The Social Life of Information [Hardcover]

I really enjoy 'ah-ha' moments; these are times where I look back at my experiences in a new light, thanks to a theory that justifies or explains something that I didn't understand. For example, I remember when I started my first professional job, right out of college, I thought the whole point of work was to, well, work. So I sat in my cube and worked 8 solid hours a day. After a few months, when I still didn't know anyone at the office, but had to ask someone how to modify a script I was working on, I learned the value of social interaction at the office. (Actually, I was so clueless, I had to ask someone to find the appropriate someone to ask.) While examining the concept of the home office, the authors state "[t]he office social system plays a major part in keeping tools (and people) up and running." It's not just work that happens at the office--there's collaboration and informal learning.

I've worked remotely in the past year for the first time, and anyone who's worked remotely has experienced a moment of frustration when trying to explain something and wished they were just "there," to show rather than tell--the authors refer to this process as 'huddling.' When someone is changing a software configuration that I'm not intimately familiar, it's much easier to judge correct options and settings if I'm there. The authors explain that "[huddling] is often a way of getting things done through collaboration. At home with frail and fickle technologies and unlimited configurations, people paradoxically may need to huddle even more, but can't." This collaboration is even more important between peers.

Reading about the home office and its lack of informal networks (which do occur around the corporate office) really drove home the social nature of work. After a few years at my company, I had cross-departmental relationships (often struck up over beer Friday) that truly eased some of my pain. Often, knowing who to ask a question is more important than knowing the answer to the question. It's not impossible to build those relationships when you're working remotely, but it's much more difficult.

Another enjoyable moment of clarity arose when the authors discussed the nature of documents. I think of a document as a Word file, or perhaps a set of printed out pages. The explicit information (words, diagrams, etc) that I can get from the document is the focus (and this is certainly the case in document management systems sales pitches). But there's a lot more to a document. How do I know how much to trust the information? Well, if it's on a website somewhere, that's a fair bit sketchier than if it's in the newspaper, which is in turn less trustworthy than if I've experienced the information myself. Documents validate information--we've all picked up a book, hefted it, examined it, and judged it based on its cover. The authors say "readers look beyond the information in documents. ... The investment evident in a document's material content is often a good indicator of the investment in its informational content." Just as if someone says "trust me" you should probably run the other way, information alone can't attest to its own veracity. The authors also look at aspects to documents (like history, like feel, like layout) that simply aren't captured when you treat them as streams of bits.

And there are many other examples of 'hype' that are deflated in this book, and a few other 'ah-ha' moments as well. As I stated above, this is a great read for anyone who thinks there is a technical answer to any problem (or even most problems). By taking apart various claims, and examining the truth and untruth of those claims in a real world context, these two authors give technology credit where it's due, while at the same time explaining why some of the older institutions and important factors in our lives will remain around. Reading this book was hard work, but understanding what the authors say gives me yet another way to relate to non-technical people, as well as fend off the zealots who claim, in a knee-jerk fashion, that more software solves problems. I majored in physics, in college, but minored in politics. It always seemed that the people problems, though more squishy, were more interesting. This book is confirmation of that fact.

This book is just about some ideas concerning the new technology and the new world information. People nowadays know the importance of information but they always missed the limitation of it. As mentioned by the author, increased in information is not necessary equivalents to increased in the value and meaning of it. Controlling the flow of mass information became a critical issue and solutions like better processing and improved data are suggested for improvement.

The book raised an essential element in the IT world, that is the social network, which in fact is playing the core role in this new technology world. Without the help of socialization, technology cannot grow so fast into our daily life. Think about facing problems about how to operate a new version of Microsoft windows, majority of new users would seek advice from those they knew rather than seek helps from the ¡§help¡ menu or instruction guidelines on the internet. Therefore, social context plays an important role in helping information and technology become more valuable to human.
It is the truth that even the professional technicians cannot solve problems by themselves sometimes and what they would do is to discuss with colleagues and share experience and knowledge with each other.

I agree that information itself has little meaning; it becomes valuable only after we digested and changed them into knowledge. Without doubt, technologies can ease our learning of knowledge and save much time. Therefore, they all have close relationship with each other.

This book is worthwhile to read and I have several learning insights from it. For instance, the difference between information and knowledge, IT is not as powerful as what I think before and there are still many rooms for improvements. The author pointed out an important term, Tunnel Vision, which means looking at a particular thing in a narrow vision and ignoring other things around. Whenever we try to focus on a certain issue, we should mind the thing around, broader vision is better to help us in getting a more objective view.

In addition, it is informative in clearing our misunderstandings on IT development and there are some good points raised by the author like those I have mentioned before.

In this book you will not find technological evangelicalism or ideas about how the Internet can change the world, but you will find thoughtful discussion about why online universities need the value of the offline university, why a knowledge economy cannot be understood in terms of a manufacturing paradigm of inter-changeable parts, why Chiat-Day's unstructured office design was an interesting concept but a failure in supporting the social structure of an office, and why groups of like-minded businesses will cluster in the same geographical area even though new technologies would elminate the need for proximity.

This book is positive about technology, but asks to look first at the real impact and real opportunity. While this is an amazing book that I would highly recommend to everyone interested in this subject, I did think the delineation of new technology and existing social context did not explore emergining social patterns as a result of technological change. We can only hope for a book in the future on this topic by these authors