Title: Well written and argued, some parts overtaken by events
Product review: Paul Duguid and John Seely Brown talk at length about howcomputer network interactions are embedded in a broader socialcontext, and how the folks who talk about how daily life will be reduced to a stream of interactions with brute machines totally don't get how people figure into the context of these interactions. Some of the chapters are from earlier papers they put together and published on the net, but there's a lot of new materials. A particularly interesting discussion from the authors (Brown is at Xerox Parc, Duguid is a historian at Berkeley) is of Xerox's support system for copier techs called "Eureka". This is kind of like a "frequently asked questions" or "innovative solutions to problems" database, with a couple key human touches that (they claim) cause people who are otherwise busy doing real work to contribute to and update it...
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