John Seely Brown: In Context
by Jeff De Cagna, Ed.M. Managing Director, Strategic Learning and Development Special Libraries Association
Recently, Information Outlook had the opportunity to sit down with John Seely Brown, chief scientist at Xerox Corporation and director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Dr. Brown is one of the world's leading authorities on new technologies, organizational innovation and learning. He is also co-author (with Paul Duguid) of the recent book, The Social Life of Information, which offers an optimistic look beyond the simplicities of information and individuals. It shows how a better understanding of the contribution that communities, organizations and institutions make to learning, working, and innovating can lead to the richest possible use of technology in our work and everyday lives.
Jeff De Cagna, SLA's managing director, strategic learning and development, chatted with Dr. Brown about information, knowledge, libraries and, of course, motorcycles!
Information Outlook: What was it that prompted you and your colleague, Paul Duguid, to write The Social Life of Information?
JOHN SEELY BROWN: We both live in the midst of what I'm going to call "broken promises" in the center of Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is the home of the Internet, a place that cries out loud and clear about "the death of distance." But why is it that people pay $5 million for a home in Silicon Valley, and why are the highways clogged beyond all belief? Likewise, people keep asking us, if the book is dead, why are people buying more books than ever? We're also kind of struck by the fact that many of the digerati claim that large companies are dinosaurs, and yet, you can hardly pick up a newspaper today without reading about some new mega-merger that's going on. So we seem to live in an era of broken promises. The job of Xerox PARC has been to design technology that fits people, not to design technology that people have to fit to. So, for the last ten years or so, we have shifted our own focus from individual and personal computing to the community, communities of practice, and what you might call "social computing." This emphasis gives us a new set of eyeglasses to step back and look at some of these broken promises.
IO: In the beginning of the book, you write, "attending too closely to information overlooks the social context that helps people understand what that information might mean and why it matters." Can you say a little more about that?
JSB: Surely. I'll start with one of the easiest examples: newspapers. If you think of a newspaper as solely a deliverer of information, you have lost 90 percent of the way a newspaper communicates meaning.
For example, everyone implicitly knows that stories that start above the fold are more important than stories that start below the fold. The stories that jump to the back page are actually more important than the stories that jump to the middle. Good editors do an excellent job of putting one story next to another story that you are likely to be interested in, even if you don't know that you are interested in it.
So now you jump ahead and think about the interest today in creating newspapers tailored to individuals, be it in paper or digital form. Either way, it is using digital technology to tailor the newspaper just to your personal interest, under the guise of efficiency. But is this really efficient? This is a big question mark we started thinking about.
Is a newspaper that has been tailored to the individual any longer "a newspaper?" After all, newspapers create or make news; everybody in the community sees the same headlines, so it creates a common experience that fosters and focuses conversations everywhere you go in the community or the organization.
So while the newspaper may be thought of as only delivering information, it is really acting as a kind of social glue that pulls together and maintains communities. Within those communities, what the newspaper says helps to make meaning, not just by what it says, but also around the conversations that it fosters. It is not only the physical context of where a story lies in the newspaper, but also the social context that gets created as well.
A related point that may resonate with your readers is recognizing how much you can tell about a book by its cover. In fact, different book genres are rendered differently in terms of type font, art design, bindings, and so on and so the layout and the design of the book, as an artifact, tells you all kinds of things about how to read the content of the book. Also, where a book is placed on the bookshelf tells you even more about it. So, basically, there's the broader context of a book--not the content or the text--but the book's packaging, design, and where it is placed in the libraries or the bookstores. When you expand these layers one after another, you realize that every artifact is situated in its own unique context, context that provides a powerful tool for those of us who navigate through the world to find it.
IO: One of the issues you and Paul examine in The Social Life of Information is the notion of "disintermediation." Can you share your perspective of disintermediation, particularly as it pertains to libraries and librarians?
JSB: First of all, I think associated with "disintermediation" goes along the concept of "reintermediation." There is a shift in the types of intermediaries from the "old economy" to the "new economy." Disintermediation itself does not take out all of the intermediaries, but rather it transforms the roles of these "middle folks."
