The Social Life of Information

Posted on 27 April 2017 by John Seely Brown

For years pundits have predicted that information technology will obliterate everything, from supermarkets to business organizations to social life itself, but beaten down by info glut, exasperated by computer crashes, and daunted by the dot com crash, individual users find it hard to get a fix on the true potential of the digital revolution John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid 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 The Social Life of Information shows us how to look beyond our obsession with information and individuals to include the critical social networks of which these are always a part. Best Download The Social Life of Information [ author ] John Seely Brown [ Kindle ePUB or eBook ] – kino-fada.fr 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 informa...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 interes 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 anothe...Review originally posted here 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, an Review originally posted here 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 InformationThis book lived u...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 s 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...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 andlike a watercolor painting As each new color is added, it blends with the others to produce the final effect, in whi 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 andlike 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 b...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 intere 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 al...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 inc...I first encountered this title in graduate school, my copy of the second edition is full of notes and flags it is a book I ve recommended to others over the years Why It s a good introduction albeit with a scholarly bent to how we arrived at our current information universe.Have the authors succeeded in revising this classic to our contemporary context and still providing the value found in the original edition Yes I think it will help those who are curious about information and how we go I first encountered this title in graduate school, my copy of the second edition is full of notes and flags it is a book I ve recommended to others over the years Why It s a good intro...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 analy...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 obv 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 ...

English
27 April 2017

John Seely Brown