After reading the Social Life of Information I was curious about the co-authors Paul Duguid and John Seely Brown so I searched for them online and found an interview with Paul Duguid. The interview done by Ubiquity under Communications of ACM talks about everything from his background too his motivations for writing the book.  I tried to pull out the pieces that I thought were most relevant and interesting to the content of the book itself.

UBIQUITY: Let's go from the idea of stock pricing to the idea of making things free. You talk in your book about the shibboleth that "information wants to be free." Say something about that.

DUGUID: Well, I'll say several things. First, the idea of information being the sort of thing that either is imprisoned or, indeed, can be freed, is an attractive but ultimately false over-simplification. Second, I think a lot of comments like that -- along with the John Perry Barlow declaration of the "independence of cyberspace" -- were made in the euphoric early days of the Web.  Those days are gone. The declaration of independence of cyberspace paradoxically marked not the beginning, but really the end of a phase of utopia in cyberspace. For better and for worse, the market has moved onto the Internet, and has changed things drastically.

UBIQUITY: Are you worried about the increasing dominance of very large companies such as AOL and Time Warner?

DUGUID: Indeed I am.  I'm a big fan of Larry Lessig's book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, because he is very good at getting at some of the tensions that are emerging as the Web becomes market-dominated.  It's very hard to see what we will be paying for and what we won't.  Instead of becoming free, a good deal of once-free information is in fact being privatized. A friend out here who recently wrote a book on the history of San Francisco said to me, "Only five years later I don't think I could do that research" because so many of the sources he's used are no longer in the public sector, but have moved into the private sector. I think that's a worry for everybody.

UBIQUITY: Can you elaborate on that concern?

DUGUID:  The ideology is, in some sense, that we're "liberating" information for individuals, but that doesn't seem to be true. In some areas, the Net is restricting people's access to what used to thought of as public domain knowledge.  And while there's a lot of cant about the fee-based systems giving authors, inventors, and so on rewards for their work, the people who are more likely to reap the benefits are not the producers, but the people who control the distribution channels. They seem to be getting bigger and bigger, and more and more powerful and facing fewer and fewer restrictions.
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UBIQUITY: In thinking about issues like these, what do you regard as the marching orders for an information technology professional?

DUGUID: I think the first thing he or she has to do is take account much more of what people actually do than what, as designer, they would like people to do. Rather than think of people as resistant to new ideas, one needs to look forward to the challenge of leading those people, willingly, onto interesting new ground. And I think that's a major shift as you try to design or implement or give people technology. You have to pay much more attention to the way people work in the world. Technologists understandably see a great deal of the world as built of constraints that are always inhibiting us -- and therefore they see their role as coming along and simply removing those constraints. . . . But they have occasionally to notice that paradoxically within those constraints there can often be very useful resources for getting things done. And so if they simply wipe away what they see as constraints, they're actually destroying things that we, as inventive human beings, have turned into important resources.

UBIQUITY: Can you think of an example for that?

DUGUID:  Think about the nature of paper.  Since the 1970s and the famous Business Week prediction, the so-called "paperless office" has been the holy grail of a great deal of information technology, along with the paperless newspaper, the online book, and so forth. All of those in some way are good goals, but they've been remarkably hard to reach. Alvin Toffler in the '80s said that faxes and paper in the office are dead; Nicholas Negroponte called the fax a retrogressive technological machine. Well, you can see why they say that, but, on the other hand, they never seem to ask: Why do you people continue to like this stuff? What is it that's valuable about it?
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