Luciano Floridi
The Social Life of Information, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
(Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press, 2000. pp. x + 336, h/b)

The information society is full of strange paradoxes. "On the Internet,
nobody knows you're a dog", yet individual privacy has never been more at
risk. Electronic texts may be threatening the printed book, but the first
flagship of e.com has been a book retailer. ICT (digital information and
communication technology) has created new kinds of intellectual richness
and expertise as well as unprecedented forms of techno-disabilities and
poverty. The Web requires ever better educated people, although it may be
run by artificial agents. Cyberspace is said to be open, free, democratic
and friendly, yet networks are protected by firewalls, mailing lists are
moderated, sites and databases require userids and passwords, and our
vocabulary has been expanded by words like "spamming" and "flaming". The
new frontier of long-distance education and tailored entertainment also
demands increasing parental care to avoid ubiquitous pornography (would
you allow your children to search for Star Wars' "Princess Leila" on the
Web?). The list could easily be expanded. The crucial point is how we
understand these difficulties. The Social Life of Information
(http://www.slofi.com/) is a timely, well-informed and very interesting
attempt to explain how ICT and the infosphere should develop to avoid
problems of this kind.
John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid have a philosophy of information to
defend and their perceptive diagnosis contains the seeds of a valuable
prescription. The infosphere is the most plastic reality with which
humanity has ever dealt. Its pioneering culture has naturally fascinated
the American mind, but in the past spatial metaphors have been slightly
misleading. For we are not merely exploring or taming, but rather creating
and moulding a whole digital universe, whose worth and defects mirror our
interests, wishes and faults. How we create, design, employ and regulate
the powerful, digital resources and technologies at our disposal is not
only of vital importance for the shape that our environment is taking, but
also a matter of profound moral responsibility towards the present world
and future generations. What matters is not so much moving bits instead of
atoms-this is an outdated, communication-based interpretation of the
information society that owes too much to mass-media sociology-as the far
more radical fact that the very essence and fabric of reality is
changing. The information society is better seen as a neo-manufacturing
society in which raw materials and energy have been superseded by the new
digital gold. Not just communication and transactions then, but the
creation, design and management of information are the keys to its proper
understanding. From this neo-manufacturing perspective, the main thesis of
the book can be introduced as an ethical reminder: complete ontological
responsibility does not entail unregulated freedom. Two simple rules
should guide our divine acts of information creation and design: there is
no information in isolation, and information in context may still be
worthless without the careful intelligence required to transform it into
knowledge and meaningful ideas. In the first chapter, Brown and Duguid
convincingly argue that contemporary datacentrism fails to respect these
fundamental constraints. The authors do not defend some kind of
Heideggerian search for the authentic, over and above the infosphere. They
know that reality is not hiding in the digital, but rather is being
digitised. Their warning is that the merely informational aspects of life
are becoming over-important at the expense of what is not or cannot be
reduced to information: the meaning, understanding, knowledge and
epistemic practices that constitute their social contexts. There is a
dangerous shift towards a superficial datafication and information-based
re-definition of the world of experience; what can be done, what can be
wanted, what can be threatening etc. may become just types of
information: sexual, gastronomic, musical, visual, textual and so
forth. Even intelligence may appear as mere data processing, with strong
AI trying to reproduce as much as to redefine human understanding,
although guesswork, judgement, experience, intuition or discretion cannot
be reduced to smart algorithms.
The nineteenth century's death of God, understood as the transcendental
guarantee of an objective, cosmological semantics, has been followed by a
"second wave" of total humanism, which in turn is now being proclaimed
moribund by a data-based "third wave" that predicts the death of politics,
of government, of institutions, of cities and nation-states or
transnational organisations and other social intermediaries as we know
them, in a sort of destructuring and boundless hypertextualisation of
human relations. The result of this datacentrism has been a plethora of
hype and some simplistic obituaries that the authors aptly label the
6Ds. Demassification, decentralisation, denationalisation,
despacialisation, disintermediation and disaggregation have all been
predicted as immanent phenomena. Wrongly, they argue. For info-enthusiasts
correctly acknowledge ICT as one of the most powerful forces at work in
society, but are mistaken when they view the new landscape it makes
possible as constituted merely by information and exclusively oriented to
the individual, implicitly appealing to Moore's Law (computational power
will double every eighteen months) as a panacea for any present and future
social problem. 
The mistake rests on the blinding simplicity of the CD vs. vinyl
interpretative model of technological evolution. Why have CDs not replaced
the more primitive music cassettes? By trying to solve old problems,
technological solutions often end up by splitting, re-shaping and
diversifying them. In this evolutionary sense, killer applications are
rare exceptions. BiC® produces "modern" ball pens that have not decreed
the death of "old" fountain pens, and "old" disposable razors are not
mortally challenged by more "modern" electric razors. Pencils come in a
variety of forms, swatches are analogue but trendy and scooters have not
replaced bicycles. Technological evolution is usually a creative process
of binary fission.
The temptation is to condemn any technological eliminativism (the naïve
CD-vinyl model) as short-sighted, but with an insightful twist Brown and
Duguid speak instead of a tunnel-vision, which may be partly justifiable,
but is dangerously limited by its disregard for the surrounding
environment. As they suggest, the way forward may be, paradoxically, to
look not ahead, but around. Their philosophy of information is a kind of
lateral ecologism. Too often contextual factors are so pervasive as to
become unnoticeable to hypermetric futurologists. Yet, the importance of
the supporting periphery, i.e. the social context in which information
flourishes and evolves into knowledge, can be overlooked  but not
overestimated (one may prefer an electric razor only if easy and constant
access to a cheap source of electricity is available; scooters presuppose
petrol stations, fuel and garages, and so on).
From chapter two onwards, Brown and Duguid analyse six specific domains in
which technological eliminativism mistakes gradual evolutions, mutations
and adaptations for mere catastrophic changes. The discussion is carefully
and systematically based on actual cases and it never turns into the
boring collection of pointless, if entertaining, anecdotes, so common in
the literature on the social impact of ICT. The worlds of negotiation,
information brokering and artificial agents, of the home office and
tele-jobs, of work organisation, of learning, of research and innovation,
of the electronic media and of long-distance education are thoughtfully
assessed, with a wealth of brilliant intuitions. In each case, the authors
show how ICT may run the risk of throwing away the substantial hidden
resources (e.g. the old razor's total independence of any energy
technology) along with the surface constraints (e.g. the dangerous
sharpness of the old razor). In the northern hemisphere, people live in an
increasingly designed reality. The Social Life of Information does not
contain a gloomy catalogue of pre-conceived solutions or neo-luddite
prescriptions of what we ought to do. It is a circumstantial and
constructive reminder of the importance of all the semantic and social
constraints that we need to respect in order to build a better
infosphere. It should be read by anyone interested in understanding the
future.


Luciano Floridi is Research Fellow at Wolfson College and Lecturer in
Philosophy at Magdalen College and Keble College, Oxford University. His
most recent book is Philosophy and Computing - An Introduction (Routledge,
1999).