Ling Kong
SymSys205 Book Review
The Social Life of Information
Bill Gates, on the cover of his book
“The Road Ahead”, is pictured on the left standing at a straight highway that
runs into the horizon. Of course, his metaphor of the road extends to the
information highway and the advances in information technologies, while plainly
suggesting that he will be the man that leads us down this road. This, however,
is exactly the path that John Seely Brown and Paul
Duguid want to avoid in “The Social Life of Information.” This is not to say
that Brown and Duguid are adverse to technology;
in fact, Brown is the chief scientist at XEROX Corporation and the former
director of Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) while Duguid
is a consultant for PARC and an associate researcher in Social and Cultural
studies at UC Berkeley. Through their work together, they have come to the
realization that many people are only looking forward in the information technology
age, experiencing what they call “tunnel vision.” Drawing from their own experiences
at XEROX PARC, as well as from a breadth of historical, social, and cultural
research, the authors challenge some popular predictions of the path that
technology will lead us on.
We often see TV commercials featuring offices in paradise, made possible by laptops, cell phones, and other advances in information technology. This image is an optimistic and positive outlook on the opportunities that new information technology brings us. In this rosy picture of the world, where everyone is connected via internet, and databases of information and communication software make work collaboration from a beach as easy as from an office, everything you want to know seems to be just a click away. What makes “The Social Life of Information” a great book is that it deconstructs these information revolution myths and brings us back down to our feet in our view of information technology. Taking us a step back from looking forward to more advances in technology in pursuit of that rosy dream, Brown and Duguid focus on bringing perspective to how information and technology occur in a social context that is often overlooked. They point out the problems that form in our visionary world and show that the goals we set out to achieve in this dream—the elimination of conventional offices and the ease of information acquisition—actually contradict each other. There is a hidden network theory point of view at work throughout the book. Without directly mentioning the theory of networks and systems, Brown and Duguid manage to successfully lead the reader to start thinking about the importance of how all the elements of information in relation to people work together. They’ve managed to highlight the importance of different ways of information travel in our society and take us away from rushing headstrong into a new information revolution to look at the bigger picture.
Brown and Duguid believe that proponents of technology foresee new information revolutions that will bring about simplified and unrealistic expectations of “endisms”: the end of the press, television, and mass media; the end of brokers and other intermediaries; the end of firms, bureaucracies, and similar organizations; the end of universities; the end of politics; the end of government; the end of cities and regions; and even the end of the nation-state. These people are compared to reckless drivers, speeding ahead with a tunnel vision into the future, creating technology that often creates more problems than they solve. To truly understand how information technology integrates into society, Brown and Duguid maintain that we need to look around us instead. We need to look at all the elements of information that cannot be digitized without some loss. We need to look at the firms, bureaucracies, universities, and other organizations and realize the important roles that these networks of human resources play on the spread of information and learning. What appear to be minor, insignificant, and outdated ways of communication and human interactions in light of our new technologies are actually the very essences of human learning that we want to preserve. In the end, we need realize that the main focus of new technological advances should not be on information; instead, our main focus should be on people, creating environments for them to easily learn information and become possessors of knowledge.
There are limits to information. In today’s age, there is an over reliance on information as more and more information is created to explain existing information. This is a trap that creates confusion, leading to the rise of huge databases of information containing documents that each explains another. Perhaps that instead of creating new information that links to the old, a “less is more” approach should be taken, rewriting past information so that information can be easily understood without the convolutions of documents. Over relying on information creates what Brown and Duguid calls “6-D” vision, which stands for demassificiation, decentralization, denationalization, despacialization, disintermediation, and disaggregation. Although these Ds help to explain trends and pressures in society, they “too easily suggest a linear direction to society—parallel movements from complex to simple, from group to individual, from personal knowledge to ubiquitous information, or more generally from composite to unit.” (p.22) Hence, over-reliance on information suggests a world of simplicity, where simple doesn’t entail ease in the way of life and learning. Instead, much is lost by eliminating the groups, network, and systems that facilitate information travel and cause learning in indirect but especially effective ways. To Brown and Duguid, the information, knowledge, and learning that happens in these groups is the most important aspect of focus. We cannot isolate information from life and everything else.
In trying to point
out the dangers of rushing into new technology dealing with information, Brown
and Duguid start their commentaries on computer
agents, also known to us as “bots.” With immense amounts of information available
today, especially on the internet, we are using bots to provide a variety of
services dealing with information. From chatterbots
that fill chat rooms with simulated personality to webcrawlers
that silently archive and pinpoint information on webpages,
bots are at work 24/7. However, in having bots for product brokering,
commercial sales, and product recommendations, it is easy to be seduced to
utilize the potential deceptiveness of bots. When people found out that the
Amazon.com book recommendation system was slightly skewed to favor certain
advertisers, the naïve opinion that bots were simply programs that mindlessly
search for the best available information fell. In having bots as proxies or
representatives of real people, we often don’t stop and think about how much autonomy
we give to the bots to act in certain situations. The more we make bots
humanlike, the more personality theft will occur. What happens when we find out
that a friendly e-mail from “Bob” in
The agents and
bots section of the book is of special interest to people in human computer
interaction fields. In contrast to the annoying agent “clippie” developed by Microsoft,
we dream of smart agents on computers, who will learn to detect and react to
our emotions and avoid us when we are angry, praise us when we are in need of
encouragement, and cheer us up when we are depressed. We dream of such agents,
who will in the future give us the best price for a product we are looking at, pinpoint
the document we look for on the web, and interact with us through speech and
lifelike animations. Basically, we dream of agents with human personalities. Brown
and Duguid are justified in their cautious approach
to agents and bots. If people today can be attached to simple agents such as
the Tamaguchi pets, imagine the power and the misuse
of power that human-like agents can have over people. In pointing out the
personality thefts, the deceptiveness, and the uncertainty in the attribution
of responsibility, we can see why Brown and Duguid are
worried for ethical, moral, and social reasons. In successfully identifying and
highlighting the possible problems, however, they do not offer any answers or
approaches to solve these problems; they only offer us the opportunity to think
about these issues before they become reality. This creates a slight disappointment
in the minds of readers. In the future, as gigabytes upon gigabytes of
information is unloaded unto the internet, and as our hard drives in our PC’s
become so big that it is impossible to remember through spatial representations
of folders, we will most likely become much more reliant upon agents to search and
tailor the information delivered to us. The role of agents will most likely
become a necessity, a role that we cannot just cautiously sidestep by not
creating such agents.
