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Annual Meeting Coverage
"Context must be added to information to produce meaning. If we're to move forward, we must not limit ourselves to merely looking ahead, but we must also learn to look around. Learning occurs when members of a community of practice socially construct their understanding of some event or text and then share their understanding with others." This message was the focus of a keynote address delivered by John Seely Brown, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation and former director of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), to nearly 400 persons at the 2000 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.
Co-author of The Social Life of Information and author of more than 100 papers, Brown (or JSB as he is mostly called) began by explaining that his presentation was not "a formal talk." Instead, he said he would just "throw out idea spankers," in the hope that they would be evocative for audience members to consider after they left the session.
JSB started his talk by noting there has been a tendency toward "endism" lately. Various observers have predicted the death of the university, the nation, the city, the firm, distance, the library and the book. On the one hand, we say technology is destroying all these things; on the other hand, we read about mega-mergers while we read that the firm is going away. Maybe there are some fundamental misunderstandings of what made the world work. We need to step back and think more about the social fabric in which we live.
Part of the problem, JSB said, is tunnel vision. As an example, he referred to Bill Gates' 1995 book The Road Ahead. Brown described the book as "simple technological determinism." In one sense, the road ahead is straight. In another sense, though, it's filled with twists and turns. In fact, when you think about it, we never had technological determinism. There are some technologies we fight to keep, he said: "I love the fact that my notebook never needs booting up." The book and the fax we fight to keep. He related the story of a woman who uses fax machines instead of e-mail because she can scribble a personal note at the bottom of a...