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The Social Life of Information
(Brown-Duguid)
The Outline
The Outline
Ch. 1: the limits of infopunditry
Ch. 2: the challenges of software agents
Ch. 3-5: the social character of work and learning
Ch. 6: resources for innovation
Ch. 7: unnoticed aspects of the document and their
implications for design more generally
Ch. 8: the future of institutions, in particular the
university
1. Limits to Information
the limits of infopunditry
Limits to Information
the assumptions:
• difficulty of making decisions in conditions of
limited or imperfect information.
• chronic information shortages threatened work,
education, research, innovation, and economic
decision making (at the level of government
policy, business strategy, everyday routines)
• and therefore, What is apparently needed is
more information.
Limits to Information
the answers (of infopundits /infoenthusiasts) is
infocentric:
• cheer the disaggregation of knowledge into
data (new word coined to describe the process:
datafication)
• exult in the volume of information that
technology makes available,exult in the
processing power rather than content and
context
Limits to Information
and therefore has the outcomes of:
• neglecting the forms in which information
reflected in bits comes to us (as stories,
documents, diagrams, pictures, or narratives,
as knowledge and meaning, in communities,
organizations, and institutions)
• neglecting the social life of information
objects, and the social and institutional
contexts in which information objects circulate
Limits to Information
Moore’s* Law solutions:
• the more information, the more problemsolving power
• infoenthusiasts insist that information
technology will see the end of documents,
break narratives into hypertext and reduce
knowledge to data, that institutions are relics
of a discredited old regime.
*Gordon Moore, founder of the chip maker Intel apparently stated: ”The computer power available on a
chip would approximately double every eighteen months.”
Limits to Information
Moore’s Law Solutions & the endism
syndrome:
New technology is predicted to bring about
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
the end of the nation-state
Limits to Information
6-D vision relies on the infocentric view:
Demassification
Decentralization
Denaturalization
Despatialization
Disintermediation
Disaggregation
Limits to Information
6-D vision: “better organization will emerge from
information’s abundance and the power of the 6 D-s”
• 6D vision embodies the ideal of new
technology in the service of new economy in
an infomated Paradise by heralding: smaller
organizations, less management, less
centralization, more individual freedom, more
autonomy
Limits to Information
6-D vision :
Decentralization: local decision-making (local knowledge
based on practice) instead of centralized decision
making; more egalitarian work environment. Reality:
FedEx, Wal-Mart (centralized decision making)
Disintermediation: (in firms) doing away with
intermediaries because information-processing
equipment might replace them; will result in flatter
organizations; doing away with transaction costs.
Reality: organizations are becoming involved in more
services; firms are stronger rather than weaker
Limits to Information
6-D vision :
Demassification & Disaggregation: information
economy operates in small agile firms with big
ideas and little money rather than large networks
(aggregated, massified forms); demassification of
production and niche markets.
Reality: AOL, Microsoft, mergers, mass
customization, accumulation of power
Despatialization & Denaturalization: transnational
firms; distance education; it will be possible to
work anywhere
2. Agents and Angels
the challenges of software agents
Agents and Angels
Belief in AI:
• Information technologies are not only capable of
transmitting and storing information, but of
producing information independent of human
intervention.
• Information’s power to breed on itself. It pushes
aside humanity.
Sherlock, Jeeves, Bob (personalization)
infobots, knobots, shopbots, chatterbots
Agents and Angels
Agents (bots) and Humans:
bots are seen as personal assistants involved in
accomplishing tasks. But how trustworthy are they?
Information brokering (Mac’s Sherlock): high recall
but low relevance of what is retrieved
Product brokering (bots at Amazon.com) alert to new
products according to profile: Is this the
recommendation really wanted?
Merchant brokering (bots roaming the web to get a
‘Best buy’ option). Is this really the lowest price?
Agents and Angels
Agents (bots) and Humans:
Now largely instrumental and operational concerns
in the area of intelligent agents.
Problems: no space for human negotiation; no space
for planning, coordinating, decision making.
Implications for design:
Moral and social-institutional questions need to be
introduced in the design of bots that imitate or
replicate human actions.
3. Home Alone
4. Practice Makes Process
5. Learning: In Theory and in Practice
the social character of work and learning
Home Alone
Assumption (infocentric / idealized view of
work and information) : new technology will
change the nature of office work
Delocalization phenomenon
‘Electronic cottage’ model of work (Toffler)
‘Hot desking’: abandoning fixed desks and providing
laptops, cell phones, and Internet connections so
employees can work from where they choose
Home Alone
Blind spots in this model of work:
• overlooking the social aspects of work and frailty
of electronic systems
• no access to collective knowledge or
organizational support (office help systems) in
solving problems
• ignores diverse sorts of knowledge latent in
systems that distribute work
• cases: Chiat/Day experiment (decline in
productivity); Xerox photocopier repair
technicians strategies (increase in productivity)
Practice Makes Process
practice vs. process:
• Management resorted to business process
reengineering (1980s) to optimize investment and
production, focusing on how to increase efficiency
of the process
• Numerous studies of workplace practice, the
internal life of process, the struggles over meaning
in different communities of practice in
organizations, not only in the ‘thinking’ parts of
organizations.
