Informed about Information   A Review of The Social Life of Information, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid (©2000, Harvard Business School Press, ISBN: 0-87584-762-5)

 

Since this book was written in 2000, there have been a great many changes in the world of information making the first two chapters of the book fairly obsolete. However, the remainder of the book is well worth reading. The overarching argument is that information is not neutral, that it occupies a social context. Attempts to treat it objectively and dispassionately are doomed to failure for the simple reason that people are complex creatures that deal with information in complex ways.

 

The chapter "Home Alone" points out the decline in the utopian belief that offices will be a thing of the past and that people can survive quite well working either at home or in non-traditional office settings. Needless to say, the futurists were wrong. While the authors don't address churches, reactionary pastors who see the Internet as a threat because it exposes their flock to radical ideas need not worry too much. Information takes place in a social context and most of what church has to offer is not available on the Internet, enthusiast claims to the contrary. Those involved in internet ministry are finding things far more difficult than they anticipated, largely because they failed to consider the social impact that church exerts and the need that people have for connecting in this particular social context.

 

The authors go on to detail how "Practice Makes Process" in chapter 4 and expand on this idea in chapter 5 about learning. They emphasize that simply having information, cataloging it and making it available is no panacea for improving performance. Conventional wisdom has the notion that all one needs in order to be successful is to find out what successful people do and mimic their practices. He cites numerous examples where this is not the case such as the company that bought out a rival in order to pick their corporate brains, find out what made them successful and adopt it, only to discover that the strength of the company rested in the accumulated knowledge of their line staff whom they had laid off as a result of the takeover. Another set of examples centered around how two parts of the same company with the same policies and practices can generate very different results despite their standardization. The important points being that we are not cogs in the machine, nor do we respond in robotic ways to the environment around us. Instead, we are living, breathing, thinking, dynamic entities who are capable of manipulating the environment. Information is a part of the environmental context and doesn't exist apart from it. In short, our interaction with the information is equally, if not more important than the information itself.

 

Churches need to realize that doctrine, much like information, is not an objective entity that can be "held" as a fixed quantity. It must exist in relation to individuals, social organizations and within cultural frameworks. A simple look at the history books such as Fox's Book of Martyrs, Martyrs Mirror and others is sufficient to make this point. These books provide accounts of believers who were willing to die over the issue of baptism as one example. Such dedication to doctrine is so unheard of in our culture that we can't even conceive of what would motivate a person to be willing to give their lives up to stand for a point of doctrine. Our social context won't allow us to begin to connect with such an idea, yet we find that more people have been killed over the issue of baptism in the history of the church than were killed on both sides in the Crusades. While the "doctrine" or information about baptism may remain the same, how we relate to that doctrine has vastly changed over the centuries, particularly in Western culture.

 

The book is also valuable as a starting point for discussions about hermeneutics and literalism. Most fundagelicals accept various forms and statements on the doctrine of inerrancy with little thought to the context in which the Bible writers wrote. Too much attention is paid to proof-texting and too little paid to contextualizing. That is not to say that we use context to explain away the uncomfortable bits of the Bible, but rather we take a historic perspective that appreciates the setting into which the original words were penned, the relevant audience and authorial intent. Often statements of inerrancy fail to include attention to varying literary styles and how those styles should be read. A wooden literal reading of poetry or apocryphal literature does service to no one, and coupled with a tendency to use the proof-text method that decontextualizes the scriptural snippets, is it any wonder that today's Christians are functional biblical illiterates?

 

The Social Life of Information nowhere addresses Bible study directly or indirectly. However, it does address the subject of information, knowledge and learning, all aspects of what constitutes Bible study. One should examine one's presuppositions when engaging in a biblical hermeneutic. Identifying what some of those presuppositions are is the point of this book and a recommended text for anyone engaged in the use of information, knowledge and learning.

 

by Rick Presley