The Social Life of Information (review)

The Social Life of Information, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000. 320 p. $25.95 (ISBN 0-87584-762-5)

This is essentially a series of pleasantly ruminative essays grouped around the topic of the complex nature of information interchange in corporate life. They are intended as a corrective to a world that the authors imply is too "data driven" (meaning computer data) and that needs to understand better the multi-faceted organizational role played by such forms as paper communications, face-to-face contacts, and informal networking among communities of interest. Co-author John Seely Brown was, until recently, Director of Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and Duguid is a research specialist in Social and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, also with ties to Xerox PARC. This connection is evident when they remind us of the virtues of paper copy, but there are also some interesting pages of honest criticism of Xerox's policies and operations with regard to its internal information use.

The book is geared towards business professionals, and begins with the familiarly overwritten section announcing a hitherto-unnoticed factor that will help us all make sense of a bewildering mass of phenomena in corporate life. In this case, it is done using the metaphor of a car driver with tunnel vision, who is too focused on what is immediately ahead to be able to see the surrounding landscape, or even other drivers or pedestrians. This allegorizes the authors' central thesis that a full understanding of information must include context, as well as text; as in the following passage (which will also serve to convey something of the stylistic limits of the work): "...some of the people driving us all hard into the future on the back of new technologies appear to assume that if we all focus hard enough on information, then we will get where we want to go most directly. This central focus inevitably pushes aside all the fuzzy stuff that lies around the edges--context, background, history, common knowledge, social resources." (p. 1)

That statement is a valid enough subject for a book, though a logically weak formulation of it--after all, context and background, etc., are also forms of "information," and no sane person can long ignore them. But the field of discussion it opens up is nonetheless worth serious perusal and beyond the introduction, the rest of the work is actually quite enjoyable, thought-provoking, insightful, and quizzical, with some good mini case-studies of corporate success and failure in recognizing the social context of information. The work is infused with a lot of what most librarians would recognize as plain common sense about the nature and use of information.

Chapters on working from home, and on distance education elucidate the point that human interchanges for the purpose of information handling are an important kind of social glue, and that most individuals who have tried these ways of working or learning have realized that the social context of life; i.e., being physically present in a real organization with real co-workers or fellow students, has intrinsic value. The state-of-the-art of Intelligent Agents ("bots") in interactive computer searching provide an easy target: how shallow and unreliable they are, how they miss vital context, etc. (not a difficult case to make. However, this chapter misses an opportunity to speculate on how this form of computer assistance might look in twenty or fifty years.) Organizational re-engineering is derided as pushing change too far without the stabilizing influence of common sense--the brainchild of management zealots too often ignorant of the human context and meaning of work, the informal networks, and that part of corporate memory that resides only in employees' heads.

A chapter on the value of information on paper begins with a delightful story of the artifactual value of old documents: a researcher was observed sniffing...