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John Seely Brown
Paul Duguid
The Social Life of Documents[1]
© 1995 J.S. Brown and P. Duguid
Abstract
The remarkable appeal of new browsers for the World Wide Web
suggests that the document may have a significant future in cyberspace. Too
often, though, both old and new forms of documents have been seen as merely
delivery mechanisms. This essay argues that documents, both old and new, are
much more. They are not only a powerful means for structuring and navigating
information space. They are also a powerful resource for constructing and
negotiating social space. Indeed, understanding documents in social terms
makes it much easier to understand the success of the Web. In the course of
this paper, the authors relate theories of texts, documents, and communication
to practicalities of the Web and the Internet. In the process, they argue that
a broader understanding of documents and their uses will open new directions
for developing document media and allow new social practices and social groups
to emerge.
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.
1. Exaggerated Rumors of Death
Books are not absolutely dead things,
but do contain a potency of life in
them to be as active
as that soul whose progeny they are
John Milton, Areopagitica
The advent of new technology has suggested to many that the document was
nearing the end of its influential reign. Old document forms and
institutions--books, journals, and newspapers, on the one hand, publishers, and
libraries, on the other--seemed about to dissolve before our eyes. Some assume
that technology will allow us to distill pure information, leaving the
document, as such, behind in the ashes.
Yet, just as the elegies were being written, the explosion of the World Wide
Web (for which the $2 billion launch of Netscape is not the most significant
piece of evidence, merely the most countable) has made us think again about not
just the resilience, but also the significance of documents. The success of
the Web, particularly following the development of Mosaic and Netscape
software, argues that both the document metaphor and documents themselves may
be as important to the "information galaxy" of cyberspace as they have been in
its Gutenberg equivalent.
To fully assess the document's evolving role requires a broad understanding of
both old and new documents. For documents are much more than just a powerful
means for structuring and navigating information space--important though that
is. They are also a powerful resource for constructing and negotiating social
space. It is the latter quite as much as the former that has made the
documents of the World Wide Web so popular.
Yet the "social life" of the document is not widely recognized. Consequently,
this essay focuses primarily on that social life as it appears in both old and
new uses of documents. Seeing documents as the means to make and maintain
social groups, not just the means to deliver information, makes it easier to
understand the utility and success of new forms of document. This social
understanding of documents should better explain the evolution of Web as a
social and commercial phenomenon.
2. Documents as Darts?
School formed most people's subliminal idea of what a document is. But it
probably took more than the painful process of learning how to write a
five-paragraph essay. For many, there was also that startling first time
someone's careful folding transformed a page from an exercise book and a newly
created paper dart took flight across the room.
Though no doubt mischievous, this classroom recreation of the Wright brothers
was probably more supportive than disruptive of classroom activity. For it
merely underscores the widely held notion of the document as some sort of paper
transport carrying pre-formed "ideas" or "information" through space and time.
By darts or didacticism, we all usually come to believe that, like freight,
information is boarded on a document at one end of its journey and taken out at
the other. If a little is lost in the transaction, to most this seems no more
significant than the occasional package lost in transit.
The idea of a document as a carrier is an example of what Michael Reddy calls a
"conduit" metaphor. People regularly describe most communication technologies
in conduit terms, talking of information as "in" books, files, or databases as
if it could just as easily be "out" of them. We ask or are asked to put ideas
"down on paper," to "send them along," and so forth.
Undoubtedly, this metaphor captures important aspects of communications
technologies. But it simultaneously hides others. As new technologies take us
through major transformations in the way we use documents, it becomes
increasingly important to look beyond the conduit image. We need to see the
way documents have served not simply to write, but also to underwrite social
interactions; not simply to communicate, but also to coordinate social
practices. By following research that has gone beyond the limits set by the
conduit metaphor, this essay attempts to bring into view a broader idea of the
document and to emphasize how and why it has a future as well as a past.
3. Linked by Text
The sociologist Anselm Strauss explored the way new forms of document allowed
new forms of community (or as he calls them, "social worlds") to come into
existence. His work predates the proliferation of computers and so provides an
interesting view of the way other developing technologies (copiers, faxes, and
so forth) supported social relations in new ways. In particular, new media
allowed small communities (enthusiasts of exotic breeds of birds or antique
motorcycles) to form though their members were often few, and those few spread
over large distances.
These groups can look surprisingly like modern equivalents of the scholarly
communities that formed throughout the world in the Renaissance. These too
were held together by common interests and shared communications. The letters
circulating among the Fellows of the Royal Society in England formed the
prototype for scientific journals, which still bind intellectual communities
together. And indeed Strauss's initial observations were based on the new ways
scholars were building communities of interest with the support of new
communications technologies--and, as we have argued elsewhere, may help
understand the future of scholarly communities in the digital age.
Photocopiers, faxes, and other forms of cheap reproduction have allowed not
only scholars, but other groups of people with shared interests to form a
"social world" with relative ease and autonomy. Neither capital nor
authorization was needed. From political undergrounds connected only by
samizdat journals to wind-surfers, DeLorean owners, and beekeepers,
people with shared interests use communications technologies (both hi- and
lo-tech) to help form themselves into self-created and self-organizing groups.
To a significant degree, these are held together by documents circulating among
members, keeping each conscious of being a member and aware of what others are
up to.