A topic of great interest to both Paul and myself is the role of editing in what we might describe as "the economy of attention," since human attention is an increasingly rare commodity. I constantly go to this small, beautifully designed bookstore in my neighborhood where the owner is brilliant at editing the selection of books. The smaller the bookstore, the more editing that is going on. Indeed, we are moving into an economy in which two skills—navigating and selecting—will be critically important.
[In this economy, we will need people with the ability to navigate through the vast informational spaces, to find those beautiful needles in gigantic, messy haystacks.] We also will need people with the ability to select what articles actually carry the relevant information that builds on previous ideas in ways that clients or customers really care about.
In Palo Alto, there is a huge mass-market bookstore and there is a tiny little bookstore about two doors down. The popularity of the tiny bookstore has skyrocketed since the large bookstore moved in because I think people began to appreciate that in this little bookstore there was just tremendous understanding of the books, there was brilliance in the selection and the editing of the books.
I think that we are seeing reintermediation happening in terms of the concepts of editing, selection and navigation. The navigator through information who then selects the information to be publicly rendered, I think, is a role that is going to increase, and so it is a slight shift of the old intermediary form into a brand new form. So we don't believe in disintermediation, per se. We actually believe it is going to lead to a new kind of intermediary, and that is where we must focus if we want to ride the wave of the old economy to a new economy.
IO: Given what you know about librarians as professionals, do you think that their ability to perform these roles of navigation and selection in the way that you describe is going to require them to change the way they deal with information?
JSB: I assume the new navigators and selectors are going to have to pick up a whole new class of skills. For example, in the old economy, the print material came primarily from large-scale institutions like The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, or other publishers, where there were institutional warrants behind the information. But on the web, you'd have to be crazy to believe 99 percent of what you find.
So the role of judgment is going to become even more important, and judgment not just for librarians, but also for the reader. It just may be that one of the most important skills for the kids that grow up digital to develop is the skill of judgment because as you surf the Internet and borrow things to add to your term paper, you can't fall back implicitly on the institutional warrants that have made the judgments for you in the physical world, but rather now you must be prepared to explicitly make the judgments yourself. This means that on the web, you have to find new ways to judge quality and you don't have many of the same old cues. Now, librarians are skilled in massing peripheral cues in order to really believe in what they find. Those skills are going to have to pick up on new kinds of cues, but while the cues are going to be different, the skill is still going to be there. That's what I expect.
IO: In The Social Life, you wrote about three important differences between knowledge and information. Can you explain these differences and comment on why understanding the distinction between knowledge and information is really important?
JSB: Paul and I write about three key differences between knowledge and information: 1) that knowledge entails a "knower," i.e., it is personal, whereas information is treated as essentially independent, 2) because knowledge is personal, it is harder to detach from someone and pass around than information and, 3) having knowledge requires understanding on the part of knower, while having information can be separated from any appreciation of its meaning.
Speaking as a technologist, [information is what lies in machines. Knowledge, in contrast, is what lies in humans, in our heads, in our bodies, and between us in our communities of practice.] Knowledge is something that we have integrated into our own conceptual framework. So you can ask ‘where is the information' but not ‘where is the knowledge'.
IO: What is your impression of "knowledge management" as it is commonly practiced on organizations today? I gather from what you just said that you think it's more akin to information management .
JSB: I think a great deal of knowledge management is classical information management labeled under the new buzz word called "knowledge management." I think if you look at the concept of knowledge sharing, that's quite different because knowledge sharing brings it back to people. [Knowledge management should be dealing primarily with people and looking at how technology might augment the conversations that happen between people.]
It is important to note that a key goal of knowledge management is to create and disseminate "knowledge" that people are willing to act on. It is one's willingness to believe something and to act on it that really matters. We all hold opinions, but opinions aren't knowledge. Knowledge, according to some philosophers, is warranted belief. How do beliefs get warranted? What makes them really believable so you are willing to act on them? In my view, something believable is something that's been vetted by people you know or know of. The dynamics of knowledge in communities of practice turn on being able to discuss and argue within in your own physically shared community or at least where you share a practice. You look at the world pretty much the same way, and so it is that vetting within the community of practice that not only leads to being willing to believe this knowledge, but it also leads to being able to integrate fragments of understanding into a conceptual whole. At this point, we are off and running with something that is valuable and that people are willing to act on.
IO: You've just touched on something I wanted to ask you about. You are among the leading thinkers in the world on "communities of practice." Why do you think communities of practice are so important to organizations today and what can information professionals do to foster the development of these kinds of communities within their organizations?
