up straw men to more easily make their points such as taking the most extreme statements of information technologists and futurists then presenting them as universal views among those groups. In some places they weave their arguments out of flimsy material that makes for a good story rather than for solid evidence. For example, they tell the story of how the scent of vinegar on old paper revealed information not contained in the words themselves. The point is well made, but the reader is left wondering how broadly this applies and why the authors do not mention information technology that at least attempts to achieve similar results (such as versioning, and meta-commentary Web tags). Some of the shortcomings of the info-centric view may also result from the immaturity of the technology. Certainly the authors have strong points about the value of physical proximity, though many workers are already finding technologies that allow remote work, and as broadband and eventually virtual reality become pervasive, more of the social cues currently missing may return to our tech-mediated interactions. Overall, this is an important book that identifies a real problem in thinking. In an infotech-saturated world, the authors may be forgiven for going too far in the other direction.

Rating:
Summary: Great content, dull context
Review: For every movement, there's a countermovement. Thus spoke Einsten. Andthe empirical evidence for this is never hard to find. There's thepro-globalizationeers with the countermovements of Attac, Naomi Kleinetc. There's the "nothing can stop us now"-new economists andthe "told you so"-old economists. "The Social Life ofInformation" is the Attac/ "Told-you-so"-ers of theInformation Economy. This book is really an antidote to the legions ofpeople who have proclaimed the abundance of online information as thesolution to all evils and improvements of all goods. But the authorsare no crusty old "told-you-so"-ers, neither are they(thankfully) particularly vicious in their attack, opting instead fora sober analysis, something the so-called new economy has been lackingfor some time.

John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, of Xerox PARC andBerkeley fame respectively, manages in "Social Life..." to walkthe fine line between criticism (which may be fun to read but notparticularly useful) and acclaim (which may be useful but notparticularly fun to read) of the role that information has been givenas saviour of the future. Their main thesis, as is revealed in thetitle, is that there's so much more to information than the writtenword. This "something" is basically boiled down to"context"; the stuff that surrounds you, to quote a Britishstyle magazine. "Context" are the things that affect the way wesee or understand something but not necessarily think about. Thinkabout the problem of conveying sarcasm in print, for instance. Or whynot think about the "helpful or not"... This functions is asoften a display of whether the readers agree with the reviewer as itis an evaluation of how well written the review is.

The tendency toforget about context permeates the discussion about the informationeconomy, argues the authors. But a fascinating aspect is that MessrsSeely Brown and Duguid seems to have forgotten this themselves. Thebook, although well written, is surprisingly dull to read. The authorshave spent considerable time gathering examples and evidence tosupport their cause but "Social Life..." suffers from the factthat it is...well... a book. A book without anything besides text tosupport its message. True, traditional writing has proved hugelysuccessful traditionally in storytelling, but approaching otheraspects in the use of context would have been a welcome relief. At theend, the experience of reading "The Social Life..." leaves thereader enlightened but somewhat empty.

Rating:
Summary: The Start of the Next Chapter
Review: Forget that Xerox can't translate PARCs innovations into market dominating products and instead focus on the core themes of Brown and Duguid book. I'll admit it is not the most eloquent wordsmithing and at times seems like disconnected essays being strung together but the book contains seeds. Seeds that have spawned a new chapter in the conversation of how technology changes everthing. This book plants the idea that technology is part of developing the social fabric rather than solving our production problems (i.e., the paperless office). Indeed we already see Brown and Duguid contemporaries writing books like "Enabling Knowledge Creation" and "In Good Company." Together these books are helping us understand the importance of the technology and human interface which is at the heart of true business innovation and leadership. If you are looking for a cookbook then look elsewhere. If you are looking for something to make you think about your approach to managing people and technology, then click "add to cart."

Rating:
Summary: A Tale of Two Topics?
Review: I am of two minds about The Social Life of Information. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid try to tackle several large topics, and end up somewhere in between them. Much of the book is spent trying to convince the reader, in short, that technology isn't all it's cracked up to be. As if we needed them to tell us that! The work also delves into some interesting and insightful discussions about where technology and social structures, such as education and learning, intersect one another.

The first portion of the book disappointed me. The first four chapters present a series of examples of touted technology "fads" and demonstrated how each of them hasn't lived up to its "promise" in terms of changing our everyday lives. However, the examples are, by and large, peripheral to mainstream applications of technology. As a reader, I just wasn't able to buy in to the idea that the failure of "agents" and "bots" to revolutionize contemporary life proves that technology in general is somehow "overblown." This part of the book was, in my opinion, quite weak, and didn't really draw me into the authors' message. In an age where technology innovations carry with them a host of important, and interesting, issues like privacy, encryption, and 1st amendment rights, the author's choices of topics for the early chapters seem almost trivial.

In fact, after I'd finished the first four chapters, I almost put it down and moved on to the next book in my "to read" pile. The second half of the book made me glad I'd finished it. The authors seemed to run out of ground in their original thesis and move on to more interesting territory. And, while I didn't feel like the authors succeeded in driving home any particular point in this part of the book, they did cover some new ground and make me think about topics I hadn't addressed before. Chapter 5 was a worthwhile investigation of learning in an organization, Chapter 8 painted an interesting picture of a possible future of education in a technology-driven world, and Chapter 6 was a fairly insightful and fresh (if cursory) look at how organizations are changing in light of the changes around them.

While the second half of the book doesn't redeem the first, to me it made the book as a whole worth the read. If you're thinking about reading this book, you won't be wasting your time. But lay down your expectations at the door, because this book probably won't be what you expected.