One of the most astounding recent examples has been the spread of
"zines"--cheaply produced newsletters. Needing little more than a typewriter
or word processor, a photocopier and stapler, and the Post Office or a fax,
zines are often put together at home by one or two people and are "mid-cast"
among small groups. The practice began with fans of science fiction and
fantasy and spread to followers of particular television programs and rock
groups. Consequently, these documents were known as "fan-zines" and now just
"zines." One estimate reckons that these "Xeroxed, hand-written,
desktop-published, sometimes printed, and even electronic" documents (as the
1995 zine convention in Hawaii puts it) have produced some 20,000 titles in the
past couple of decades. And this "cottage" industry is thought to be still
growing at twenty percent per year.
Consequently, as never before, scattered groups of people unknown to one
another, rarely living in contiguous areas, and sometimes never seeing another
member, have nonetheless been able to form robust social worlds. From hound
dog owners to herbologists, and from fans of The Avengers to Star
Trek's "Trekkers" (said to hate being called Trekkies), the easy
circulation of shared communications has helped build well-coordinated social
groups with a strong sense of shared identity.
The role of documents in linking people this way helps explain the particular
enthusiasm of small, widely scattered interest groups for the Internet, where
electronic zine publishing, which at the margin is even cheaper than
conventional zines, is developing rapidly. The Internet now has over 600
e-zine titles (from The Abraxus Reader, and Abyssinian Prince to
Zen Anarchy, ZIPZAP, to Zmagazine), and growth will almost
certainly outstrip the twenty percent of the paper form. Once again, people
can first recognize and then develop shared interests through their access to
shared documents.
The growth in zine titles, both on and off the Internet, may also indicate how
much more volatile new documents make social worlds. The key to forming a new
group is starting a new publication to help hold it together. Consequently, as
publication costs come down, formation becomes much easier. This allows people
to test the "market" for a new group quite cheaply. Those who do are often
staggered at the response.
Equally, however, disintegration is also easier. Strauss (no doubt drawing
again on his experience with academic communities) notes that, once formed,
social worlds continually face disintegration (as dissenting members split off
into "sub-worlds"). In the past, the cost of starting a new sub-group
undoubtedly put limits on dissent. As the costs descend, forming a splinter
group becomes easier. Low-inertia resources inevitably make both worlds and
sub-worlds correspondingly labile. Old paper forms may, then, have been a
resource for stability. And the volatility allowed by newer forms may help
account for the large number of "404" dead links on the Internet, marking zine
sites that have already been abandoned by groups, some of which might all along
have been more imaginary than either real or virtual.
4. Political Linkages
Strauss's argument helps illustrate the importance of documents to the
formation of communities. It doesn't necessarily, however, undermine the idea
of the document as a dart rather than a more sociable object. The social
rather than directly informational life of the document is clearer in a social
exploration of documents set on a much larger scale (both historically and
geographically) by the political scientist Benedict Anderson in his book
Imagined Communities.
Anderson argues that a document culture was a key ingredient in the creation of
independent nations in the late eighteenth century. Printed documents,
Anderson maintains, were essential to replacing the ideology of sovereigns and
subjects by creating the idea of a self-constructed society built around shared
ideals and shared practices. Anderson's foremost example is the United States.
Here the documents that first come to mind include such seminal works as the
Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the
Federalist Papers, and the Constitution.
But Anderson suggests that "popular" cultural items, such as journals,
novels, pamphlets, lampoons, ballad sheets, and so forth were equally important
in creating the cultural sense of common interests necessary for the nation's
formation.[3] The emerging daily newspapers
were, in particular, signally important in constituting the nation--but not
simply through the "news" they carried, which, much as today, was often little
more than gossip and scandal dressed as public interest. It wasn't, though,
simply the content that helped bind the nation. It was as much their wide
circulation. Reaching a significant portion of the population, newspapers
helped develop an implicit sense of community among the diverse and scattered
populace of the separate colonies and the emerging post-revolutionary nation.
This sense of community was quite as significant as the explicit arguments in
political documents about the right to independence from the British Crown.[4] That is, the emergent common sense of
community contributed as much to the formation of nationhood as the rational
arguments of Common Sense. Indeed the former helped create the audience
for the latter.
Anderson calls the resulting community an "imagined" one. This is no slight.
An imagined community is quite distinct from an imaginary community. It is
one, Anderson notes, whose members "will never know most of their fellow
members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the
image of their communion." Where an imaginary community does not exist, an
imagined one exists on too large a scale to be known in any other way. And the
central way they can be imagined is through the documents they share.
In the case of the American revolution, newspapers, the first mass-produced and
mass-consumed objects, were crucial in making their dispersed readers aware of
Anderson's "communion" across space and time.[5]
The proliferation of daily newspapers, pamphlets, journals, and tracts made
each reader aware that what he or she was doing thousands and possibly tens of
thousands of others were doing at the same time and with the same interests.
As Anderson puts it,
An American will never meet, or even know the names of more than a handful of
his . . . fellow-Americans. He has no idea of what they are up to at any one
time.
But given the shared practices suggested by the appearance at regular times of
objects like the newspaper, readers (both male and female) became aware of each
other's "steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity."
Importantly, this idea of a nation built to a degree around a new sense of
space and time through the possession of shared documents encompasses not only
the original making--or what Gray Wills called the "inventing"--of America, but
also its continuing maintenance. As the imagined community of the United
States developed, visitors from the French sociologist Tocqueville, the English
authors Dickens and Trollope, to the Dutch historian Huizinga have noted how
important newspapers seem to be to American society. The newspaper, Huizinga
wrote in 1926,
fulfills in America the cultural function of the drama of Aeschylus. I mean
that it is the expression through which a people--a people numbering many
millions--becomes aware of its spiritual unity. The millions, as they do their
careless reading every day at breakfast, in the subway, on the train and the
elevated, are performing a . . . ritual. The mirror of their culture is held
up to them in their newspapers.
