Copyright © 2002 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1-57851-708-7
Chapter One
Limits to Information
On an average weekday the New York Times contains more information than any contemporary of Shakespeare's would have acquired in a lifetime.
—ANONYMOUS (and ubiquitous)
Every year, better methods are being devised to quantify information and distill it into quadrillions of atomistic packets of data.
—BILL GATES
By 2047 ... all information about physical objects, including humans, buildings, processes and organizations, will be online. This is both desirable and inevitable.
—GORDON BELL AND JIM GRAY
This is the datafication of shared knowledge.
—TOM PHILLIPS, Deja News
IT NOW SEEMS a curiously innocent time, though not that long ago, when the lack of information appeared to be one of society's fundamental problems. Theorists talked about humanity's "bounded rationality" and the difficulty of making decisions in conditions of limited or imperfect information. Chronic information shortages threatened work, education, research, innovation, and economic decision making—whether at the level of government policy, business strategy, or household shopping. The one thing we all apparently needed was more information.
So it's not surprising that infoenthusiasts exult in the simple volume of information that technology now makes available. They count the bits, bytes, and packets enthusiastically. They cheer the disaggregation of knowledge into data (and provide a new word—datafication—to describe it). As the lumps break down and the bits pile up, words like quadrillion, terabyte, and megaflop have become the measure of value.
Despite the cheers, however, for many people famine has quickly turned to glut. Concern about access to information has given way to concern about coping with the amounts to which we do have access. The Internet is rightly championed as a major information resource. Yet a little time in the nether regions of the Web can make you feel like the SETI researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, searching through an unstoppable flood of meaningless information from outer space for signs of intelligent life.
With the information spigot barely turned on—the effect has seemed more like breaching a dam than turning a tap—controlling the flow has quickly become the critical issue. Where once there seemed too little to swim in, now it's hard to stay afloat. The "third wave" has rapidly grown into a tsunami. Faced by cheery enthusiasts, many less optimistic people resemble the poor swimmer in Stevie Smith's poem, lamenting that
I was much too far out all my life And not waving, but drowning.
Yet still raw information by the quadrillion seems to fascinate.
COULD LESS BE MORE?
Of course, it's easy to get foolishly romantic about the pleasures of the "simpler" times. Few people really want to abandon information technology. Hours spent in a bank line, when the ATM in the supermarket can do the job in seconds, have little charm. Lose your papers in a less-developed country and trudge, as locals must do all the time, from line to line, from form to form, from office to office and you quickly realize that life without information technology, like life without modern sanitation, may seem simpler and even more "authentic," but for those who have to live it, it is not necessarily easier or more pleasant.
Even those people who continue to resist computers, faxes, e-mail, personal digital assistants, let alone the Internet and the World Wide Web, can hardly avoid taking advantage of the embedded microchips and invisible processors that make phones easier to use, cars safer to drive, appliances more reliable, utilities more predictable, toys and games more enjoyable, and the trains run on time. Though any of these technologies can undoubtedly be infuriating, most people who complain want improvements, not to go back to life without them.
Nonetheless, there is little reason for complacency. Information technology has been wonderfully successful in many ways. But those successes have extended its ambition without necessarily broadening its outlook. Information is still the tool for all tasks. Consequently, living and working in the midst of information resources like the Internet and the World Wide Web can resemble watching a firefighter attempt to extinguish a fire with napalm. If your Web page is hard to understand, link to another. If a "help" system gets overburdened, add a "help on using help." If your answer isn't here, then click on through another 1,000 pages. Problems with information? Add more.
Life at Xerox has made us sensitive to this sort of trap. As the old flip cards that provided instructions on copiers became increasingly difficult to navigate, it was once suggested that a second set be added to explain the first set. No doubt, had this happened, there would have been a third a few years later, then a fourth, and soon a whole laundry line of cards explaining other cards.
The power and speed of information technology can make this trap both hard to see and hard to escape. When information burdens start to loom, many of the standard responses fall into a category we call "Moore's Law" solutions. The law, an important one, is named after Gordon Moore, one of the founders of the chip maker Intel. He predicted that the computer power available on a chip would approximately double every eighteen months. This law has held up for the past decade and looks like it will continue to do so for the next. (It's this law that can make it hard to buy a computer. Whenever you buy, you always know that within eighteen months the same capabilities will be available at half the price.)
