Editorial Review:
All New Preface by the Authors For years pundits have predicted that information technology will obliterate everything-from supermarkets to business organizations to social life itself. But beaten down by info-glut, exasperated by computer crashes, and daunted by the dot com crash, individual users find it hard to get a fix on the true potential of the digital revolution. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid argue that the gap between digerati hype and end-user gloom is largely due to the "tunnel vision" that information-driven technologies breed. We've become so focused on where we think we ought to be-a place where technology empowers individuals and obliterates social organizations-that we often fail to see where we're really going. The Social Life of Information shows us how to look beyond our obsession with information and individuals to include the critical social networks of which these are always a part.
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Customer Reviews
Average Customer Rating: 
Superb Primer for Any Age  2008-01-19
I come to this book eight years after it was first published, and with all the accolades and superb reviews that it has already accummulated, my primary focus here, apart from flagging the book for those that follow my reviews, is to suggest that it is one of the finest overviews available and easily exploited as a primer for undergraduates, graduates, or adults pursuing their own continuing education via Amazon, which is now the hub of the World Brain.
As is my custom, I provide here a few highlights from my flyleaf notes, and then link to ten books that can be used to study discrete aspects of the digital age as I have come to understand it.
This is one of the best books I have found that makes the case that "fiber to the forehead" is next to worthless, it is not about acquiring more information, but rather about the nuanced networking and social interpretations of information in context.
Indeed, they say that with all the technologies now pushing and creating digital information, consumption of this information is only increasing among individuals by 1.7 percent a year.
I value this book, in part because I have seen the U.S. secret intelligence community lose its mind, today spending $60 billion a year of the taxpayer's hard-earned money, to create monstrous and often counter-productive technical program that access the 4% of the information we can steal, while ignoring the 94% that is in 183 languages we do not speak, and more often than not, NOT online.
The authors write well, and gifted turns of phrase about, such as "the radical instability of infopunditry."
They do a superb job of addressing the ills of technology-centered tunnel vision, a point that Peter Drucker made in Forbes ASAP 28 Aug 98, and I repeated in my keynote in Vegas to the National Security Agency (NSA) IT conference, in the early 2000 timeframe. We've spent the past 50 years on the T in IT, we need to start focusing on the I now.
The authors are eloquent in saying that more of the same is not the answer, and I totally agree. Returning to the secret world, I paraphrase an Australian journalist commenting on the pathologies of secret programs, who said that giving more money to dysfunctional secret agencies is like pouring gasoline on a fire. Right on. I want to reduce the secret budget to $12 billion a year, and redirect everything else to US education, global access to open sources in all languages, and free on demand education to the five billion poor via a network of 100 million volunteers with skype and internet access who can answer a cell phone question in any of 183 languages: education "one cell call at a time."
The authors point out that at its best, technology augments and enhances human capabilities, it does not replace them (less the truly repetitive mechanical aspects).
They observe (in 2000) that 1-2 exabytes of information per year are created, but that much of this is not useful, and there is a major short-fall in sense-making and precision access.
They discuss, most usefully, the reality that designers underestimate what people do (and I would add, what they want or need).
"Information fetishism" is defined as the belief that information and information technology can replaced nuanced relations among people and their individual and shared insights. In Body of Secrets, link below, Jim Bamford ends his second book on NSA by saying that with all the trillions they have spent, they have still not built the ultimate computer, one that runs on a tiny amount of energy, weighs less than a few pounds, and can make petabyte calculations per second: "the human brain."
The authors respond to earlier criticism about not addressing LINUX, and point out that LINUX is social innovation, not technical innovation. See Wealth of Networks below.
They note that the primary advantage of IT is that it enhances both local and global access. On the downside, it neglects periphery and context.
The authors reassert, compellingly, the value of intermediation, and I am reminded of our earlier criticisms of the Internet, still valid, in that most information is unedited, unformatted, unpaginated, undated, and lacking in source bias insight. This is still true, and Google is making it worse.
By the authors own account, this book addresses:
1) Limits of infopunditry
2) Challenges of software agents
3) Social character of work and learning
4) Limits of management theory
5) Resources for innovation
6) Unnoticed aspects of the document
7) Implications for design
8) Future of information, especially for university
I have a couple of nits, but not enough to warrant removal of one star. This is clearly a seminal work of lasting value.