Ideas of cultural objects not just connecting, but coordinating social
performance help explain the social life of various documents. Radio and
television programs and movies, all different types of document, have provided
a similar and yet more extensive sense of social coordination. In the morning
at work people would discuss what they had seen at home the night before, again
with an implicit sense of coordinated practice. To some degree, in the United
States network broadcasts took over some of this ritual role from the nineteen
fifties on. Newscasters, for instance, began to assume a central role in the
daily ritual.
In this way, document forms both old (like the newspaper) and relatively new
(like the television program) have underwritten a sense of community among a
disparate and dispersed group of people. As newspapers recede before broadcast
and on-line communication, and as the multiplication of television channels
disrupts schedulers' control over what is seen when, the strong feeling of
coordinated performance provided by these documents is changing. One possible
result may be that the loss of simultaneous practice will reinforce the need
and desire for common objects--the wish at least to see the same thing,
if not at the same time. Here the Internet is a particularly powerful
medium for providing access to the same thing for people more widely
dispersed than ever before. Moreover, the reach of the Internet is increasing
a sense of simultaneity as ideas emerging on one side of the world can
almost instantaneously be picked up through the Internet and absorbed into the
local context by communities on the other.
Nonetheless, it seems equally probable that, as they become fewer, those
occasions when we still do all feel we are doing something together--from the
transient camaraderie achieved by the audience in a movie theater, to the sense
common sympathy achieved by those standing in a midnight line for the launch of
Windows '95 (unintelligible to most others), or the sense of nationhood
achieved by watching the Superbowl--will become increasingly significant.
People's memories of where they where when war broke out or the president was
shot perhaps testify to the continuing power and importance of social
simultaneity. The unexpected success of the movie Apollo 13 suggests
how powerful moments of national drama and documents about such moments
can be in maintaining our sense of "communion" and community.
This remaining power continues to make those documentary forms (newspapers,
television programs, radio news, movies, and books) that support such events
and create a sense of both simultaneity and commonalty remarkably resilient,
even as they become technologically "outdated." For instance, people still
like to read Business Week when it comes out in hard copy, even though
its text will be available through America Online the following month. People
still read hardback books, even though they will cost one-third as much in
paperback a year later. And people still go to watch movies in first-run
houses, though they could rent the video at half the price the following year.
Not just reading the same thing, but reading it at approximately the same time
as other people is still important.
5. Negotiating Meaning
Anderson's ambitious argument takes us far beyond the notion of the document as
a dart or conduit carrying information. Ultimately both his and Strauss's
arguments concur in showing how the circulation of documents first helps make
and then helps maintain social communities and institutions in ways that
looking at the content alone cannot explain.
In offering an alternative to the notion that documents deliver meaning, both
arguments instead suggest connection between the creation of communities and
the creation of meaning, for communities seem to create meaning for themselves.
The work of the literary critic Stanley Fish helps develop this issue. Noting
that different social worlds can fight over the "right" interpretation of a
document, Fish argues that there is in fact no right way to choose among
alternatives. Echoing earlier arguments of Stephen Toulmin about competing
scientific theories, Fish points out that for there to be a "right" way, there
must be a standard and a judge external to all of the competing community-based
alternatives. But there is no external fulcrum to move these social worlds
that is not itself merely the internal standard of another social world.
Contentiously, Fish claims that a document "is an open category" defined by
"what we [as readers] decide to put into it." But Fish retreats from this a
little, concluding "the reader is identified not as a free agent . . . but as a
member of a community whose assumptions about literature determine the kind of
attention he pays and thus the kind of literature he makes." At it's extreme,
this viewpoint makes the creator of a document almost epiphenomenal. But more
moderately it suggests that she cannot determine the document's meaning. Nor
is meaning in any sense simply "in" the document itself. Rather, it is
constructed by the "community of interpretation" around the text or document
under consideration.
It is probably a mistake, however, to conclude that, because meaning is an
internal construction of a community, meaning can be taken for granted as
shared within a community. Certainly that is not true of Anderson's imagined
community. An entire country might imagine itself to be a community. But it
is quite unlikely to imagine everyone in it has exactly the same
interpretation, whether of the morning paper or the constitution. If they did,
there would be neither political pundits nor Supreme Court Justices. Even
Strauss's smaller social worlds are unlikely sites for shared meaning. Anyone
who has sat among baseball fans discussing the meaning of a page of statistics,
for example, knows that even close-knit communities can find uncountable
different meanings in a single page. Within a community, then, it can only be
assumed that general strategies of interpretation are shared; meanings may not
be.
Seen this way, shared documents within communities are in many ways simply the
grounds for a fight, merely the pre-text for agreement. Providing a shared
context for constructing meaning, documents are the beginning rather than the
end of the process of negotiation. Understanding this, Huizinga was
particularly critical of the teaching of writing in the States. Writing, he
worried, was presented to students as the outcome of deliberation. Whereas,
Huizinga maintained, it was really just another part of the deliberative
process. This view of the document as a medium or resource for negotiation
suggests that one avenue for technological development lies in improving the
means for negotiation.
