The social life of information /

Brown (chief scientist, Xerox, and director of the Palo Alto Research Center) and Duguid (social theorist and historian) present an intriguing reminder not to take for granted the advantages of information technology or to assume that the complexity of human decision making and creativity can ever be replaced. The human need for shared cultural objects is emphasized throughout the book. The authors build their case by analyzing the glowing predictions about how computers would transform society, business, education, and personal lives, and they detail how only some predictions have come to fruition. Their provocative conclusions will stimulate the reader to contemplate the real advances and failures resulting from computer use. The broad and varied bibliographical sources used to support the authors' thesis, along with the many cases and examples, will resonate with readers. Related books include Common Knowledge by Nancy M. Dixon (2000) and Enabling Knowledge Creation by George von Krogh (2000). An excellent resource for academic audiences, upper-division undergraduate and up. The authors' accessible and entertaining writing style will also appeal to business practitioners and general readers. N. J. Johnson; Metropolitan State University

From the chief scientist of Xerox Corporation and a research specialist in cultural studies at UC-Berkeley comes a treatise that casts a critical eye at all the hype surrounding the boom of the information age. The authors' central complaint is that narrowly focusing on new ways to provide information will not create the cyber-revolution so many technology designers have visualized. The problem (or joy) is that information acquires meaning only through social context. Brown and Duguid add a humanist spin to this idea by arguing, for example, that "trust" is a deep social relation among people and cannot be reduced to logic, and that a satisfying "conversation" cannot be held in an Internet chat room because too much social context is stripped away and cannot be replaced by just adding more information, such as pictures and biographies of the participants. From this standpoint, Brown and Duguid contemplate the future of digital agents, the home office, the paperless society, the virtual firm and the online university. Though they offer many insightful opinions, they have not produced an easy read. As they point out, theirs is "more a book of questions than answers" and they often reject "linear thinking." Like most futurists, they are fond of long neologisms, but they are given to particularly unpronounceable ones like "infoprefixification" (the tendency to put "info" in front of words). The result is an intellectual gem in which the authors have polished some facets and, annoyingly, left others uncut. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved