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ACIA Main Page > Content > The Social Life of Information
By John Seely Brown
and Paul Duguid
Harvard Business School Press, 2000, 320 pages, ISBN: 0875847625
$20.76
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The ACIA is sponsored by Argus Associates, a leading information architecture consulting firm.
Review by Dennis Schleicher (August 15, 2000)
The Social Life of Information
"It's the people, stupid!"
After reading this refreshing book, that's what I expect would be Brown
and Duguid's reworking of Clinton's famous mantra of 1992.
The authors posit this over and
over as they explore the difference between information and
knowledge. They argue that a straightforward definitional approach gets us
nowhere
(and is as bankrupt now as it was 2500 years ago).
Instead, they offer a unique
inquiry stating that "the way forward is paradoxically to look not ahead,
but to look around."
They ask us to focus not on information nor
technology,
"but to look instead to things that lie beyond information." This
broader context is composed of both a social world and a world
of
practice.
They denounce the "blinkering (of) humans as just a connection to the
computer," and warn us not to "address people as information processors
or to redefine
complex human issues such as trust as simply information."
Arguing
that instead of making the social world a function of the mechanical world
in which everything human must be digitally encoded/decoded to be valid,
we should understand technology through the complexity of the social world
of which it is just a part.
Over many pages they champion Julian Orr (author of Talking
About Machines and one of my personal heroes)
for studying practice, which they contrast throughout the book with
process.
Success, they insist, does not occur through "best practices" or
"reengineering" but with education through communities of practice.
This book could be seen as a banal echo harkening back to the human
relations school, but I prefer to think of it as a small voice calling out
for us not to forget the man in the machine.
The authors encourage us to use information technology tactically not
strategically, noting that "one
of the most powerful uses of information technology seems to be to support
people who do work together directly and to allow them to schedule
efficient face-to-face encounters."
Remember the mantra:
We must always keep in mind that we are not organizing information so as
to have organized information, but for people to easily learn from it,
modify it, and add to it.
On bots (p. 52):
On Xerox's copier repair persons and practice (p. 101):
On how people use information (p. 107):
On information and knowledge (p. 119):
On libraries (p. 181):
On information architects (p. 121):
"It's the people, stupid!"
Though this is clearly not a "how to" book, I would recommend it to all
information architects as a good reminder of who we're doing all of
this work for in the first place.
Quotes from the Text
"Development will be ill served by people who merely redefine elaborate
social processes in terms of the things that bots do well."
"So when machines did something unpredicted, reps found themselves not
just off the map, but there without a compass or tools for
bushwhacking."
"For it is not shared stories or shared information so much as shared
interpretation that binds people together."
"First, knowledge usually entails a knower. That is, where people treat
information as independent and more-or-less self-sufficient, they seem
more inclined to associate knowledge with someone."
"It has become increasingly clear that libraries are less
collections
than
useful selections that gain usefulness from what they exclude as
much as
what they hold. They are reflections of particular groups of users and
their needs."
"Increasingly, as the abundance of information overwhelms us all, we need
not simply more information, but people to assimilate, understand, and
make sense of it."
The ACIA is Sponsored by Argus Associates, Inc. Copyright 2000 All Rights Reserved