15-Apr-00 [The Economist] Predictions about technology - It isnt nigh

THE SOCIAL LIFE OF I NFORMATION . By John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid. Harvard Business School Press. 304 pages; $25.95. McGraw-Hill; £16.99

HALFWAY through this book is an enchanting anecdote. Paul Duguid, one of the authors, was working in an archive of a 250-year-old company, reading correspondence written at the time of the American Revolution. Coughing asthmatically at the clouds of dust, he was aghast to see another historian arrive one day and go through the letters, sniffing each envelope in turn. Occasionally he would open one, examine it briefly, make a note and move on. He was, he explained, a medical historian, documenting outbreaks of cholera. When an outbreak occurred in an 18th-century town, all its mail was disinfected with vinegar. From letters that still carried the faint whiff, he could chart the progress of cholera outbreaks.

The tale illustrates perfectly the main theme of this book: the perils of separating, as the authors put it, "text from context". Many of the claims made for the digital revolution have turned out to be false, and the reason is almost invariably that their makers have failed to understand the true complexity of the world in which the revolution is taking place. They suffer, instead, from "tunnel vision": they see only the narrow way ahead, and not the rich and confused landscape on each side. They therefore predict the end of everything from distance to the university to the firm&emdash;a habit the authors dub "endism"&emdash;in spite of a long history of failure for such predictions.

Take the paperless office&emdash;confidently promised in Business Week way back in 1975. Since then paper consumption in offices has doubled, from 100 pounds to 200 pounds per head per year. Why? "Paper has wonderful properties," say the authors, one of whom is chief scientist at Xerox and one an academic at the University of California at Berkeley: "properties that lie beyond information, helping people work, communicate and think together."

These communal activities are the ones that surround and steer any technological innovation. Ignoring them is a short-cut to failure. The authors offer a wry account of the failure by Chiat/Day, a trendy advertising agency, to persuade its staff to work without permanent offices, desks or physical equipment of any kind. The result was a campaign of civil disobedience and an outbreak of turf wars. What Chiat/Day ignored was not just the inconvenience of having no desk of one's own: it was the ability of people to learn at work from watching and talking to those around them. People who work at home (the authors quote a wince-making diary of a home-office worker's efforts to set up an account with a new Internet service provider) lack such support, which is why conventional offices, in some form or other, are here to stay.

Physical propinquity remains a powerful force for innovation: Silicon Valley and all its imitators suggest that geography is far from dead. Distance learning, while much hyped, will never replace some of the most important kinds of learning that take place when groups of people assemble in one physical place to acquire academic skills and knowledge. Knowledge itself is not the one-dimensional commodity that much excitable writing in the past decade has suggested.

The book is more than just a welcome antidote to digital silliness. It is also an important description of the complexities of innovation. In the thick of an undoubtedly important technological revolution, it is important to be reminded that innovation is not just about technology. It is also about those curious, unpredictable, inventive and cussed creatures: human beings. Forget them, and you might as well forget everything else.

 

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