6. Means for Negotiation
It is perhaps a reflection of the fact that documents tend more to raise debate
than to quash it, that the great documents of civilizations (the Bible,
the Q'ran, the works of Shakespeare, the Analects of Confucius,
and so forth) are responsible for uncountable commentaries engaging warring
communities of interpretation over debates about what they mean.
Marginal notes, footnotes, and conventional commentaries are merely the
clearest examples of the ways that writing continually provokes more writing
and that texts provide context for each other. (Imitation, parody, pastiche,
allegory, and plain plagiarism are, of course, others.) From turned down
pages, to notes on a dust jacket, to academic essays, to fan zines, to direct
quotations and indirect allusions, to stories lifted for future retelling
without attribution, we are always commenting on texts, which continually
intertwine in a process grandly known as "intertextuality." Documents are not,
then, independent. Like biological organisms, every document is always related
to some other.
Indeed, writing on writing is both literally and metaphorically an important
part of the way meaning is negotiated. Annotation is a rich cultural practice
which helps, if only by the density of comment attached, to signify the
different cultural importance of texts and parts of texts. The thin trickle of
original text overflowing a vast dam of commentary, the long introduction, and
the separate subject entry in a library catalog offer clear indications that a
particular text is socially and culturally valued.
But commentary is not just for the Bible and Shakespeare. We recognize
important organizational documents from the long and impressive routing slips
attached, the handwriting we recognize in the photocopy's margin, the assertion
"surely you've read X's paper," and so on. And we assert our membership in a
community in part by showing we have read these documents--which is why we
often like to be sure our own name gets on routing slips and our own
handwriting appears in the margin.
It is the easy support of marginal commentary that makes the fax so useful.
Not only can we annotate in manuscript, but we can send the annotated fax on as
another fax. The commentary always accompanies the piece of text to which it
refers. Negroponte often expresses surprise that the fax machine is on the one
hand so popular while on the other not digital. Yet it is the close analog
link between text and commentary--the fact that the commentary is literally on
the text--that makes faxed documents so resourceful.
Conventional forms of publishing long ago broke this link. Early note forms
did appear in the margin, much as in faxes now, but the demands of typesetting
soon pushed them to the foot of the page, before relegating them to the end of
a chapter or the back of a book. In doing this and leaving the printed page
pristine, publishing made intertextuality seem a highly abstract notion.
Hypertext software, however, has revived the immediacy of intertextual links.
Furthermore, not only are commentaries attached to the section of a document at
issue, but links can take readers not merely to a reference, but to the text it
refers to. Dense and elliptical footnotes ("LL. Edg. SS14 apud. Spellm. Conc.
vo. i.p.471," being an unexceptional selection from a standard history of
England) give way to access to the actual text referred to.
Furthermore, like faxes, hypertext links allow more than an author's
qualifications and citations. They also support interchanges between authors
and readers. In the process, they have brought to the negotiation of meaning
more serviceable means for this sort of negotiation. A community's debates on
or around a document can now be continuously added to that document. People
can see someone else express doubts that perhaps they felt no one else shared
or were unwilling to voice. Questions that have been asked and answered remain
for later readers to understand, without anyone needing to go over the same
ground again. Indeed, many Internet sites have "FAQ" documents, where
newcomers can look at "Frequently Asked Questions," to save everyone the
trouble of asking and answering them again. These documents, beyond the
questions and answers, can also give newcomers to a particular community a
useful sense of the group and its interests.
One particularly resourceful tool has been designed by Dan Huttenlocher of
Cornell University and Xerox PARC and Jim Davis of the Xerox Design Research
Institute at Cornell. They have developed an annotation tool called "CoNote"
for documents on the World-Wide Web. CoNote allows people reading a Web
document to attach annotations at certain points. Anyone reading the document
has access to the annotations. CoNote thus allows readers, particularly a
community of readers, to hone the document for community use by adding
community commentary. It could also help to bring people into a community
while allowing outsiders to see a group's particular concerns and, perhaps, to
respond to them.
Furthermore, the appearance of entire conventional books at Web sites now
supports intertextual research and practices. Almost every day a new site
appears with searchable and downloadable texts. Some allow commentary, too.
Primarily, these sites involve classic texts. Works of Chaucer, Shakespeare,
Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill can all be found
in full text form. But enterprising publishers are also developing sites for
new works. City of Bits, a new book by William Mitchell, the Dean of
MIT School of Architecture, and published by MIT as a conventional hard-cover
book, appeared simultaneously in electronic form at a Web site and readers'
comments are solicited.
Both Huttenlocher and Davis's tool and MIT's book site help illustrate the
potential symbiosis between new and old forms of documents. Technophiles and
bibliophiles have engaged in rather fruitless battles in which the former point
out that you can't search or link hard copy documents, while the latter point
out you can't read on-line documents in the bath or on the beach, or even at
your desk with much ease. There the debate has stood. The intriguing
intertextuality of two versions of the same text, one digital and one analog,
does a great deal to meet both demands. MIT Press is optimistic enough about
the symbiosis to include an order form for the hardcopy at the Internet site,
suggesting that the publishers expect many readers will recognize the utility
of the off-line version.
More generally, creative use of new documents no longer involves direct
challenges to old ones, with on-line forms replacing hard-copy predecessors.
Rather, these new forms appear to reinvigorate the old, extending their useful
social life not ending it. Thus, as another example, on-line library
catalogues providing abstracts, indexing, and in some cases full texts for
print journals have reinforced these journals rather than undermined them. The
journals still remain the best social filter for the flood of writing available
on any topic as well as the best repositories of the development of ideas and
attitudes. In these realms, digital media, as yet, do not compete. The
electronic resources, however, have made using print journals much easier than
during the Gutenberg era.
