A Commonplace Book

Similarly, those who talk about having direct, unmediated access to the news sometimes sound equally oblivious to how news is made. They sound as if to find the "real" news on Russia, for example, they would expect to pick up the phone and get Boris Yeltsin on the other end of the line. But it requires a profoundly naive belief in "disintermediation" to assume that all the links that fall between Yeltsin and the news are somehow interference in the information channel. Rather, it is in these steps -- from sources to reporters to editors and news organizations -- that news is made. Without them, again, there would be no story. Nonetheless, when information takes center stage and lights dim on the periphery, it's easy to forget these necessary intermediaries. But while these may be invisible, they are not inconsequential.

The way forward is paradoxically to look not ahead, but to look around.

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 page. Problems with information? Add more.

Too often, information technology design is poor because problems have been redefined in ways that ignore the social resources that are an integral part of this socialization process. By contrast, successful design usually draws on these social resources, even while helping them change.

[P]eople tell stories to try to make diverse information cohere. Economists tell stories in their models, scientists tell stories in their experiments, executives tell stories in their business plans, lawyers tell stories in their briefs, and so on.

...While it may appear at first that the reps used stories to circulate information, they were actually doing much more. For it is not shared stories or shared information so much as shared interpretation that binds people together.

Knowledge usually entails a knower.... [K]nowledge appears harder to detach than information. People treat information as a self-contained substance. It is something that people pick up, possess, pass around, put in a database, lose, find, write down, accumulate, count, compare, and so forth. Knowledge, by contrast, doesn't take as kindly to ideas of shipping, receiving, and quantification. It is hard to pick up and transfer.

...Knowledge is something we digest rather than merely hold. It entails the knower's understanding and some degree of commitment. Thus while one person often has conflicting information, he or she will not usually have conflicting knowledge.

[A] true knowledge economy should distinguish itself not only from the industrial economy but also from an information economy. For though its champions like to present these two as distinct, the information economy, like the industrial economy, shows a marked indifference to people.

The importance of people as creators and carriers of knowledge is forcing organizations to realize that knowledge lies less in its databases than it its people.

[T]he same stream of information directed at different people doesn't produce the same knowledge in each.

...Documents then contribute not only to forming and stabilizing the worlds but also as [historian Brian] Stock's heretics did, to reforming, destabilizing, and transforming them. The presence of heretics reminds us that the "information" is not the sole contributor here. The orthodox and the heretics both form around the same information or content. They are distinguished from one another by their unique disposition toward that information.

Libraries are less "collections," than useful selections that gain usefulness from what they exclude as much as what they hold. They are also reflections of particular groups of users and their needs. As such, it's very hard to see one technology (atom-based or bit-based) or one solution fitting all.

Context not only gives people what to read, it tells them how to read, where to read, what it means, what it's worth, and why it matters.

In all, books and paper documents set a useful precedent not only for document design, but for information technology design in general. In a time of abundant and even superabundant raw information, they suggest that the better path in creating social documents (and social communities) lies not in the direction of increasing amounts of information and increasingly full representation, but rather in leaving increasing amounts un- or underrepresented. Efficient communication relies not on how much can be said, but on how much can be left unsaid -- and even unread in the background.

[T]he "personalized newspaper" assumes that people are best served if they are given news on topics that they preselect. Such a model neglects how difficult it is for people to know and describe what they want.... It also neglects the importance of serendipitous news -- news that people didn't set out to find -- to the way people understand the world.

[N]ew techniques and technologies often aim to remove a surface constraint (objects, organizations, practices, institutions) without appreciating their submerged resourcefulness.

...So while paper may seem a constraint on the circulation of information, readers and writers have made it a powerful resource for making, shaping, warranting, interpreting, and even protecting information. The example of paper suggests to us that, for design more generally, before an apparent constraint is dismissed, it's important to consider the social resource that people may have developed around it.

Conversely, designers might look at ways to turn constraints into resources.

Copyright developed as principally a document-based phenomenon. Society took the constraint of paper and built a resourceful institution around it. The law relied on the difficulty of copying texts to do much of its enforcement work for it.

Software code respects the quid (protection of property) without yielding the quo (the public interest). Code now makes it possible to decide in fine degrees of detail not only who can or cannot use a certain digital text, but also how it can be used. It can prevent you from listening to a piece of music for a second time, pasting a text into another document, or sending an image to a friend. But it can also prevent the public from getting ultimate access to a copyrighted object forever. The "public domain" and all the pubic goods connected to it have no part in the new encoded balance.