JSB: To us, the community of practice concept is incredibly important from both the social and epistemological perspectives. Contrary to the great American spirit that deifies individuals, most ideas actually emerge out of the context of a community of practice working on something real wherever the rubber hits the road. The community is able to improvise around barriers or breakdowns and from these improvisations emerge new ideas. And because these improvisations stemmed from a shared practice, they can be evaluated while situated in context and augment the current practice where appropriate—a form of learning in action.
A professional practice—librarian, doctor, physicist--probably consists of 90-percent tacit knowledge and 10-percent explicit knowledge. It is very easy to "learn about" a profession, but to "learn to be" a librarian or a physicist is mostly a process of enculturation. You become enculturated into a community of practice, as a consequence of mastering that practice and as being seen as mastering it by the other members of your particular community of practice. You don't enculturate into the whole world of physics or libraries, you enculturate into a particular community of practice, a particular way to do physics or to do librarianship. A particular community of practice is constituted not just by the knowledge and practices it has evolved, but also by the taste, sensibilities and point of view it has evolved. And, of course, it involves the slow build up of trust among its members. Communities of practice form the knowledge fabric of an organization.
IO: I know that the emerging notion of "knowledge ecology" in organizations is one of central research themes at Xerox PARC and I am wondering if you could briefly explain the idea.
JSB: The real key in building a serious knowledge ecology is striking the right balance between structure and spontaneity. If all you have is a set of people who are constantly engaged in improvisational "knowledge jazz," if you wish, what makes you think the whole is greater than the sum of its parts? What makes you think you can scale from five or ten people to five or ten thousand people? Why isn't everybody at cross-purposes with each other?
You need something to orient the different communities of practice so that they end up connecting together to create the value chain of an organization, and so what we are looking at is the role of processes that actually honor how communities of practice creatively share what they know and also find ways to foster negotiation between communities of practice when taking an invention from one group to an innovation, something which requires coordination with the other parts of the organization.
We are trying to find ways foster knowledge sharing within this ecology without killing it. If you put in too much process, you can kill it. If you have too little process, you get chaos. The question is how do we get elegantly minimal processes to create a structure that actually fosters creativity and dissemination of that creativity, so we can move rapidly from invention to innovation, i.e., to move from the idea itself to how it is implemented. This effort often requires coordinating the original invention with all kinds of other complementary inventions, since almost no major invention can make it all the way in the market by itself. It always has to be complemented by others.
IO: In the book, you say that we continue to view learning today as just absorbing information. How do we begin to change this way of thinking about learning when most of us have been educated from this perspective throughout our lives? Where do you think we begin?
JSB: Well, I think it actually comes right back to the essence of what your magazine is about because I think we are moving more and more into what you may call "just-in-time" learning. Let's admit up front that the key to surviving in the New Economy is lifelong learning, where you are willing to pick up new skills every three or four years, you are willing to challenge your background assumptions and you are willing to try new ways to look at the world and act in it. Let's take that as a given.
The question is if you are engaged in lifelong learning, how do you define "working" and "learning" as two sides of the same coin? You want to learn something at the moment you need it, when you start to experience an obstacle in what you are trying to get done. What you are trying to get done, in turn, creates the context for what you want to know. You want to go out and find the information that becomes immediately integrated into the framework of what you need to know in order to solve the problem at hand, the action that is stalled until you can figure out what to do.
We need to find a way to short-circuit this idea of just receiving information, and then a year later trying to apply it. When you are stuck or facing a problem, you know why you need to know something, and you know how to judge if you are going to be able to use some piece of information. You find the information, and you integrate it into action, thereby setting the stage to transform it into knowledge for yourself. You need to be able to integrate it into your current frame of action. Just-in-time learning is going to be increasingly important and is going to mean we have to find ways to get to get people the information they need, in the form that they need it, and as rapidly as possible.
IO: One of the ideas you discuss in the book is the overlap and the possible tension that exists between resources and constraints. In your view, how can libraries as we understand them today balance this tension between resources and constraints?