Nit #1: Organizational Intelligence (Wilensky, 1967) is not to be found in this book. The authors do not go past Quadrant III (see loaded images).
Nit #2: While they have a superb bibliography and include works by Barlow, Kelly, Strassmann, Toffler, and Turkle, they do NOT include the seminal works directly relevant to this book, specifically, Barlow's seminal manifesto, and the following:
Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World
Information Payoff
Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Power at the Edge of the 21st Century
The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit , Twentieth Anniversary Edition
Amazon limits us to ten links. See my earlier lists (the first ten) for 300+ books covering information and intelligence. Here are six more:
The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
I regret the limitation on links. See also such gems as Forbidden Knowledge; Voltaire's Bastards; Age of Missing Information; etc etc.
This is a terrible book  2008-01-07
This book is, simply put, an epic letdown.
I'm intimately familiar with authors like Jared Diamond and Matt Ridley, with sociology texts, and with all manner of pop-tech books. I *should* be the absolute ideal fanboy for this book. I like reading about society and its interactions with technology. I love insight and fresh ideas ([...], for instance). And as a scientist, the concept of reading about the social life of information excites me!
Brown and Duguid have entirely failed to squeeze insight out of the interaction between information and society. Instead, they mindlessly drone on and on, listing a series of unsupported anecdotes describing how businesses and universities deal with this new concept of "technology". If they followed a theme or made salient points, I might forgive them. They do not.
Their writing is terrible - the entire book reads as though it were written by high schoolers with incredibly large vocabularies. The verbosity is stunningly bad; I'd give an example, but quoting a single sentence would require me to write so much that Amazon might bar the review for copyright reasons.
Worst of all - when I grab a book like this in a bookstore, I usually flip open to a few pages and see if the material draws me in. I cannot find a single page in this entire book that draws me in. Not one. It's so dense, so obfuscated, and so utterly pointless that it almost repels you from reading it.
I wanted so badly to like The Social Life of Information, but try as I might, there's nothing worth saving here. Avoid.
Some good and some old, some nostalgia  2007-08-11
This work, published in 2000, describes the perils of ignoring social aspects of information flow. The book is dated in certain respects. It spends a lot of time debunking concepts like denationalization and disintermediation that sound today like naïve meanderings from a misspent youth. But there are also good discussions of how social interactions critically influence how work actually gets done. Such interactions are typically ignored in process engineering, which explains among other things why SOX compliance is so painful. Worth reading for that by itself.
Information is not Epiphany 2007-03-11
I think personally, for me, I realized this was a pretty important book when I became rather bored with it in the middle. "I know all this," I was thinking to myself. While reading it, my mind kept wandering to the social media book I'm trying to write. I kept coming up with new things to write in the book.
Soon, The Social Life of Information was coated with scribbles related to my book.
And then I had to laugh at myself when I realized this was a large part of JSB's & PD's point. I had all the information to come to these little epiphanies, but it was only through the social interaction of reading their book did many of these concepts gel.
These thoughts gelled not because these guys were specifically telling me them, but because reading their book was part of a pattern of practice of my own in social media. Their ideas, my ideas, their experiences, my experiences and information combined to create context. Our social interaction created context.
The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same 2007-01-29
In "The Social Life of Information", the authors explore the informational revolution and its drumbeat of futuristic implications. As many thought at the beginning of the internet age, the 'Net would wipe out the big box concept and stores would disappear (i.e. Walmart or Sears), as too would books and etceteras. However, we have come to learn in the last 10 years or so that this did not take place for several reasons, of which, one very important reason is that information has its own social life with respect to content & context. For example, as the authors propose, if a company or organization of managers are primarily information processors, then the new technology and processes would have made organizations flatter with less management. However, as most of us would suspect or have experienced, most organizations only got more management top heavy which is similar to the futuristic assumption that paper too would slowly be obsolete as we continue to consume more paper every year.
As we tend to be social animals, Judgment and discretion are not features of software, but are learned not by the acquisition of facts and rules, but through social relations and participation in human activities. The authors help remind us of this fact as we move forward with new processes and designs.
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