Scholarship
July 3, 2025
The Social Life of Information
- Author
- Brown, John Seely and Paul Duguid
- Publisher
- Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, MA
- ISBN
- 1578517087
- Table of Contents
-
Preface: Looking Around
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Tunneling Ahead
ch. 1 Limits to Information
ch. 2 Agents and Angels
ch. 3 Home Alone
ch. 4 Practice Makes Process
ch. 5 Learning - in Theory and in Practice
ch. 6 Innovating Organization, Husbanding Knowledge
ch. 7 Reading the Background
ch. 8 Re-education
Afterword: Beyond Information
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Authors
In this paperback edition of The Social Life of Information, the authors dispel many of the futurists' sweeping predictions that information technology will obliterate the need for everything from travel to supermarkets to business organizations to social life itself. But beaten down by info-glut, exasperated by computer crashes, and burned by dot-com stocks, individual users find it hard to get a fix on the true potential of the digital revolution.
A new preface updates and expands on the ideas of the original text, in which 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 that we often fail to see where we're really going. We need to look beyond our obsession with information and individuals to include the critical social networks of which these are always a part.
The Social Life of Information shows how a better understanding of the contribution that communities, organizations, and institutions make to learning, working, and innovating can lead to the richest possible use of technology in our work and everyday lives. (From the Publisher)
A new preface updates and expands on the ideas of the original text, in which 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 that we often fail to see where we're really going. We need to look beyond our obsession with information and individuals to include the critical social networks of which these are always a part.
The Social Life of Information shows how a better understanding of the contribution that communities, organizations, and institutions make to learning, working, and innovating can lead to the richest possible use of technology in our work and everyday lives. (From the Publisher)