John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
It's back to the nonfiction with this book, which is an outlook on the possible trajectories of information technology from the authors' starting point around the turn of the Millennium. It's strange to revisit this book a full eleven years after most of its examples have had the chance to play out, and though it isn't fair to judge the book simply by the authors' inability to accurately forsee the future, it is hilarious to note a few instances where they are hilariously wrong (my personal favorite is assuming that a start-up will never be able to capture a market again; hello, Google). It is not these forgivable failures that sink The Social Life of Information, however. Buried within its excessive verbosity and obsession with authors' employer are interesting ideas, sure, but it is too damn hard to find them in the rambling, often contradictory prose offered by Brown and Duguid. The authors are perhaps a bit too enthusiastic as they fill their pages with incomprehensible jargon and work on the underlying assumption that readers share a strong business background. Particularly egregious is a mention of 6D thinking well before the list of 6Ds, odd buzzwords that all begin with de- or dis- and which are completely obtuse and unexplained, popping up occasionally in subsequent chapters (despite the authors' insistence that the "essays" can be read in any order). I mean, what does "disintermediation" even mean? Instead of shoring up their argument by explaining how each D represents a trend, the authors leave the words uselessly hanging.
This type of assumptive writing is prevalent throughout the book, which teems with unexplained examples that seem unrelated to the text at large and which unexpectedly pop up later after being left hanging for far too long. Brown and Duguid indulge in technical talk that is, at best, self-indulgent and throw in bonus-point vocabulary words that detract from meaning and come across as flagrant showboating. Their inability to construct an academic argument also adds an air of self-importance; though there are several coherent points in the book, these are repeated as bite-sized tidbits and aren't connected to the data presented. Often, Brown and Duguid use the book as a platform to attack futurologists and predictions of the future, a tendency that is hilarious when they are wrong (which is often) and ironic when they devote twenty pages or so to describing a future of universities which hasn't come to pass yet and doesn't seem to be close. It's paradoxical that in their love of paradox-exposing and use of the word "paradoxical" they unwittingly create a paradox in their own book. Amidst all this bad writing, they make the same point time and again. The Social Life of Information argues, where arguments can be found, that technology can't be ripped from the social context of humanity; the way we use information is as important as how we use information. Brown and Duguid have come up with many interesting examples of this but can't seem to connect them with each other or with larger principles; it's up to the reader to connect the dots and to discard the 85-90% of the book that is useless statistics and almost-unreadable language. The Social Life of Information is an interesting attempt to contextualize technology, but only hardcore information buffs willing to withstand a battery of poor prose should bother with this incoherent list of sometimes interesting ideas.
Grade: C
This type of assumptive writing is prevalent throughout the book, which teems with unexplained examples that seem unrelated to the text at large and which unexpectedly pop up later after being left hanging for far too long. Brown and Duguid indulge in technical talk that is, at best, self-indulgent and throw in bonus-point vocabulary words that detract from meaning and come across as flagrant showboating. Their inability to construct an academic argument also adds an air of self-importance; though there are several coherent points in the book, these are repeated as bite-sized tidbits and aren't connected to the data presented. Often, Brown and Duguid use the book as a platform to attack futurologists and predictions of the future, a tendency that is hilarious when they are wrong (which is often) and ironic when they devote twenty pages or so to describing a future of universities which hasn't come to pass yet and doesn't seem to be close. It's paradoxical that in their love of paradox-exposing and use of the word "paradoxical" they unwittingly create a paradox in their own book. Amidst all this bad writing, they make the same point time and again. The Social Life of Information argues, where arguments can be found, that technology can't be ripped from the social context of humanity; the way we use information is as important as how we use information. Brown and Duguid have come up with many interesting examples of this but can't seem to connect them with each other or with larger principles; it's up to the reader to connect the dots and to discard the 85-90% of the book that is useless statistics and almost-unreadable language. The Social Life of Information is an interesting attempt to contextualize technology, but only hardcore information buffs willing to withstand a battery of poor prose should bother with this incoherent list of sometimes interesting ideas.
Grade: C
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