The Social Life of Information

For Years Pundits Have Predicted that information technology will obliterate the need for almost everything--from travel to supermarkets to business organizations to social life itself. Individual users, however, tend to be more skeptical. Beaten down by info-glut and exasperated by computer systems fraught with software crashes, viruses, and unintelligible error messages, they find it hard to get a fix on the true potential of the digital revolution.

John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid help us to see through frenzied visions of the future to the real forces for change in society. They argue that the gap between digerati hype and enduser 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 and what's helping us get there. We need, they argue, to look beyond our obsession with information and individuals to include the critical social networks of which these are always a part.

Preface: Looking Around
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Tunneling Ahead

1. Limits to Information
2. Agents and Angels
3. Home Alone
4. Practice Makes Process
5. Learning - in Theory and in Practice
6. Innovating Organization, Husbanding Knowledge
7. Reading the Background
8. Re-education

Afterword: Beyond Information
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Authors