Contact:cdent@burningchrome.com
Brown, J.S., & Duguid,P. (2000). Chapter 7: Reading the background. In
_The social life of information_ (p. 173-205). Boston: Harvard
University Press.
Paper has had remarkable staying power. Those that want to get rid of
paper deny the contextual power that paper provides. It is not just
the information that the paper contains but how the paper contains
that is of value.
The same can be said for other traditional households of information,
such as the library.
These media give shape and authority to information.
Brown and Duguid describe the document as a motivating force for
communities of practice that may be invisible, even to the members.
Some documents have the power to gather entires countries around them.
The U.S. Constitution for example.
Modern technologies such as the web have made the web more acccessible
because they bit the concrete inforomation representation of the page
over the more abstract notion of the Internet.
But there is a danger with these new technologies: they are fluid and
our common methods for keeping track of things on paper won't work as
well with fluid documents that don't stay in the same place and have
content that changes.
One of the problems with the current WWW is that the representation of
the linking structure and the representation of the content of the
documents are in the same container. The makes keeping track and
maintaining things much more difficult. Both the Xanadu system of
Nelson and the Augment system of Engelbart work to keep the
interconnections between things as a separate notion. Bush's Memex and
its trails had a similar notion
It's unfortunate that the w3c is moving forward with their plans for
the Semantic web without first addressing this issue. They've got a
hard road to hoe.
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