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\title{The Social Life of Information\footnote{This text is an excerpt of {\it The Social Life of Information} by John 
  Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, published in March 2000 by Harvard Business 
  School Press. Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business School Press. 
  Copyright  2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College; All Rights 
  Reserved.
 The book is available from Harvard Business 
  School Press directly, fine bookstores everywhere, and other sources such 
  as Amazon.com. Please also visit the 
  Social Life of Information Home Page at http://www.slofi.com/
 A public forum to discuss {\it The Social Life of Information} can be 
  found at http://www.slofi.com/slofidis.htm
}}

\author{John Seely Brown\footnote{ 
  Chief Scientist at Xerox Corporation and Director of the Xerox 
  Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). e-mail: John@SLofI.com}
  \\
  Paul Duguid\footnote{Research specialist in Social and Cultural Studies in 
  Education at the University of California at Berkeley.  e-mail:
paul@SLofI.com}} 

\date{Copyright  2000}  


\begin{document}
\maketitle
\ 
\newpage

\tableofcontents

 \chapter{Limits to Information}

\citacao{
  On an average weekday the {\it New York Times} contains more 
    information  than  any  contemporary  of  Shakespeare's  would  have
  acquired in a 
    lifetime.}{anonymous (and ubiquitous)}
  
\citacao{ 
    Every year, better methods are being devised to quantify 
    information and distill it into quadrillions of atomistic packets of 
    data.}{Bill Gates}
  
 
\citacao{
  By 2047 ... all information about physical objects, including 
    humans, buildings, processes and organizations, will be online. This
  is both 
    desirable and inevitable.}{Gordon Bell and Jim Gray}
  
 
  
\citacao{ 
  This is the datafication of shared knowledge.}{Tom Phillips, 
    {\it Deja News\footnote{Gates, 1995, p. 21; Gordon Bell and James N. Gray, 
  quoted in Nardi and O'Day, 1999; Phillips, quoted in Napoli, 1999.}}}
  
 
  
 It now seems a curiously innocent  time, though not that long ago, when
  the lack  of information appeared  to be one of  society's fundamental
  problems.  Theorists talked about humanity's "bounded rationality" and
  the  difficulty  of  making  decisions  in conditions  of  limited  or
  imperfect information. Chronic  information shortages threatened work,
  education, research, innovation,  and economic decision making-whether
  at  the level of  government policy,  business strategy,  or household
  shopping. The one thing we all apparently needed was more information.
  
 So it's not surprising that  infoenthusiasts exult in the simple volume
  of  information that technology  now makes  available. They  count the
  bits,   bytes,   and   packets   enthusiastically.  They   cheer   the
  disaggregation   of   knowledge  into   data   (and   provide  a   new
  word-datafication-to  describe it). As  the lumps  break down  and the
  bits  pile  up,  words  like  {\it quadrillion,  terabyte,}  and  {\it
  megaflop} have become the measure of value.
  
 Despite the cheers, however, for  many people famine has quickly turned
  to glut. Concern about access  to information has given way to concern
  about coping with the amounts to which we do have access. The Internet
  is rightly  championed as a  major information resource. Yet  a little
  time in the nether regions of the  Web can make you feel like the SETI
  researchers  at  the  University  of California,  Berkeley,  searching
  through  an unstoppable  flood of  meaningless information  from outer
  space for signs of intelligent life\footnote{SETI stands for Search for Extra Terrestrial 
  Intelligence. For more information, see http://seti.ssl.berkeley.edu/, 
  retrieved 21 July 1999.}.
  
 With the information spigot barely turned on-the effect has seemed more
  like  breaching a dam  than turning  a tap-  controlling the  flow has
  quickly become the critical issue.  Where once there seemed too little
  to swim in, now it's hard to stay afloat. The "third wave" has rapidly
  grown  into a  tsunami\footnote{The notion of the "third wave" comes from the futurist 
  Alvin Toffler's (1980) book of the same name.}.  Faced by  cheery enthusiasts,  many less
  optimistic people  resemble the poor  swimmer in Stevie  Smith's poem,
  lamenting that
  
\citacao{ 
  I was much too far out all my life\\And not waving, but 
    drowning.}{Stevie Smith, "Not Waving But Drowning," from {\it Collected 
    Poems of Stevie Smith.} Copyright  1972 by Stevie 
  Smith.}
  
 
  
 Yet still raw information by the quadrillion seems to fascinate.
  