But while the law is insightful, Moore's Law solutions are usually less so. They take it on faith that more power will somehow solve the very problems that they have helped to create. Time alone, such solutions seem to say, with the inevitable cycles of the Law, will solve the problem. More information, better processing, improved data mining, faster connections, wider bandwidth, stronger cryptography—these are the answers. Instead of thinking hard, we are encouraged simply to "embrace dumb power."
More power may be helpful. To the same degree, it is likely to be more problematic, too. So as information technology tunnels deeper and deeper into everyday life, it's time to think not simply in terms of the next quadrillion packets or the next megaflop of processing power, but to look instead to things that lie beyond information.
DROWNING AND DIDN'T KNOW IT
If, as one of our opening quotations suggests, "all information about physical objects, including humans, buildings, processes and organizations, will be online," it's sometimes hard to fathom what there is beyond information to talk about.
Let us begin by taking a cue from MIT's Nicholas Negroponte. His handbook for the information age, Being Digital, encouraged everyone to think about the differences between atoms, a fundamental unit of matter, and bits, the fundamental unit of information. Here was a provocative and useful thought experiment in contrasts. It can be useful to consider possible similarities between the two as well.
Consider, for example, the industrial revolution, the information revolution's role model. It was a period in which society learned how to process, sort, rearrange, recombine, and transport atoms in unprecedented fashion. Yet people didn't complain that they were drowning in atoms. They didn't worry about "atom overload." Because, of course, while the world may be composed of atoms, people don't perceive it that way. They perceive it as buses and books and tables and chairs, buildings and coffee mugs, laptops and cell phones, and so forth. Similarly, while information may come to us in quadrillions of bits, we don't consider it that way. The information reflected in bits comes to us, for example, as stories, documents, diagrams, pictures, or narratives, as knowledge and meaning, and in communities, organizations, and institutions.
The difficulty of looking to these various forms through which information has conventionally come to us, however, is that infocentric visions tend to dismiss them as irrelevant. Infoenthusiasts insist, for example, not only that information technology will see the end of documents, break narratives into hypertext, and reduce knowledge to data, but that such things as organizations and institutions are little more than relics of a discredited old regime.
Indeed, the rise of the information age has brought about a good deal of "endism." New technology is widely predicted to bring about, among other things,
the end of the press, television, and mass media
the end of brokers and other intermediaries
the end of firms, bureaucracies, and similar organizations
the end of universities
the end of politics
the end of government
the end of cities and regions
the end of the nation-state
There's no doubt that in all these categories particular institutions and particular organizations are under pressure and many will not survive long. There's nothing sacred here. But it's one thing to argue that many "second wave" tools, institutions, and organizations will not survive the onset of the "third wave." It's another to argue that in the "third wave" there is no need for social institutions and organizations at all.
The strong claim seems to be that in the new world individuals can hack it alone with only information by their side. Everyone will return to frontier life, living in the undifferentiated global village. Here such things as organizations and institutions are only in the way. Consequently, where we see solutions to information's burdens, others see only burdens on information.
ORIGIN MYTHS
From all the talk about electronic frontiers, global villages, and such things as electronic cottages, it's clear that the romanticism about the past we talked about earlier is not limited to technophobes. Villages and cottages, after all, are curious survivors from the old world applied to the conditions of the new. They remind us that the information age, highly rationalist though it seems, is easily trapped by its own myths. One of the most interesting may be its origin myth, which is a myth of separation.
Historians frequently trace the beginnings of the information age not to the Internet, the computer, or even the telephone, but to the telegraph. With the telegraph, the speed of information essentially separated itself from the speed of human travel. People traveled at the speed of the train. Information began to travel closer to the speed of light. In some versions of this origin story (which tends to forget that fire and smoke had long been used to convey messages over a distance at the speed of light), information takes on not only a speed of its own, but a life of its own. (It is even capable, in some formulations, of "wanting" to be free.) And some scholars contend that with the computer, this decisive separation entered a second phase. Information technologies became capable not simply of transmitting and storing information, but of producing information independent of human intervention.