Huttenlocher and Davis's Web site discussions appear far more
communal or collegial than either the MIT site or a similar one Microsoft has
built for Bill Gates's book. This difference points to distinctions between
closed and open sites. Huttenlocher and Davis are dealing with a group of
students who already know one another. Outsiders are excluded. The tone and
content of exchanges reflect this. Mitchell's and Gates's sites, on the other
hand, are open to all comers. They have no predefined community, nor anyone
engaged in defining the community in the way many bulletin boards or e-mail
lists have.. Documents on their own, this suggests, cannot define a single
community. Rather, as Fish's work suggests, they are likely to be subject to
the competing claims of a variety of communities, each with different and some
with incompatible interpretations.
This might suggest, as indeed Fish's work sometimes does, that documents only
exist within communities and can play no role at all between them. Conversely,
some discussion of the Internet and its extraordinary reach tend to assume that
it's possible to ignore the particular foibles of communities, because Internet
documents have some sort of universal character. The first of these positions
is too reductive, while the second, ignoring the communal base of
interpretation, too expansive. The interpretation of a document always depends
on community standards. Nonetheless, documents can and do play important roles
in negotiating differences and coordinating practices between communities.
There are, though, differences between internal communication--where the
stripped down zine, often uninterpretable to outsiders, has proved uniquely
powerful--and external communication--which requires more explicit documents
like contracts and business letters. Intercommunal and intracommunal documents
are not, however, necessarily two quite different sorts of document. More
usually, they involve two different practices built around the same documents.
Within communities, documents face the challenge of gaining attention of
community members. Between communities they face that challenge and the
difficulty of coordinating practice despite different interpretive strategies.
The following sections look at some aspects these different uses, but on the
assumption that these are not necessarily two different types of document, but
more usually a single document playing both roles.
7. Engaging the community
The French sociologist Bruno Latour points out that a primary characteristic of
documents is their mobility (the other is their immutability). Documents
quickly pass beyond the reach and protection of their maker and have to fend
for themselves. A central challenge, then, is to engage the interests of the
community they are intended for. As the number of documents multiplies
dramatically and their reach is extended by information technology, the
challenge of engaging an intended audience grows too. The swelling number of
documents and the shrinking amount of time available for each one raises the
problem of what Richard Lanham calls the "economy of attention," evident as
much in the diverse envelopes of junk mail, each with a separate strategy for
getting read, as anywhere else.
The central issue here is for the intended audience to be able to recognize
documents intended for them. Faced with similar problems, and realizing that
books were not universal documents but addressed different audiences, book
designers (and product designers more generally) long ago developed numerous
strategies that help readers distinguish different kinds of books.
Consequently, books use far more than their title to engage certain audiences
and tell others to pass by.
In an increasingly crowded attention economy, the challenge of reaching an
intended audience accounts for the demand for sophisticated Web-page designers
and the importance of autonomous agents on the net that can plant links in
strategic sites. Despite this work, with most links and pages, it's still very
hard even to make even a reasonable guess at the intended audience. This
difficulty may reflect an implicit assumption by many that documents have
universal appeal or that content alone will marshal an audience. Yet if the
overall form appears unclear, few will linger over the content, especially
given the ease with which links allow people to pass by.
8. Documents as boundary objects: Patrolling & Controlling
Documents that pass successfully between communities need to be able to engage
(at least) two interpretive strategies and to survive where the recipients can
no longer be assumed to share the interpretive assumptions of the members of
the originating community.
Within a community highly condensed forms of communication, which rely on the
shared assumptions of the community, work well. Between communities these must
be elaborated, often to the exasperation of the original community, whose
members can see the elaboration as redundant. Anyone who has used the Internet
much has probably come across the different approaches. Most ftp sites, which
are usually constructed primarily for use within a known community, are almost
completely inscrutable--a collection of files with semiliterate names.
Successful web sites designed to engage people from different communities have,
by contrast, a much more public face.
In passing between communities, documents play an important role, bringing
people from different groups together to negotiate and coordinate common
practices. Such negotiations are particularly significant in institutions,
such as bureaucracies and corporations, that comprise many different
communities. Here the direction of the institution as a whole depends on the
successful outcome of negotiations among its constituent groups, all of whom
have particular interests at stake. Both the means and a willingness to come
to a shared understanding are vital to the effectiveness of such institutions.
Because documents (or as the sociologist Leigh Star calls them "boundary
objects") passing between communities face different interpretive strategies in
each one, the challenge of coordinating practice around them is always
theoretically and often practically problematic.
One result of frequent intercommunal communication may be cross-border
communities, groups of people who are, collectively, capable of dealing with
the codes of both worlds and of talking a common language among themselves.
These groups are essentially bilingual in terms of the two dominant communities
their members come from. Institutions can strive to create such groups, but
the more effective ones tend to emerge. Studies by Julian Orr, a workplace
anthropologist at Xerox PARC, suggest that sales representatives and their
contacts in other corporations often form what is in effect a small
interstitial and metaphorically "bi-lingual" community crossing the boundary to
deal with the inability of the two dominant communities to communicate
directly.
But intercommunal communication isn't only a matter of comprehension and
coordination. Documents are also used to patrol and control. In the first
case, documents can patrol community boundaries rather than cross them.
