The Social Life of Information.

• Author: NYE, BARBARA E.
• Position: Brief Article - Review

TITLE: The Social Life of Information

AUTHORS: John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid

PUBLISHER: Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA

ISBN: 0-87584-762-5

PUBLICATION DATE: 2000

LENGTH: 320 pages

PRICE: $25.95

SOURCE: Any bookstore; www.slofi.com

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." (Thomas Watson, Sr., one-time president of IBM). "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home." (Ken Olsen, then-President of Digital Equipment Corporation). These observations seem humorous today, but they are just two of many technology predictions made by experts that have proven wrong. As the authors of The Social Life of Information conclude, "Futurology is littered with the obituaries of tools that nonetheless continue a robust ... life."

The topic of futuristic predictions about information and information technology that were off the mark is just one of several that are engagingly and informatively discussed in this book, which, as a whole, focuses on the context (i.e., the "social life") of information and why this context is so important. Co-authors John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid make the case that information gains value in a social context. It is not merely an absolute commodity to be captured and sold, as in e-commerce, or to be thought about only in terms of how much we have and how fast we can move it around.

This premise is all the more intriguing because the authors have worked at the center of the technological maelstrom for many years. Brown was, until recently, the director of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) -- birthplace of the computer mouse, the graphical user interface, and the Ethernet -- and Duguid is Brown's colleague at PARC and is a social theorist and historian at the University of California, Berkeley.

This book succeeds in debunking conventional wisdom about technology's impact. The authors explain why tunnel vision predictions such as the paperless office haven't materialized: "Attending too closely to information [per se] overlooks the social context that helps people understand what that information might mean and why it matters." Paper, for example, continues to thrive because it is so flexible, does not need electricity, can be carried and used anywhere, and has significantly better resolution than any computer monitor.

The authors provide many fascinating examples of information's contextual "social life." One account involves Duguid's researching 250-year-old business...