 
\section{Could Less Be More?}
  
 
  
 Of course, it's  easy to get foolishly romantic  about the pleasures of
  the  "simpler" times. Few  people really  want to  abandon information
  technology.   Hours  spent  in  a  bank  line, when  the  ATM  in  the
  supermarket can  do the job in  seconds, have little  charm. Lose your
  papers in a  less-developed country and trudge, as  locals must do all
  the time, from line to line,  from form to form, from office to office
  and you quickly realize that life without information technology, like
  life  without  modern  sanitation,  may  seem simpler  and  even  more
  "authentic," but for those who have  to live it, it is not necessarily
  easier or more pleasant.
  
 Even  those people  who continue  to resist  computers,  faxes, e-mail,
  personal digital assistants, let alone the Internet and the World Wide
  Web, can hardly avoid taking  advantage of the embedded microchips and
  invisible processors  that make  phones easier to  use, cars  safer to
  drive, appliances more reliable,  utilities more predictable, toys and
  games more enjoyable, and the trains  run on time. Though any of these
  technologies can undoubtedly be  infuriating, most people who complain
  want improvements, not to go back to life without them\footnote{Indeed, the degree to which we complain about such 
  technologies when they do go wrong indicates the extent to which we have all 
  become dependent on them to go right. The apprehension about the Y2K bug, 
  which some predict may allow tiny embedded chips to bring huge social 
  institutions to a halt, is itself a sign of how deeply enmeshed these things 
  are in our lives.}.
  
 Nonetheless,  there  is  little  reason  for  complacency.  Information
  technology  has been wonderfully  successful in  many ways.  But those
  successes  have extended its  ambition without  necessarily broadening
  its    outlook.   Information    is   still    the   tool    for   all
  tasks. Consequently,  living and working  in the midst  of information
  resources  like the  Internet  and  the World  Wide  Web can  resemble
  watching a  firefighter attempt to  extinguish a fire with  napalm. If
  your Web  page is  hard to  understand, link to  another. If  a "help"
  system gets overburdened,  add a "help on using  help." If your answer
  isn't here, then  click on through another 1,000  pages. Problems with
  information? Add more.
  
 Life at Xerox  has made us sensitive  to this sort of trap.  As the old
  flip cards  that provided instructions on  copiers became increasingly
  difficult  to navigate, it  was once  suggested that  a second  set be
  added to  explain the  first set. No  doubt, had this  happened, there
  would have been a  third a few years later, then a  fourth, and soon a
  whole laundry line of cards explaining other cards.
  
 The power and  speed of information technology can  make this trap both
  hard  to see and  hard to  escape. When  information burdens  start to
  loom,  many of the  standard responses  fall into  a category  we call
  "Moore's Law"  solutions. The  law, an important  one, is  named after
  Gordon  Moore,  one  of the  founders  of  the  chip maker  Intel.  He
  predicted  that   the  computer  power  available  on   a  chip  would
  approximately double every  eighteen months. This law has  held up for
  the  past decade and  looks like  it will  continue to  do so  for the
  next\footnote{Sometime around 2012, it has been predicted, Moore's 
  Law will come up against the physical limitations of current microchip 
  components, though by then solid-state components may well have been 
  replaced.}.   (It's  this  law  that   can  make  it  hard   to  buy  a
  computer.  Whenever you  buy,  you always  know  that within  eighteen
  months the same capabilities will be available at half the price.)
  
 But while the law is insightful, Moore's Law solutions are usually less
  so.  They take it on faith that more power will somehow solve the very
  problems that they  have helped to create. Time  alone, such solutions
  seem to  say, with the  inevitable cycles of  the Law, will  solve the
  problem.  More information, better  processing, improved  data mining,
  faster connections,  wider bandwidth, stronger  cryptography-these are
  the answers.  Instead of  thinking hard, we  are encouraged  simply to
  "embrace dumb power."\footnote{Kelly, 1997.}
  
 More power may be helpful. To the  same degree, it is likely to be more
  problematic,  too. So  as  information technology  tunnels deeper  and
  deeper into everyday  life, it's time to think not  simply in terms of
  the next quadrillion packets or the next megaflop of processing power,
  but to look instead to things that lie beyond information.
  
