Tag Archives: technology

The Social Life of Information

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Browsing my shelves gently, nibbling at books, I picked up for the first time in ages [amazon_link id=”0875847625″ target=”_blank” ]The Social Life of Information[/amazon_link] by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid (2000). I’ve loved this book for providing me with the insight, so often validated by life, that while everyone thinks computers are predictable and people are unpredictable, it’s actually the other way round.

The book is about the social context in which digital technologies are used, my preoccupation since the mid-1990s. Today I came across this passage contrasting information (which we hold and can pass around) and knowledge:

“Knowledge is something we digest rather than merely hold. It entails the knower’s understanding and some degree of commitment. Thus while one person often has conflicting information, he or she will not usually have conflicting knowledge. And while it seems quite reasonable to say, ‘I’ve got the information but I don’t understand it’, it seems less reasonable to say, ‘I know but I don’t understand’, or ‘I have the knowledge but I can’t see what it means.’” (p120)

Machines do information, knowledge needs people, they conclude.

[amazon_image id=”0875847625″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Social Life of Information[/amazon_image]

Barthes, Derrida and all that jazz

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There’s a new [amazon_link id=”0745656153″ target=”_blank” ]biography of Jacques Derrida[/amazon_link] by Benoit Peeters, reviewed by Terry Eagleton. As an economist, my education in literature and critical studies is pretty scanty, but I have read Roland Barthes [amazon_link id=”0374521506″ target=”_blank” ]Mythologies[/amazon_link] (sitting in the Kramer Books cafe in Washington DC).

[amazon_image id=”0745656153″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Derrida: A Biography[/amazon_image]

So over breakfast this morning I asked my husband (degree in French and German literature a million years ago) to sum up for me the difference between the two authors. He pondered an said, “Derrida is like Barthes going off on one.” So unless anybody persuades me to the contrary, I’ll stick to Mythologies. There was a new edition published earlier this year. The New Yorker reviewer Richard Brody liked best the essay ‘African Grammar’: “It exposes the colonialist rhetoric that is embedded in the popular press under the guise of journalistic objectivity.”

I preferred the hymn of praise to the Citroen DS, surely one of the most beautiful cars ever designed:

“I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object. It is obvious that the new Citroen has fallen from the sky inasmuch as it appears at first sight as a superlative object .. We must not forget that an object is the best messenger of a world above that of nature: one can easily see in an object at once a perfection and an absence of origin, a closure and a brilliance, a transformation of life into matter…”

The essay clearly inspired generations of advertising copywriters….

The Citroen DS

Humans, robots and wages

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Jonathan Schlefer has an interesting HBR post about income inequality and the rewards to factors of production. He has a book out that looks interesting – [amazon_link id=”0674052269″ target=”_blank” ]Assumptions Economists Make[/amazon_link]. He discusses the question of the substitutability of capital and labour, and consequently rewards to labour, in the context of an automobile production line. The line of argument is that neoclassical economics wrongly assumes ease of substitutability, and that if labour gets too expensive, firms will bring in more robots. It doesn’t happen like this – apart from anything else, as he implies, there is a lot of tacit knowledge in workers’ heads and muscles that machines can’t replace. In the auto context see, for example, Ben Hamper’s brilliant book [amazon_link id=”0446394009″ target=”_blank” ]Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line[/amazon_link].

[amazon_image id=”0446394009″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Rivethead[/amazon_image]

However, Prof Schlefer overdoes his argument in one way. The cost of labour can increase enough to trigger a move to more capital-intensive methods. Just think of all those new machines in the supermarkets that make you do your own check-out: “There is an unexpected item in the bagging area.” It’s a lumpy switch rather than continuous adjustment.

On the other hand, I think he under-does the argument in other contexts. There are many organisations in modern economies where almost all activity depends heavily on tacit knowledge, and cannot be monitored easily. Creating a new computer system. Answering calls in a call centre. Many more are the product of team efforts, with individual contributions impossible to evaluate and monitor. Boris Groysberg’s book [amazon_link id=”0691154511″ target=”_blank” ]Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance[/amazon_link] demonstrates the importance of teams and institutional context, rather than individuals, in the finance sector.

Either way, Prof Schlefer is right to challenge the simplistic neoclassical labour market thinking that manifests itself in some public policy discussion (although, ironically, the good labour market economists have long since stopped thinking like the textbook mode the HBR blog post condemns).

[amazon_image id=”0674052269″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Assumptions Economists Make[/amazon_image]

A Great British success story

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One of the activities in which the UK has a comparative advantage is creating video games – maybe this shouldn’t be at all surprising in a country with an illustrious history of creativity of all types. A new book, [amazon_link id=”1845137043″ target=”_blank” ]Grand Thieves and Tomb Raiders: How British Video Games Conquered the World[/amazon_link] by Magnus Anderson and Rebecca Levene, describes its accidental growth.

Part of the story involves the deliberate policy of encouraging innovation in personal computers. The Sinclair ZX Spectrum and the BBC Micro play a key role in the development of today’s games industry. As the book notes, “These home-grown machines democratised access to computers and made simple programming skills commonplace – for a while Britain may have been the most computer literate country in the world.” So a key lesson there for the debate about teaching coding skills in schools now.

Just as interesting, though, is the grassroots nature of the early days of the industry. “In the early 1980s the British games market saw one of the most spontaneous, fragmented and lively proliferations of creativity in its history …. British gaming didn’t feel at all corporate: it was ad hoc, unstructured and rather parochial.” Professionalisation followed reasonably quickly, but my reading is that this unstructured and chaotic phase was vital.

This book is based mainly on interviews with key people in the industry. It’s a fascinating business history, that ends up with the Raspberry Pi, whose founders are hoping to repeat the burst of creativity Britain enjoyed in the 1980s. “There’s a fierce hope that the traits that first inspired the British games industry – passionate home coders, a market flourishing with ideas – are robust enough to take hold again.”

[amazon_image id=”1845137043″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders: How British Videogames Conquered the World[/amazon_image]

Technology and the conquest of time

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Last night I stayed up late reading (not yet quite finishing) a marvellous book by Rebecca Solnit, [amazon_link id=”0747568413″ target=”_blank” ]Motion Studies: Time, Space and Eadweard Muybridge[/amazon_link]. I discovered her writing last year, when I wolfed down [amazon_link id=”1841957453″ target=”_blank” ]A Field Guide To Getting Lost [/amazon_link]and [amazon_link id=”1844675580″ target=”_blank” ]Wanderlust: A History of Walking[/amazon_link].

This 2003 book is a reflection on technology, nature and society. Muybridge took the famous series of photographs revealing motion to human eyes – as Solnit puts it: “With photography, they would come to see faster what had been hidden in time, and then to reconstruct those moments in time.” All technology really is about the conquest of time in one way or another.

Muybridge was first commissioned by Leland Stanford, one of the railroad magnates. The railroads are part of the story too, “the co-ordination of systems of technology with political and economic power.” Stanford’s reach over technology continues through the university his railroad-earned money enabled him to found. All fascinating – a reflective, poetic companion to another terrific book, Tom Standage’s [amazon_link id=”0753807033″ target=”_blank” ]The Victorian Internet[/amazon_link].

[amazon_image id=”0747568413″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Motion Studies: Time, Space and Eadweard Muybridge[/amazon_image]