Hello All,

I've been thinking about the reading for this week, Information Ecologies by Bonnie A. Nardi and Vicki L. O'Day, and its applications for me and the work we're doing in Information Architecture.  I hope you find this post useful and for a fruitful, metaphor-filled discussion on Monday. 

Information Ecologies, written by Bonnie A. Nardi and Vicki L. O’Day describes the growing role of technology in the lives of students and workers in the late 1990s.  This development has only continued, and bears much relevance to our work in Information Architecture.  The book opens up describing opposing positions on the Information Revolution.  Some people called technophiles see technology as serving as a kind of societal savior.  Other observers view technology in an opposite light, suggesting that our reliance on technology is more likely to bring an apocalypse than anything else. Nardi and O’Day suggest, however, the a truer reflection of this phenomenon is probably somewhere in the middle of these two extremes.  And I think they’re right.  
    Technology is a tool; it is not inherently good or  bad.  And unlike language, technology is neutral.  Perhaps there’s a better way to look at this debate whether our extensive use of technology as being good or bad and consider the metaphor that Nardi and O’Day use.  The authors define an information ecology as “a system of people, practices, values, and technologies in a particular local environment.  In information ecologies, the spotlight is not on technology, but on human activities that are served by technology (Nardi and O’Day 49).”  So maybe we shouldn’t be looking at technology as a discrete entity.  We should be looking at how it is used by people and to what ends.  I think this ecology metaphor works well because it takes into account the interconnectedness of our relationship with technology
    The middle portion of the book describes three case studies that bear relevance to our work.  The first one describes how the work of librarians has actually increased in importance with the advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web.  Another case study described the interactions of students and teachers in a virtual world.  It was an experiment in learning that showed that cultural obstacles may exist in the classroom.  I thought this relevant because I have rationally been a detractor to spending money to have computers in schools, but this section showed that the virtual worlds can be useful by making learning more participatory.  
    The third case study, which described “gardeners” in an engineering firm was most interesting to me.  Gardeners are people that develop technical skills “on the side” and become liaisons between experts and non-experts.  They aren’t always the IT people, but develop enough acumen to use the tools functionally and can then pass the information on to other people.  I thought this may be the type of position I should strive for as I have been disappointed in how difficult a time I’ve had in learning to build a web site.  While I got better at building the site in time, I’m afraid that I’m never going to be super good at doing technical things.    
    Like the gardeners described in Information Ecologies, I enjoy acquiring new information, learning from others, and sharing said knowledge with others.  I wouldn’t want to be someone that banged away at code all day, but I also wouldn’t want to sit in meetings, or write all day.  Some combination of the three sounds appealing to me.  
    I also found the part about the computer company that didn’t hire computer people interesting.  Instead, they hired waiters (like me), teachers (as a tutor, that’s close), and other people whose jobs demanded a high level of patience and face-to-face interaction.  The person interviewed in the book said something along the lines of “you can teach people to use a computer, but you can’t teach them patience.”  I hope I can one day (soon) put the many hours of building patience as a waiter for 7 years to work in a job that doesn’t rely so heavily (and by heavily, I mean I rely entirely) on people’s generosity to make money.  Wish I wrote that page number down, I want to give that company a call.  
    I believe the goal of Information Ecologies was to challenge the way we view our relationship with technology and to force us to look at it with a fresh perspective.