Many of the new technologies advertise the ability to travel to anywhere in the world with just one click of a mouse. These technologies—mobile computers, cell phones, etc—seem to offer new and unconventional ways of working. People can work from home or innovate in offices without desks and walls. Through pointing out examples at PARC and Chiat/Day, Brown and Duguid show that the traditional offices, desks, and the community of workers are precious resources lost when we implement the unconventional ways of working offered by these new technologies. Brown and Duguid note the importance of desks and walls to provide structure within an organization. By breaking this structure down, like in Chiat/Day’s office-less work environment where employees would check out cells phones and laptops to work among one of the open couches, people become less efficient and productive. By taking down the structure of an organization, it is impossible the exchange of information to occur in a timely manner.
Working at home, on the other hand, has its own share of problems. People who work at home do not benefit from the importance of collaboration, narrations, and improvisation, which is essential for learning. Learning often occurs unknowingly. This “stealing” of knowledge happens within collaborations and narrations in communities of workers. In the example of XEROX service reps, their sociability enables them to form a network that share knowledge and resources. Through the telling of stories and working together out in the field, these reps acquire an immense amount of knowledge and are constantly learning from each other. This network of knowledge, when later transformed into a database where workers shared knowledge with each other, was worth billions of dollars in savings of operation and training costs. Through these examples, Brown and Duguid convey the importance of circulating and stealing knowledge on demand within these networks and communities of practice.
In telling their
readers about the failure of XEROX engineers to implement the GUI design made
at PARC, Brown and Duguid discuss how distance matters
in learning and husbanding knowledge. From the example of XEROX service reps,
it is already evident to us that people fall into divisions and communities of
practice. These communities then form local knowledge that reinforces such
divisions of people. The distance between the scientists at PARC who designed
the GUI and XEROX engineers in
With today’s technology, Brown and Duguid is justified in saying that the advances in information technology will not be able to eliminate the need for offices, communities of practices, and ecologies of knowledge. Although there are high speed internet and online collaboration tools, knowledge seems to spread more effectively from person to person in a network of people than from information in databases and the internet. Information technology does not reduce the distance between people, since it cannot solve the problems of collaboration that distance creates. In pointing out how we learn, it is often true that we cannot gain much knowledge from direct information. When we look at University learning, much of the learning occurs outside of class, among work and discussions with others. In virtual universities, where classes are offered online, students are deprived of this “learning from peers outside of class” experience. Although the content delivered is the same in the classes, the benefits reaped by the students of these two different types of universities widely differ. In pointing out how learning occurs in organizations, communities of practice, and ecologies of knowledge, Brown and Duguid successfully make us aware of their importance. However, this does not mean that technology cannot be used to help create more opportunities in learning. Brown and Duguid do not suggest how technology can be designed to encompass this learning from a community aspect and have failed to mention the success of learning in online communities. Advances in technology, instead of eliminating communities of knowledge, can be used to facilitate the growth of them. Among local ecologies of knowledge, technology can bring forth the virtual ecologies of knowledge—online communities dedicated to sharing and learning, “stealing” knowledge through virtual means.
Asking us to take a step back from our digital information world, Brown and Duguid examine the importance of paper. Why is that in this day and age, where digital documents are easily created, maintained, and updated, that paper is still around? Paper provides structure and seems to validate information, in its inability to change. In the digitalization of written documents, much more information conveyed by the documents may be lost. In providing the example of a medical historian tracing outbreaks of cholera in the 1800’s through the smell of written documents, Brown and Duguid show that the scent of the paper, the writing, and other extra qualities are sometimes the more important elements to some researchers. On a similar note, there is something special about a direct handshake, a smile, and a look in the eye that concludes business deals. When there is the availability of video teleconferencing, why is the traditional method still the preferred method of interaction? In asking these questions, Brown and Duguid illustrate that there are many aspects of receiving and communicating information. Many of these old methods have not become obsolete yet, and play just as an important part, if not a greater one, in the role of communicating information between people.
Overall, Brown and
Duguid do a great job in bringing to our attention
the problems associated with embracing new information technology too quickly.
They
support their claims with very persuasive real life examples of how information
together with the new technology developed cannot truly replace the circles
of humans interacting and working together, either in companies, communities,
or universities. This is more of an awareness book than a how to type of book.
Brown and Duguid successfully raise our awareness
about the issues and problems they saw; however, they offered few solutions
to these problems. In pointing out how the information works in a social context,
they have failed to suggest or offer solutions to how we can design technology
to encompass such workings. With no clear solution or method of thinking offered,
the book leaves the reader a bit unsatisfied, because of the lack of closure.
This sense of dissatisfaction is perhaps the single drawback to what otherwise
is a great learning experience for technologists like us. In having showed
us the problems that would have otherwise been ignored, it is now up to us
to solve those problems for society to move along with technology.