JSB: Earlier, I spoke of a small bookstore for which the constraint of space becomes a resource. The owner of that bookstore has to be able to do serious selection and editing, and then lay out the selections, so that as you walk in, you get a complete sense of what is new and what should you pay attention to. This is not the kind of problem that the mass-market stores have, but this is the kind of problem that the guy two doors down does, and yet he succeeds brilliantly because of his skill, his ability to actually transform this constraint into a resource. I think this is a wonderful challenge for all of us, and special librarians, I'm sure, have a similar type of challenge with their collections. Space is limited, resources are limited, and money is limited. This a major set of constraints. The question to ask yourself is, "How do I transform this set of constraints into a resource?"
IO: You've touched on this point already, but I was struck by a particular phrase and I'd like you to comment on it. You wrote, "it is becoming increasingly clear that libraries are less collections than useful selections that gain their usefulness as much by what they exclude as what they hold." I read that and I thought it sounded very much like the definition of a special library. What do you think?
JSB: I think as we move forward, the role of the librarian is going to have to be re-thought, and I think it can be re-thought in a way that the librarian--special collection or otherwise—takes on a more central role as a "knowledge intermediary," by working to create knowledge in the right form, at the right time, for the right purpose, and by eliminating what is not critical. A knowledge intermediary is also the one who has integrated enough fragments of knowledge into something that provides the root for making the selections, and knowing how to render that selection in its most meaningful way.
IO: You have talked a little bit about Xerox PARC, which enjoys such a wonderful reputation in the business and technology communities. What is it that makes Xerox PARC so special?
JSB: I think it goes back to taking this notion of "knowledge ecology" very seriously. We foster a tremendously diverse set of activities, in terms of disciplines. We do everything from atoms to culture. We have diversity in terms of methodologies, in terms of the twenty-seven different countries from which our people come, and in terms of race and gender. It is just a very rich ecology.
We have a small set of research themes that cross cut all of our laboratories, creating an intellectual structure for pulling researchers together. We also encourage our research teams to go to the root of a real world problem which, on the one hand will pull them out of any one disciplinary methodology, and on the other hand will often lead to making fundamental discoveries.
We also have the luxury of being small. My budget is one-third of one percent of the revenue of the corporation, which is small enough for us to fly under the radar screen and thus not requiring too much "adult" supervision. Fortunately, there are other research centers in Xerox that do the more incremental R&D. Our job is to hit the home runs, and that means that an awful lot of times, we swing at the bat and we miss. While we don't publicize our failures on the outside, on the inside our failures are celebrated as much as the successes. We learn from failure as much as from success.
IO: To help our readers get to know you a little better on a personal level, I'd like to ask about your favorite sound.
JSB: Actually, it's the sound of my motorcycle. I'm a BMW motorcyclist, not a Harley. I go for more subtle sounds. I did a 7,500-mile trip just recently on my motorcycle on just the back roads of America. I asked whether is it possible to drive from Connecticut to San Francisco on only scenic back roads, where scenic is defined by what Rand McNally calls "scenic." And the answer is that out of the 7,500 miles traveled, 7,000 were on scenic back roads. It was a wonderful, amazing trip. You get to see a different side of America.
IO: Are there any final ideas or thoughts that you would like the information professionals who are reading this interview to take away with them?
JSB: I think one idea is to be open to the notion that a new form of literacy may actually be emerging, a literacy of informational navigation that may become an incredibly important form of literacy for our kids to acquire. Second, we must be careful not to get caught up in just thinking about individuals and information, but to realize that almost everything that we do has to do with context, the reading of context and the leveraging of context in communication. I really believe that we all have to pay more attention to the fact that, especially in America, there is a great deal more to life than individuals and information, and that considerable meaning comes from the context--be it physical or social.
Our ability to honor context will enable us to create a technological future that is going to be much more exciting than the kind of future for which we are currently headed. Information technology has enabled many new things to happen, but it hasn't necessarily enriched our lives that much. It's enriched our pocketbooks and our wallets, but not our lives.
So I think we're at an inflection point, and we do have a great opportunity, if we can bring this notion of looking at communities, context, and communication more to the forefront. If so, we'll actually have a chance to create a culture of learning in our country, a culture that turns in part on viewing libraries as more than just access to information, but as platforms for understanding and meaning.
To learn more about The Social Life of Information, visit the book's web site at www.slofi.com.
Let us know what you think! E-mail your reactions to this interview to learning@sla.org. We can't wait to hear from you!
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