Strange formats, unexplained generic conventions, jargon, abbreviations,
allusions, as well as private languages are all examples of ways in which
documents keep people out as much as bring them in. More simple than
obfuscation, of course, is simple secrecy. Documents are kept from certain
eyes. Encryption, blind "carbon" copies, restricted access, and so forth, make
secrecy quite as prevalent on the Internet as it has been in the world of paper
documents. Many Internet sites simply restrict access to registered users.
Control, however, is often more subtle. Leigh Star and her colleague Greisemar
makes this apparent in their discussion of "boundary objects"--objects capable
of crossing the boundary between communities or social worlds. Boundary
objects, Star and Greisemar note,
are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and the constraints of the
several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity
across sites. They are weakly structured in common use, and become strongly
structured in individual site use. . . . They have different meanings in
different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one
world to make them recognizable, a means of translation. The creation and
management of boundary objects is a key process in developing and maintaining
coherence across intersecting social worlds.
Star and Greisemar's argument makes it clear that with documents, control is
more salient than coordination. The idea of "translation," borrowed from
Latour, explains some of the complex relations involved when documents move
between different communities and the interests of one community are translated
into the terms of another. Inevitably, Star and Greisemar argue, the process
of translation often represents an attempt to subordinate one group to the
other's interpretation. (JoAnne Yates's Control through Communication
suggests how this practice emerges among the communities that make up a
corporation as different constituent groups bid for and assert control.) As
Strauss's work suggests, similar struggles within communities can lead either
to domination or separation of different factions into new and distinct
communities.
In sum, intercommunal documents can both promote and retard institutional
development, depending on whether boundary objects lead to collaboration or
control. Understanding the potential for both is thus particularly important
for large institutions.
9. Documents, Determination, and Enabling
The issue of documents as instruments of power and control is an important one.
Much debate around this issue, however, tends to argue that document
technologies determine certain social processes--either for good or for ill.
So, for example, theorists of literacy such as Walter Ong, Marshall MacLuhan,
Elizabeth Eisenstein, Jack Goody, and Richard Lanham, have painted the onset of
democracy and the rise of individual freedom as the inevitable and unavoidable
outcome of the spread of printing or information technology. From a profoundly
different perspective, Weberians, Chandlerians, and Foucauldians have linked
documentary technology to the rise of social control and the increasing spread
of bureaucratic-institutional power and repression.
While document technology is undoubtedly linked to both, neither of these
accounts gives the whole picture. And neither result is inevitable. As Oswyn
Murray has suggested, it's more reasonable to think of technology as an enabler
with the potential to support various scenarios. Which scenarios will play out
(and there will undoubtedly be more than one), will be the result of a great
deal of social work, conflict, coordination, and creativity, conducted around
but not determined by the technology.
This argument surely holds for the Internet, too. Some argue it will fulfill
social democratic ideals, others that it will undermine civil, political, and
economic institutions. Each outcome is no doubt feasible, but the technology
alone guarantees neither. The outcome of contemporary social-technological
pressures for change, whether for good or for ill, will be the result of social
struggle and negotiation. Consequently, the means of negotiation are
particularly important. Here, the Internet and related technologies are
intriguingly both the forum and the topic of debate.
10. Performance
Changes in documentary forms have lead some to foresee a shift from "objects"
(such as paper documents, software programs, concert recordings) to
"performance." The journalist John Perry Barlow, for instance, points out that
recordings of rock bands are rapidly losing value because they can so easily be
pirated. Cheap analog recording devices like the conventional tape recorder
produced such poor copies of originals that for most fans it was worth paying
to buy a professionally cut disc. Similarly, with print documents it has
usually been easier to buy than to copy. But now digital technology makes the
production of copies indistinguishable in all essentials from the original,
making copying often the cheaper and easier choice. This, Barlow argues, puts
a premium on performance. Musicians will give away recordings to attract
audiences to concerts, which is where money can still be made.
Simultaneously, some claim that written documents are moving from the
permanence of old forms to the performance of new ones. Certainly, notions of
"real-time response," "collaborative work," "multi-authored hypertexts,"
"shared documents," "relational databases," "on-line editing," "continuous
up-dates," "interlinked data," "live video links," and other properties suggest
that their malleability makes new documents significantly different from old
ones. Those who struggled for years with stencils and White Out undoubtedly
appreciate the shift from fixed to a different sense of fluid.
Nevertheless, it's important not to ignore some counterpressures developing
within the new technologies themselves. While many technologies strive to
achieve the immediacy of the conversation, the phone call, and other live
links, people occasionally use new technologies to achieve the opposite: to
escape that very immediacy. For instance, e-mail and faxes may be used to
overcome the delay of "snail mail." But people also use them for messages that
could be delivered by the more conversational phone call. While voice mail
allows us to leave messages for people we cannot reach, occasionally people use
it to avoid reaching someone they would prefer not to talk to. Similarly,
people allow an answering machine to pick up and announce "I'm not here, now,"
even though "I" is indeed "here" and listening in, just to add a little delay
between message and response.
Practices like these are not simply desperate responses to the burdensome
pressures of modern life or information overload. They are as much innovative
ways to reintroduce time and physical traces into what would otherwise be
immediate and ephemeral exchanges. At the very least, they suggest that delay
and fixity may be just as important to all of us as immediacy, mutability, and
indivisibility. While everyone can benefit from technology capable of
overcoming separations of space and time and the convergence of producer and
consumer, it seems people are beginning to appreciate how important these
distinctions can be. New technologies help us to transcend burdensome barriers
of space and time. But, in part through the improvisations of users, the same
technologies are also valued for their ability to reinject both space and time
into communication. Written forms have long done this. Madame de Staël
was known to write letters to fellow guests in the same house she was
visiting--to people, that is, to whom she could just as (or more) easily have
talked had she so wanted to.