 
\section{Drowning and Didn't Know It}
  
 
  
 If, as one  of our opening quotations suggests,  "all information about
  physical   objects,  including   humans,   buildings,  processes   and
  organizations,  will be online,"  it's sometimes  hard to  fathom what
  there is beyond information to talk about.
  
 Let  us begin  by  taking a  cue  from MIT's  Nicholas Negroponte.  His
  handbook  for the  information  age, {\it  Being Digital,}  encouraged
  everyone to  think about the differences between  atoms, a fundamental
  unit of  matter, and  bits, the fundamental  unit of  information\footnote{Negroponte, 1995. John Tukey coined the term bit. It 
  stands for "binary digit."}.
  Here   was   a   provocative   and  useful   thought   experiment   in
  contrasts.   Moreover,  it   can  be   useful  to   consider  possible
  similarities between the two as well.
  
 Consider,  for  example,  the  industrial revolution,  the  information
  revolution's role model. It was  a period in which society learned how
  to  process,  sort,  rearrange,  recombine,  and  transport  atoms  in
  unprecedented  fashion.  Yet people  didn't  complain  that they  were
  drowning in  atoms. They didn't worry about  "atom overload." Because,
  of  course, while the  world may  be composed  of atoms,  people don't
  perceive it that  way. They perceive it as buses  and books and tables
  and chairs, buildings and coffee mugs, laptops and cell phones, and so
  forth. Similarly, while information may  come to us in quadrillions of
  bits, we don't consider it that way. The information reflected in bits
  comes to  us, for example, as stories,  documents, diagrams, pictures,
  or  narratives,   as  knowledge  and  meaning,   and  in  communities,
  organizations, and institutions\footnote{It's worth remembering that formal information theory, 
  while it holds the bit as a central concern, is indifferent to meaning. Claude   Shannon, who with Warren Weaver laid the foundations of modern information 
  theory, is quite clear about this: "the semantic aspects of communication are 
  irrelevant to the engineering aspects" (Shannon and Weaver, 1964, p. 8).}.
  
  
 The  difficulty  of  looking  to  these  various  forms  through  which
  information  has   conventionally  come   to  us,  however,   is  that
  infocentric      visions     tend      to     dismiss      them     as
  irrelevant.  Infoenthusiasts  insist,   for  example,  not  only  that
  information technology will see the end of documents, break narratives
  into hypertext, and reduce knowledge  to data, but that such things as
  organizations  and  institutions are  little  more  than  relics of  a
  discredited old regime.
  
 Indeed, the rise  of the information age has brought  about a good deal
  of "endism." New technology is  widely predicted to bring about, among
  other things,

  \begin{itemize}
\item the end of the press, television, and mass media
  
\item the end of brokers and other intermediaries
  
\item the end of firms, bureaucracies, and similar organizations
  
\item the end of universities
  
\item the end of politics
  
\item the end of government
  
\item the end of cities and regions
  
\item the end of the nation-state

  \end{itemize}
  
 There's no  doubt that in all these  categories particular institutions
  and  particular organizations  are under  pressure and  many  will not
  survive  long.  There's  nothing sacred  here. But  it's one  thing to
  argue that  many "second wave" tools,  institutions, and organizations
  will not survive the onset of  the "third wave." It's another to argue
  that in the "third wave" there  is no need for social institutions and
  organizations at all.
  
 The strong claim seems to be that in the new world individuals can hack
  it alone with only information  by their side. Everyone will return to
  frontier life, living in the undifferentiated global village\footnote{The pervasive image of the new open frontier only 
  works if we forget the presence on the old frontier of the U.S. Army, the 
  Church of Latter-Day Saints, and myriad other organizations and institutions 
  large and small (let alone its native inhabitants) that shaped the 
  frontier.}. Here
  such things  as organizations  and institutions are  only in  the way.
  Consequently, where we see  solutions to information's burdens, others
  see only burdens on information.
  
