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Review from Current Sites, Volume 7 No. 6, University of California, Berkeley, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/1996/cc96.7.6.html Brown and Duguid offer a redefinition of the meaning of "documents", both in history and in cyberspace, primarily by expanding the definition of the word to include all of the social interaction and "negotiated meaning" a document must entail. Audacious, but it works. As an extended metaphor, the document enables the authors to connect "virtual communities" to the traditions of discourse that have long been part of the world of paper technologies (though they move at a much slower speed). For example, sociologist Anselm Strauss (much depended on here) sees documents as community builders, hence the "social world" of the title. They conclude by saying that contemporary society focuses on the "commercial life" of documents, but we should remember to understand the social uses of documents (and the endless margin notes and copies they engender). Clever, iconoclastic, and written to challenge our assumptions about information exchange in the bitstream, this article invites us to reassess our assumptions about ideas, paper, and electrons. -- Terry Huwe. June 1996. |