In general, new technologies have minimized the technological separation of
producer and consumer. It is a shift of some significance that the computer we
read on is also the one we write on, whereas the book we read is very different
from the manuscript we write. This single medium makes the intertextual
relationship of reading and writing more than an abstruse intellectual concept.
What the French historian Michel de Certeau calls "poaching"--the act of taking
text from someone else's writing to use it in your own--is not merely a feature
of high modernist works such as Joyce's Ulysses or Eliot's Waste
Land. It is also an everyday occurrence in zines. Henry Jenkins has shown
how zine writers continually appropriate television and magazine texts for
their own purposes. Software like Storytime also engages readers in the active
production of stories, turning esoteric theories about "reading as writing"
into practical occurrences.
Nonetheless, despite the technological shift, the social distinction between
producer and consumer or writer and reader remains useful. CoNote and the MIT
Press Web site for Mitchell's City of Bits, for example, allow documents
to be annotated or commented upon, but not rewritten by readers. Requiring an
"original" to be annotated, these tools implicit rely on the distinction
between original and annotations, producers and consumers. Readers do not
change the original form of the document--that remains intact. Rather, they
comment on it, and in the case of CoNote, add to it-amplifying, qualifying,
dissenting, but maintaining the original document so that others can then
measure text against commentary, while clearly understanding which is which.
The relationship between text and commentary is symbiotic. Each is augmented;
neither is erased. Indeed, because they designed CoNote for teaching,
Huttenlocher and Davis allow the original producer to control where commentary
may be attached. Production and consumption thus come closer, but they do not
completely elide. In general, this is true of most documents on the Web. They
may often relinquish some control. They rarely abandon it completely.
Here the MOO offers another intriguing case. Developed from on-line game
environments that allowed several participants to play a computer game of
Dungeons and Dragons together, MOOs (an acronym from
Object-Oriented Multi-user dungeons that somehow came out
backwards) allow participants to communicate and program collectively in real
time though they may sit at computers a world apart. As Larry Masinter of
Xerox PARC, where MOOs were developed, has pointed out, MOOs are really huge
collaborative programming environments: collaborative but not
cooperative--indeed some people in MOOs are quite uncooperative. What remains
astonishing is that so many people of so many different abilities can program
simultaneously in a shared environment without bringing that environment
crashing down. Masinter attributes this to the fact that the integrity and
ownership of each person's program are rigorously honored by the system.
Objects can interact and code can be shared, but code cannot be altered without
its creators' consent. Again, the distinction between producer and consumer is
maintained.
In general, then, the degree to which the roles of producer and consumer,
rigorously enforced by most old document technologies, are kept separate by new
ones is a matter for negotiation. The distinction is now an option, determined
by the system in each particular situation, rather than a necessity. The
distinction between producer and consumer has not been irrevocably erased.
Nonetheless, the social implications of this shift from necessary to optional
are far from trivial.[6]
11. Fixed and Fluid
The curious return of capture and fixity and the distinction between production
and consumption just as technology seemed to be increasing our freedom from
these suggests that while "being digital," as Nicholas Negroponte calls it, is
undoubtedly important there are aspects of analog life that people are eager to
keep. A century ago, the French poet Baudelaire claimed that art is half "the
transient, the fleeting, the contingent" and half "the eternal and the
immutable." Art and eternity are beyond the scope of this essay. Nonetheless,
the idea of an interchange between the immutable and the transient, the fixed
and the fleeting seems central to understanding documents and their many uses.
Moreover, as David Levy has stressed, a simple opposition between the two
misrepresents the character of the old and the new. Both are capable of
both. Fixity can be traced back to monuments, cave paintings, and
inscriptions; transience to conversation, ritual, and performance. And, in the
realm of clay tablets, chalk boards, erasable pencils, and moveable type,
mixtures of the two have been available for a long time. It is a gross
oversimplification simply to denounce fixity and embrace transience as if we
could have only one.
Even if, then, we are not in the middle of an irreversible transition from
fixity, what does seem to be inescapably different now is that the two, the
transient and the immutable, are materially no longer mutually exclusive. Now
it's possible to have mutability where once there was only fixity--in, for
example, the digital document. Equally, to have fixity or capture, where once
there was only transience--in, for example, the analog recording. As a result,
certain previously inevitable characteristics of practice can no longer be
taken for granted. Many choices were once implicit in materials. By using
paper, we left a trace. As Fitzgerald's version of Omar Khayyám puts
it
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all their Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all they Tears wash out a Word of it.
In contrast, voice once left no trace beyond the fallibility of memory. But
today, as we write on screens, our writing may sometimes be as ephemeral as the
voice. Whereas, as Richard Nixon discovered, whispered comments can be
captured as robustly as a stone inscription.
Changes in technology make it clear that we can no longer take for granted a
correspondence between social purpose and technological resources. Now a trace
may appear where it wasn't expected, or disappear when it was taken for
granted. This change doesn't insist we simply leap from product to
performance, renounce fixity and embrace transience, become digital where once
we were material. Rather, it suggests that we should consider a symbiosis
between the two. Moreover, we should consider not only the fascinating
possibilities presented to us by the digital document, but also the importance
of the immutable and the transient to central social practices from preserving
great (and even minor) works to signing contracts and cashing checks.
