The Social Life of Information (Brown-Duguid)

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The Social Life of Information (Brown-Duguid)
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The Outline
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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

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1. Limits to Information
the limits of infopunditry
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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.

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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

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Limits to Information

• and therefore 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

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Limits to Information

• Moores Law solutions
• the more information, the more problem-solving
  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.

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Limits to Information

• Moores 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

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Limits to Information

• 6-D vision relies on the infocentric view
• Demassification
• Decentralization
• Denaturalization
• Despatialization
• Disintermediation
• Disaggregation

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Limits to Information

• 6-D visionbetter organization will emerge
• from informations 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

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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

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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

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2. Agents and Angels
the challenges of software agents
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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.
• Informations power to breed on itself. It pushes
  aside humanity.
• Sherlock, Jeeves, Bob (personalization)
• infobots, knobots, shopbots, chatterbots

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Agents and Angels

• Agents (bots) and Humans
• bots are seen as personal assistants involved in
• accomplishing tasks. But how trustworthy are
  they?
• Information brokering (Macs 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?

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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.

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3. Home Alone4. Practice Makes Process5.
Learning In Theory and in Practice
the social character of work and learning
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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

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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)

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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.
• case Etienne Wengers study of the process of
  claims processing

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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)
• tension bw the practice-based struggle for
  locally coherent meaning and the process-focused
  need for uniform organizational information.
• business process engineering failed because
  refused to understand and discouraged lateral
  links that people pursue to help make meaning
  while focusing on efficiency (process-centered
  perspective)

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Practice Makes Process

• practice vs. process
• case Julian Orrs 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)

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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.

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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 (it
  needs to be digested rather than held/contained)
• different from information in scholarly
  terminology Shannon Weavers information
  theory considers information to be independent
  of meaning

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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

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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.

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6. Innovating Organization, Husbanding Knowledge
resources for innovation
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Innovating Organization, Husbanding Knowledge

• 1990s and the constantly changing conditions
  created pressure for firms to innovate What
  advances invention and promotes innovation?
• Goal creating ideas, and turning these ideas
  into new products and practices
• Firms are knowledge generators, innovative
  systems. 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.

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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

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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)

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7. Reading the Background
unnoticed aspects of the document and their
implications for design more generally
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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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8. Re-Education
the future of institutions, in particular the
university
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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