''The Social Life of Information'' is a 2000 book by

John Seely Brown John Seely Brown (born 1940), also known as "JSB", is an American researcher who specializes in organizational studies with a particular bend towards the organizational implications of computer-supported activities. Brown served as Director of Xer ...

(the former Chief Scientist of

Xerox Corporation Xerox Holdings Corporation (; also known simply as Xerox) is an American corporation that sells print and digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut (having moved from Sta ...

and director of

Xerox PARC PARC (Palo Alto Research Center; formerly Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. Founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, the company was originally a division of Xero ...

) and Paul Duguid (Adjunct professor at the

UC Berkeley School of Information The University of California, Berkeley, School of Information, also known as the UC Berkeley School of Information or the I School, is a graduate school and, created in 1994, the newest of the schools at the University of California, Berkele ...

), which discusses recently developed practices in the transmission of information in social and business contexts. The authors argue that information technology needs to be considered in a broad context that includes the entirety of society and social resources, in contrast to the narrow focus on information that tends to be the framework of such technology – what the authors criticize as "tunnel design".Seely Brown, John; Duguid, Paul (2017/2000).
The Social Life of Information
'. Updated edition. Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business Review Press. . pp. 4-9 ("Introduction to the Original Edition"). That is, increased technological delivery of information does not in and of itself contribute to a better future. The text, in part, analyzes examples of the office world's adoption of technology, offering a differentiated rather than an unquestioningly affirmative view of the effects.

User agents

Serving as an early example of the ambiguous utility of software to human, the authors discuss software known as

autonomous agent An autonomous agent is an intelligent agent operating on a user's behalf but without any interference of that user. An intelligent agent, however appears according to an IBM white paper as: Intelligent agents are software entities that carry out ...

s which manipulate information. Different forms of such agents include

information broker A data broker is an individual or company that specializes in collecting personal data (such as income, ethnicity, political beliefs, or geolocation data) or data about companies, mostly from public records but sometimes sourced privately, and s ...

, product brokering, merchant brokering, and negotiation. The authors use an example of information brokering using the Macintosh program named Sherlock that searched for the word "knobot" via the Internet. Product brokering would be an example of an online bookstore sending a person an email about a book for sale based on the previous types of books the customer bought. Merchant brokering, now widely practiced, consists of finding the best price for a product. For example,

eBay eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became ...

allows users, not necessarily in the same location, to buy new, used, or refurbished products through an auction, at a fixed price, or through negotiation. This book has been republished in 2002 with a new introduction, by the

Harvard Business School Press Harvard Business Publishing was founded in 1994 as a not-for-profit, wholly owned subsidiary of Harvard University (distinct from Harvard University Press), with a focus on improving business management practices. The company consists of thre ...

Reviews

Reviews of the book from professional journals include: *Gleason, Sandra (Summer 2001).
Planning for Higher Education
'. 29(4): pp. 38-39. *O'Malley, Lisa (2002), in '' Journal of Marketing''. 66(4): pp. 124-127. . *Watson-Boone, Peter (2001), in ''Portal: Libraries and the Academy''. 1(2): pp. 180-12. . *''

The Library Quarterly ''The Library Quarterly'' is a quarterly double-anonymous peer-reviewed academic journal covering library science, including historical, sociological, statistical, bibliographical, managerial, psychological, and educational aspects of the fiel ...

''. 2001. 71(1): pp. 94-95.

Notes

References

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Social Life of Information Information science 2000 non-fiction books

User agents

Reviews

See also

Notes

References