Social Life of Information, The

Journal of Engineering Education, Oct 2000 by Smith, Karl A, Prados, John W

The Social Life ofInformation

by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid Harvard Business School Press, 2000, 320 pp.

The Social Life of Information is the most far-reaching and provocative of the books included in this column. Seely Brown and Duguid state, for example, "To see the future we can build with information technology, we must look beyond mere information to the social context that creates and gives meaning to it."

The Social Life of Information has prompted lots of reactions. For example, William Wulf, President, National Academy of Engineering, called it:

An intellectually honest and immensely enjoyable antidote to the scores of overly simplistic projections of the impact of information technology. While there is no doubt this impact will be immense, its precise form is yet unknowable. By raising questions about what that form might be Brown and Duguid expose the pundits' unstated assumptions and treat the reader to a wide-ranging analysis of our society. (Advance praise, prior to p. i).

James Duderstadt, cited earlier, wrote:

This important book provides both the layperson and the technologically adroit with a pragmatic yet visionary perspective on the profound role that information technology will play in reshaping our society and its institutions. By combining their extensive experience in computer and communications technology%ith an unusually broad understanding ofhow technology is developed and adopted by contemporary society, the authors provide a realistic yet provocative view of the future (Advance praise, prior to p. i).

The authors note that the rise of the information age has brought about a good deal of "endism," including the end of the press, television, and mass media; brokers and other intermediaries; firms, bureaucracies, and other organizations; universities; politics; government; cities and regions; and the nation-state (p. 16).

Seely Brown and Duguid advocate that overreliance on information leads to "6-D vision." The D in their 6-D notion stands for the oft-mentioned futurist words: demassification, decentralization, denationalization, despacialization, disintermediation, and disaggregation. Pundits claim that these represent forces, unleashed by information technology, that will break society down into its fundamental constituents (p. 22). The authors counter by writing, "6-D vision, while giving a clear and compelling view of the influence of the Net and its effects on everything from the firm to the nation, achieves its clarity by oversimplifying the forces at work" (p. 30).

They write that the essays in the book grew out of long-running public and private conversations the two of them have conducted Reflecting on these conversations they noted common threads which:

allow us to talk from a single standpoint about the limits of infopunditry (chapter 1), the challenges of software agents (chapter 2), the social character of work and learning and the limits of management theory (chapters 3-5), resources for innovation (chapter 6), unnoticed aspects of the document and their implications for design more generally (chapter 7), and the future of institutions, in particular the university (chapter 8) (p. 8).

If you would like a sample of the authors' ongoing conversation, there is an interesting interview on the Amazon.com web site. Also see the Social Life ofInformation web site: www.sofi.com (Accessed 7/10/00).

In the chapter on learning in theory and in practice they demonstrate a lot of depth in learning theory. They synthesize the work of Shannon and Weaver, Bateson, Bruner, Ryle, Polanyi, Lave and Wenger, and many other notables. This should not come as a great surprise since they wrote "Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning" which appeared in Educational Researcher, January-February, 1989, 18(1): 32-42 (Available at http://www.slofi.com/situated. htm#title (Accessed 7/13/00)). They do a nice job of highlighting the practical implications of practice, of the social nature of learning, and of communities ofpractice.

Chapter Eight, "Re-education," responds to many of the pressures for change, raises the concern for the "nonequivalence of equivalent diplomas," and "suggests that learners need three things from an institution of higher education: access to authentic communities of learning, interpretation, exploration, and knowledge creation; resources to help them work with both distal and local communities; and widely accepted representations for learning and work" (p. 232). The authors do not claim that the book is a roadmap for the future. They "intend it more as a catalyst for further conversation." On the future of higher education they write:

Despite predictions about the end of the campus as we know it, we suspect that the university of the digital age may not look very different. It will still require classrooms, labs, libraries and other facilities. Nonetheless, we are sure that organizationally it will be very different (p. 240).

For the short read on the authors' ideas on higher education see "Universities in the digital age" by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, Change, July/August, 1996 and "Growing up Digital: The Web and a New Learning Ecology" by John Seely Brown, Change, March/April 2000, pp. 10-20.