 
\section{Origin Myths}
  
 From all the talk about electronic frontiers, global villages, and such
  things as  electronic cottages, it's clear that  the romanticism about
  the past we talked about  earlier is not limited to technophobes\footnote{For "electronic frontier," see Rheingold, 1993; for 
  "global village," see McLuhan, 1962; and for "electronic cottages," see 
  Toffler, 1980, and chapter 3.}.
  Villages and cottages,  after all, are curious survivors  from the old
  world applied  to the conditions of  the new. They remind  us that the
  information age, highly rationalist though it seems, is easily trapped
  by its own myths. One of  the most interesting may be its origin myth,
  which is a myth of separation.
  
 Historians frequently  trace the beginnings of the  information age not
  to  the Internet,  the computer,  or even  the telephone,  but  to the
  telegraph. With  the telegraph,  the speed of  information essentially
  separated itself  from the speed  of human travel. People  traveled at
  the speed  of the train. Information  began to travel at  the speed of
  light. In  some versions of this  origin story (which  tends to forget
  that  fire and  smoke had  long been  used to  convey messages  over a
  distance at the speed of light), information takes on not only a speed
  of  its own,  but a  life of  its own.  (It is  even capable,  in some
  formulations, of "wanting" to be free.)\footnote{The phrase "information wants to be free" is usually 
  attributed to the author Bruce Sterling.} And some scholars contend
  that  with the  computer, this  decisive separation  entered  a second
  phase.   Information  technologies  became   capable  not   simply  of
  transmitting  and storing  information, but  of  producing information
  independent of human intervention\footnote{Castells, 1996.}.

  
 No one doubts the importance  of Samuel Morse's invention. But with the
  all-but-death of the telegraph and the final laying to rest in 1999 of
  Morse code,  it might be time  to celebrate less  speed and separation
  and more the ways  information and society intertwine. Similarly, it's
  important not  to overlook the significance of  information's power to
  breed upon itself. But it might be time to retreat from exuberance (or
  depression) at  the volume  of information and  to consider  its value
  more carefully\footnote{The SETI project (see note 2), after all, 
  acknowledges that the universe has long been capable of producing raw 
  information. Finding intelligence in its midst is a different matter.}. The  ends of information,  after all,  are human
  ends.  The  logic of  information  must  ultimately  be the  logic  of
  humanity. For all information's independence and extent, it is people,
  in their communities,  organizations, and institutions, who ultimately
  decide what it all means and why it matters.
  
 Yet it can  be easy for a  logic of information to push  aside the more
  practical logic  of humanity. For example,  by focusing on  a logic of
  information, it  was easy for {\it  Business Week} in  1975 to predict
  that the "paperless office" was  close. Five years later, one futurist
  was  firmly  insisting that  "making  paper  copies  of anything"  was
  "primitive."\footnote{{\it Business Week,} 30 June 1975, p. 48.; Toffler, 
  1980, p. 205.} Yet printers  and copiers  were running  faster and
  faster   for   longer   and   longer  periods   over   the   following
  decade. Moreover, in the middle of  the decade, the fax rose to become
  an essential paper-based piece  of office equipment.  Inevitably, this
  too was seen  as a breach of good taste.  Another analyst snorted that
  the  merely  useful fax  "is  a  serious  blemish on  the  information
  landscape, a  step backward,  whose ramifications will  be felt  for a
  long time."\footnote{Negroponte, 1995, p. 187.}
  
 But the  fax holds  on. Rather  like the pencil  - whose  departure was
  predicted in 1938 by the {\it New York Times} in the face of ever more
  sophisticated typewriters  - the fax, the copier,  and paper documents
  refuse to  be dismissed\footnote{For the dismissal of the pencil, see Petrosky, 1990, 
  p. 331.}. People find  them useful. Paper,  as we
  argue in  chapter 7,  has wonderful properties  - properties  that lie
  beyond  information,  helping  people  work,  communicate,  and  think
  together.
  
 If only a  logic of information, rather than the  logic of humanity, is
  taken into account, then all these other aspects remain invisible. And
  futurists,  while raging  against  the illogic  of  humankind and  the
  primitive preferences  that lead it  astray, will continue to  tell us
  where we  ought to go. By taking  more account of people  and a little
  less of  information, they might instead  tell us where  we are going,
  which would be more difficult but also more helpful.
  
 
\section{Hammering Information}

 Caught in the headlights of  infologic, it occasionally feels as though
  we  have met the  man with  the proverbial  hammer to  whom everything
  looks  like a  nail. If  you have  a problem,  define it  in  terms of
  information and  you have  the answer. This  redefining is  a critical
  strategy not only for futurology,  but also for design. In particular,
  it allows people to slip quickly from questions to answers.
  
