The Social Life of Information
by John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid · first published 2000
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The Social Life of Information is a 2000 book by John Seely Brown (the former Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and director of Xerox PARC) and Paul Duguid (Adjunct professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information), which discusses recently developed practices in the transmission of information in social and business contexts.
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I was somewhat staggered in the late 1990s reading John Sealy Brown (former PARC director), in The Social Life of Information, which is otherwise and excellent book and one I'd still recommend, that the grand-daddy of technical reproduction businesses completely failed to mention its biggest competitor, the Apache Webserver,…
on “Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?” ↗…it's a joy when she does, the piece comes from an upcoming book. She focuses largely on John Seely Brown of Xerox Park, still very much alive despite Dr. Tett's past-tense references, and author of The Social Life of Information (2000, 2017), a hugely illuminating read despite a few glaring holes (like the World Wide Web, apparently invisible to a Xerox careerist at the time). It's one of several reads from the dawn of the Web…
on “Anthropologists and the business of sense-making at work” ↗…many times that those who have the best appreciation for how a product works are those who use it directly, and secondly, those who either service it or support those using it. John Sealy Brown's The Social Life of Information addresses this with both Xerox copier repairmen and support staff. Use this to your advantage two ways: let these people share and collaborate, even if informally For the repairmen, this was a morning…
on “We lost a customer. This is how we found out” ↗John Seeley Brown, in The Social Life of Information, has a pair of anecdotes from Xerox's repair staff and either Xerox or Kodak (I think) customer service. The support techs used to have a morning coffee session before heading out into the field on their…
on “Just shut up and let your devs concentrate, advises Joel Spolsky” ↗"We notice the ripple and take the lake for granted" from "The Social Life of Information" by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid “We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't the fish.” Marshal Mcluhan
on “Ask News.YC: How difficult is it to break out of prevailing paradigms of the present?” ↗The Bell study sounds similar to research John Seeley Brown references from Xerox, in The Social Life of Information (2000), particularly chapters 4 & 5 discussing research of Julian Orr. Xerox repair techs' secret weapon was the morning pre-dispatch coffee session, where war stories were swapped. A similar later…
on “Attention Is My Most Valuable Asset for Productivity as a Software Developer” ↗…commentary from early days of the Internet on the hidden value of mass curation (as with large-scale print or broadcast media), or negative side-effects of "personalised" media. John Seeley Brown's The Social Life of Information (2000) addresses the first, Andrew J. Shapiro's The Control Revolution (1999) the second. More recently it's been noted that personalised targeting (of both advertising and "content") means that it's…
on “A philosopher's one-word theory to explain why the world feels so weird” ↗