No one doubts the importance of Samuel Morse's invention. But with the all-but-death of the telegraph and the final laying to rest in 1999 of Morse code, it might be time to celebrate less speed and separation and more the ways information and society intertwine. Similarly, it's important not to overlook the significance of information's power to breed upon itself. But it might be time to retreat from exuberance (or depression) at the volume of information and to consider its value more carefully. The ends of information, after all, are human ends. The logic of information must ultimately be the logic of humanity. For all information's independence and extent, it is people, in their communities, organizations, and institutions, who ultimately decide what it all means and why it matters.
Yet it can be easy for a logic of information to push aside the more practical logic of humanity. For example, by focusing on a logic of information, it was easy for Business Week in 1975 to predict that the "paperless office" was close. Five years later, one futurist was firmly insisting that "making paper copies of anything" was "primitive." Yet printers and copiers were running faster and faster for longer and longer periods over the following decade. Moreover, in the middle of the decade, the fax rose to become an essential paper-based piece of office equipment. Inevitably, this too was seen as a breach of good taste. Another analyst snorted that the merely useful fax "is a serious blemish on the information landscape, a step backward, whose ramifications will be felt for a long time."
But the fax holds on. Rather like the pencil—whose departure was predicted in 1938 by the New York Times in the face of ever more sophisticated typewriters—the fax, the copier, and paper documents refuse to be dismissed. People find them useful. Paper, as we argue in chapter 7, has wonderful properties—properties that lie beyond information, helping people work, communicate, and think together.
If only a logic of information, rather than the logic of humanity, is taken into account, then all these other aspects remain invisible. And futurists, while raging against the illogic of humankind and the primitive preferences that lead it astray, will continue to tell us where we ought to go. By taking more account of people and a little less of information, they might instead tell us where we are going, which would be more difficult but also more helpful.
HAMMERING INFORMATION
Caught in the headlights of infologic, it occasionally feels as though we have met the man with the proverbial hammer to whom everything looks like a nail. If you have a problem, define it in terms of information and you have the answer. This redefining is a critical strategy not only for futurology, but also for design. In particular, it allows people to slip quickly from questions to answers.
If indeed Morse did launch the information age, he at least had the modesty to do it with a famously open-ended question. "What," he piously asked in his first message, "hath God wrought?" Now, "we have answers," or "solutions" or "all the answers you need" (11,000 according to Oracle's Web site). Similarly, IBM claims that a single computer can contain "answers to all the questions you ever had." So if Morse were to ask his question again today, he would no doubt be offered an answer beginning "http://www...."
True, Microsoft advertises itself with a question: "Where do you want to go today?" But that is itself a revealing question. It suggests that Microsoft has the answers. Further, Microsoft's pictures of people sitting eagerly at computers also suggest that whatever the question, the answer lies in digital, computer-ready information. For though it asks where you want to go, Microsoft isn't offering to take you anywhere. (The question, after all, would be quite different if Microsoft's Washington neighbor Boeing had asked it.) Atoms are not expected to move, only bits. No doubt to the regret of the airlines, the ad curiously redefines "go" as "stay." Stay where you are, it suggests, and technology will bring virtually anything you want to you in the comfort of your own home. (Bill Gates himself intriguingly refers to the computer as a "passport.") Information offers to satisfy your wanderlust without the need to wander from the keyboard.
REFINING, OR MERELY REDEFINING?
In the end, Microsoft's view of your wants is plausible so long as whatever you do and whatever you want translates into information—and whatever gets left behind doesn't matter. From this viewpoint, value lies in information, which technology can refine away from the raw and uninteresting husk of the physical world.
Thus you don't need to look far these days to find much that is familiar in the world redefined as information. Books are portrayed as information containers, libraries as information warehouses, universities as information providers, and learning as information absorption. Organizations are depicted as information coordinators, meetings as information consolidators, talk as information exchange, markets as information-driven stimulus and response.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid. Copyright © 2002 by Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.