The Social Life of Information

Berkeley) anthropologist, have written an informative and interesting book on information technology.It begins with a critique of technological determinism and futuristic "endism," whether utopian or dystopian, frequently echoing the balanced assessments of Canadian thinkers like those of Harold Innis and Ursula Franklin.Electronic agents or "bots," they note, may "personalize" Web sites, but this often merely involves using data on past shopping to suggest new purchases, as on Amazon.com.Bots are rigidly programmed in contrast to human flexibility, resourcefulness, and shiftiness; for, Seely Brown & Duguid write, people have the awkward habit of changing rules and shifting goals in mid-negotiation (p.50).Technologies, Seely Brown & Duguid suggest, are both resources and constraints, and should be "user-centric" in design.They question IT (Information Technology) fads like talk of the "death of distance," "disintermediation" (eliminating the middle man in e-commerce), decentralization, and so forth.In the latter connection, they note the recent vogue in encouraging office staff to work at home.The authors note that Chiat/Day advertising agency workers, when in their Los Angeles office, were required to use standard equipment and any available open space but still insisted on personalizing their work space and equipment.Where, however, people work in field locations, as salespeople and geologists do, electronic communications are more useful.They also enable flextime schedules, allowing many people to better integrate work and home life.While the authors are right in insisting that education requires face-to-face contact with teachers and other students, electronic media are helpful, especially where students are widely dispersed as through much of the Canadian hinterland.At Laurentian University, for example, we offer video conference-based courses to sites hundreds of kilometers apart.Seely Brown & Duguid reject the "re-engineering" management craze because it favours process over practice.Organizational learning, they add, rests on informal practices.Xerox technical representatives, for example, would get together and informally discuss repair techniques not covered in the technical manuals, and share their knowledge with call-centre operators.But when a divisional reorganization separated them, their conversations ceased and the operators could no longer solve customer problems over the phone.So the technicians found themselves wasting time on minor repair calls.In time, ways were found to reconnect them.The authors present their view of knowledge clusters in modern high-tech organizations by sketching a matrix diagram.The vertical columns represent an organization's proprietary knowledge, such as Xerox's private intellectual property right in the research developed at PARC.The horizontal rows denote information flows across organizational boundaries, such as communication between