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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 skeptical. 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. John Seely Brown
is Chief Scientist at Xerox Corporation and Director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research
Center (PARC). Paul Duguid is a research specialist in Social and Cultural Studies
in Education at the University of California at Berkeley. |
