The Social Life of Information: Updated, with a New Preface

333 Pages·2017·2.159 MB·English

by  John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid

THE

SOCIAL
LIFE
OF
INFORMATION

John Seely Brown
Paul Duguid
T H E
S O CI A L
L I F E
OF
I N F OR M AT ION
Updated, with a New Preface
New Introduction by David Weinberger
harvard business review press
Boston, Massachusetts
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“Not Waving But Drowning” by Stevie Smith, from Collected Poems of Stevie Smith.
Reprinted with the permission of New Directions and Faber & Faber.
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eISBN: 9781633692428
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For
Susan and Laura

Contents
Authors’ Preface to the New Edition: Reassessing the Social ix
Introduction to New Edition by David Weinberger xxv
P reface to the 2002 Edition: Looking Around xxxi
Acknowledgments xlv
Introduction to the Original Edition: Tunneling Ahead 1
1. Limits to Information 11
2 . Agents and Angels 33
3 . Home Alone 59
4 . Practice Makes Process 85
5 . Learning—In Theory and in Practice 109
6 . Innovating Organization, Husbanding Knowledge 137
7 . Reading the Background 161
8. Re-education 193
Afterword: Beyond Information 225
Notes 235
Bibliography 259
Index 269
About the Authors 283

Authors’ Preface to the New Edition
Reassessing the Social
The constant change everyone must live with today makes looking
back at something written over fi fteen years ago a daunting task.
Turning back to a book like T he Social Life of Information , which tried
to take a snapshot in 2000 of the continuous revolution that is the
“age of information,” feels particularly challenging. To intensify our
anxiety, we are aware that our revisiting this book coincides with the
far more signifi cant fi ftieth anniversary of “Moore’s Law.” 1 Gordon
Moore’s remarkably accurate prediction that the power of computer
processing would double roughly every couple of years draws atten-
tion to the digital drivers of the age’s ever-changing character. The
endurance of that law challenges the endurance of almost any other
pronouncements, such as ours. Hence, we could almost feel Moore
looking over our shoulders as we fl icked back through our book to
write this new preface at the end of 2015.
We can perhaps take some odd consolation from the title. When
we were approaching publication and said that we planned to call
the book The Social Life of Information , most people looked at us with
incredulity. What on earth, the general reaction in the 1990s tended
to be, has “social” got to do with “information”? Perhaps a sign of
Moore-driven change, fi fteen years later it would be hard to talk for
long about information without turning to questions about social
media, social technology, social networks, and the transformations
brought to social life through Facebook, Twitter, and dozens of other
well-known social systems. While we are delighted that discussions