From this point of view, the fixed, immutable "document" is best understood not
as an inferior and outdated alternative to conversation or other types of
unmediated and immediate communication, but, in appropriate places, as an
object that plays valuable social roles because it mediates and
temporizes, records traces and fixes spaces, and demands institutions as well
as technologies of distribution. Attempts to introduce time stamps, hash
marks, and other forms of electronic version identification stress how
important to social and particularly legal institutions the idea of a fixed
state of a document is. Being able to talk about the "same" document, for all
the Hereclitan conundrums, is extremely useful. As the historian Roger
Chartier and the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu have argued in a nice allusion to
the well-known French cliché, this fixity is not as limiting as might be
thought. The document, they note, changes by virtue of staying the same. This
paradox draws attention to interactions between fixed documents and flexible
social practices.
If the utility of both the fixed and the fluid is recognized, the Web may
develop much of its innovative power from the possibility of producing
documents that combine both fixity and fluidity. Already, many documents
retain a constant text while their links are continually changed. As the
social roles of continuity and change, of areas of stasis and areas open to
dynamic revision, are better understood, social institutions may develop around
this joint capacity in intriguing ways, much as libraries developed their
usefulness out of the juxtaposition of fixed individual texts combined to an
ever expanding collection and a continually revised set of interlinked
catalogues. This interplay between fixity and fluidity, formerly possible only
on the scale of collections may now become a central feature of individual
documents.
12. Conclusion: economy, ecology, and social life
A good deal of the debate around the transition from old document forms to new
ones has concerned reading from the new economy of documents to the old
ecology. John Perry Barlow and Esther Dyson and others have argued that the
economy of the document will change dramatically with the shift from atoms to
bits, because the economic feasibility of conventional documents resulted from
the relative ease with which paper-based objects could be controlled, which
gave them significant exchange value.
Undoubtedly, the greater ease with which bits can escape control brings down
exchange values and so will have profound effects on the way documents are
used. But this focus on commercial role of fixed documents, on exchange value,
perhaps misses the significant use value involved in many document
transactions. We need to pay attention to the commercial life of
documents--but then given the way commerce works we almost inevitably will.
What we are more prone to neglect, but what is crucial to its understanding and
use, is the document's extensive social life. In the end, it seems unlikely
that just because the economy of the document has changed, people will abandon
it. Rather, while the document retains an active social life, and the Web
suggests that it will retain this for quite some time, people will find ways to
make it economically practical.
Further Reading
B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nations.
R. Anderson, Can Organizations Afford Knowledge. Xerox EuroPARC Working
Paper.
J.S. Brown & P. Duguid, Borderline Issues: Social and Material
Aspects of Design. Human-Computer Interaction, 1994 (9): 3-36.
J.S. Brown & P. Duguid, Universities in the Digital Age. Xerox PARC
Working Paper, 1995.
R. Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. L.
Cochrane. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991.
M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Rendall.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984.
P. Duguid, Material Matters: The Past and the Futurology of the Book.
In G. Nunberg, ed., The Future of the Book. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, Forthcoming (1996).
S. Fish, Is There a Text in this Classroom? The Authority of Interpretive
Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Bourgeois Public
Sphere, trans. T. Burger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988.
C. Hesse, Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris,
1789-1810. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991
J. Huizinga, America: A Dutch Historian's Vision from Afar and Near,
trans. H. Rowen. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972.
H. Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture.
London: Routlege, 1992.
R. Lanham, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
S. Leigh Star and ? Greisemar,
D. Levy, Fixed or Fluid? Documents Satbility and New Media. In European
Conference on Hypermedia Technology 1994 Conference Proceedings . New
York: ACM Press, 1994.
W. Mitchell, City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1995.
N. Negroponte, Being Digital. New York: Knopf, 1995.
M. Reddy, The Conduit Metaphor: A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language about
Language. In A. Ortony, ed., Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1979.
S. Toulmin, Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of
Concepts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972.
J. Yates, Control through Coordination: The Rise of System in American
Management. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.
The authors
John Seely Brown <jsb@parc.xerox.com> is Chief Scientist of the Xerox
Corporation and Director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.
Paul Duguid <duguid@garnet.berkeley.edu> is a consultant at the Xerox
Palo Alto Research Center and at the University of California, Berkeley, where
he is studying transnational traders in the 18th and 19th century. This
NEH-funded historical study includes an investigation of the role of document
technologies in the development of trade and commerce.
[1] This paper has appeared in Release
1.0, EDventure Holdings Inc., New York, NY. October 11, 1995; pp. 1-18, and
First Monday, May 1996,
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issue1/documents/index.html#03
[2] Xerox Corporation, Palo Alto Research
Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CA 94304
[3]Others, including the historians Roger
Chartier and Carla Hesse and the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, make similar
claims.
[4]Without copyright laws to restrain them,
newspapers engaged in "cutting" and "pasting" or "poaching" from one another
and from other sources. Consequently, news traveled widely and rapidly. In a
way, the papers functioned like proto-BBSs repeating new stories and old saws
throughout the land.
[5]Anderson point outs that this feeling of
community engages populations as ethnically, culturally, and socially diverse
and geographically scattered as the population of the Indonesian archipelago.
[6]Under the term "demassification,"
implications of this shift are discussed in J.S. Brown and P. Duguid,
"Borderline Issues."
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