Practice Makes Process
practice vs. process:
• resources for understanding organizations (from outside:
process-based procedures, forms, etc.; from inside:
accounts of why things are done)
• business process engineering failed because it refused to
understand and discouraged lateral links that people
pursue to help make meaning while focusing on
efficiency (process-centered perspective)
• tension bw the practice-based struggle for locally
coherent meaning and the process-focused need for
uniform organizational information
Practice Makes Process
practice vs. process:
• case: Julian Orr’s study of Xerox ‘reps’ represents the
contrasting perspectives of process and practice at work
• collaboration (work groups as model of work), narration
(story-telling / war stories allowed ‘reps’ to circulate
information and create shared interpretations),
improvisation in problem-solving (practice-centered
perspective)
Practice Makes Process
• If process driven, danger for organization to be cut
off from change
• If practice driven, organization may develop too
many communities of practice without uniformity
• From business process engineering to knowledge
management
Learning: In Theory and in Practice
Knowledge and learning is distinct from information*
1. Who knows that? vs. Where is that information?
Knowledge entails a knower
Information is viewed as independent and self-sufficient
2. Knowledge is harder to detach than information
Information is treated as self-contained substance
3. Knowledge can be hard to give and receive
knowledge needs to be digested rather than
held/contained
*different from ‘information’ in scholarly terminology: Shannon & Weaver’s
‘information theory’ considers information to be independent of meaning
Learning: In Theory and in Practice
Implications for organizations:
• Importance of people as creators and carriers of knowledge:
organizations need to realize that knowledge lies less in
databases than its people
• Management of knowledge is difficult but firms need to
understand ‘best practices’ and spread the practice
• Understand groups of practitioners and facilitate
apprenticeship: learning from ‘know that’ to ‘know how,’
learning in practice, ‘learning to be’
Learning: In Theory and in Practice
Implications for organizations:
• Learning needs to be understood in relation to the
development of human identity. In learning to be, in
becoming a member of a community of practice, an
individual is developing social identity
• Support work patterns of face-to-face communities and the
process of their communication, coordination
6. Innovating Organization,
Husbanding Knowledge
resources for innovation
Innovating Organization, Husbanding
Knowledge
Firms are ‘knowledge generators,’ ‘innovative systems’
• Goals: creating ideas, and turning these ideas into new products
and practices
• 1990s and the constantly changing conditions created pressure
for firms to innovate: What advances invention and promotes
innovation?
• Problem for organizations
how to deploy knowledge
how to move knowledge that is created in the organization
how to retain and hold on to knowledge
Innovating Organization, Husbanding
Knowledge
Leaky vs. sticky knowledge
• Divisions within organization (communities of practice) make
knowledge sticky
• Networks of practice make knowledge leaky (i.e. shared
identity makes people share knowledge as the same
community/network of practice not necessarily within
organizational context)
• Case: Xerox PARC / Xerox Corporation / Steve Jobs and GUI
Innovating Organization, Husbanding
Knowledge
• Problem: how to recognize that networks of practice will share
knowledge and be most effective in innovation and use this to
advantage
• Solution: clustered ecologies of knowledge (Silicon Valley vs.
Route 128)
• Debunking the myths of the death of distance (delocalization)
and the death of the firm (disaggregation) because interaction
and proximity facilitates sharing of tacit knowledge (leakiness)
7. Reading the Background
unnoticed aspects of the document and
their implications for design more
generally
Reading the Background
Infoenthusiasts heralded the end of the paper document
• counter-example: documenting the outbreaks of cholera in the
18th century (letters sprinkled with ‘vinegar’ convey more than
information)
• documents are considered as mere carriers of information yet
they show social and cultural properties
• the use of paper in digital offices has increased (33% increase in
overall consumption in the U.S. and even more in office use)
• the web uses the language of the document (pages, bookmarks,
indexes and tables)
Reading the Background
Social properties of documents / document culture
• documents reflect institutional processes which are easier to
detect in paper than in other media (tied to material side of
document)
• documents embody the institutional authority of the publisher
• question of (personal) warrants difficult on the Net but there are
ways of triangulating what comes over the Internet (The Well
example, people would call, meet)
Reading the Background
Document communities / document cultures
• documents enable social groups to form, develop, and
maintain a sense of shared identity
• development of modern scientific communities and
scholarly communication practices (British Royal
Society: erudite letters, news-letters, Philosophical
Transactions from 1665)
Reading the Background
• ‘net communities’ extend a long tradition of communities
formed around documents
• ‘social worlds’ or ‘communities of practice’ communities
depending on constant circuit of communication (Anselm
Strauss)
• ‘imagined communities’ (Benedict Anderson)
• ‘textual communities’ in the Middle Ages transmit
particular textual traditions (Brian Stock)
8. Re-Education
the future of institutions, in particular
the university
Re-education
• Social aspects of learning and the move of universities to
‘distance education’ mode of delivery fuelled by the myth
of information as detached commodity to be delivered
• ‘Learning to be’ rather than ‘learning what’ through the
process of enculturation, for students at the graduate level
to be able to engage with communities of practice and of
concepts; to become part of particular communities; to
learn through the process of constructing meaning in
groups