 If indeed  Morse did launch  the information age,  he at least  had the
  modesty  to do  it with  a  famously open-ended  question. "What,"  he
  piously asked in his first  message, "hath God wrought?" Now, "we have
  answers,"  or  "solutions"  or  "all  the answers  you  need"  (11,000
  according to Oracle's  Web site). Similarly, IBM claims  that a single
  computer can contain "answers to all the questions you ever had."\footnote{See the IBM advertisement in the {\it New York 
  Times,} 30 June 1999, sec. C, pp. 13-20.}
  So if Morse were to ask his question again today, he would no doubt be
  offered an answer beginning "http://www ... ."
  
  
 True, Microsoft advertises  itself with a question: "Where  do you want
  to go  today?" But  that is itself  a revealing question.  It suggests
  that  Microsoft  has the  answers.  Further,  Microsoft's pictures  of
  people  sitting eagerly at  computers also  suggest that  whatever the
  question, the answer lies  in digital, computer-ready information. For
  though it asks where you want  to go, Microsoft isn't offering to take
  you anywhere.  (The question, after  all, would be quite  different if
  Microsoft's Washington  neighbor Boeing had  asked it.) Atoms  are not
  expected to move,  only bits. No doubt to the  regret of the airlines,
  the  ad curiously redefines  "go" as  "stay." Stay  where you  are, it
  suggests, and technology will bring virtually anything you want to you
  in  the comfort  of your  own home.  (Bill Gates  himself intriguingly
  refers to the computer as a "passport.")\footnote{Gates, 1995, p. 5.} Information offers to
satisfy  your   wanderlust  without  the  need  to   wander  from  the
  keyboard\footnote{The idea is certainly a tempting one to the weary 
  business traveler and is echoed in the curious enigma of the laptop. Ads for 
  these suggest that laptops can be so "loaded" with communications software 
  that you can travel anywhere and remain a virtual presence in your own office. 
  Yet in suggesting this possibility, they make you wonder why you need to 
  travel at all.}.
  
 
\section{Refining, or Merely Redefining?}
  
 In the  end, Microsoft's  view of  your wants is  plausible so  long as
  whatever you do and  whatever you want translates into information-and
  whatever gets  left behind doesn't matter. From  this viewpoint, value
  lies in information, which technology can refine away from the raw and
  uninteresting husk of the physical world.
  
 Thus  you don't  need  to look  far these  days  to find  much that  is
  familiar in the world redefined as information. Books are portrayed as
  information   containers,   libraries   as   information   warehouses,
  universities  as information  providers, and  learning  as information
  absorption.  Organizations are  depicted as  information coordinators,
  meetings as  information consolidators, talk  as information exchange,
  markets as information-driven stimulus and response.
  
 This desire to  see things in information's light  no doubt drives what
  we think of as "infoprefixation." Info  gives new life to a lot of old
  words in  compounds such as infotainment,  infomatics, infomating, and
  infomediary. It also gives new promise to a lot of new companies, from
  InfoAmerica  to InfoUSA,  hoping to  indicate that  their  business is
  information.  Adding info or  something similar  to your  name doesn't
  simply add to but multiplies your market value.
  
 Undoubtedly,    information   is    critical   to    every    part   of
  life. Nevertheless, some of the attempts to squeeze everything into an
  information  perspective recall  the  work of  the Greek  mythological
  bandit Procrustes. He  stretched travelers who were too  short and cut
  off the legs of those who were  too long until all fitted his bed. And
  we  suspect  that  the  stretching   and  cutting  done  to  meet  the
  requirements  of   the  infobed  distorts  much   that  is  critically
  human.  Can it  really  be useful,  after  all, to  address people  as
  information  processors or to  redefine complex  human issues  such as
  trust as "simply information?"\footnote{Reagle, 1996.}
  
 
\section{6-D Vision}
  
 Overreliance on information leads to  what we think of as "6-D vision."
  Unfortunately, this is  not necessarily twice as good  as the ordinary
  3-D kind.  Indeed, in many cases it is not as good, relying as it does
  on a one-dimensional, infocentric view.
  
 The D in our 6-D notion stands  for the {\it de-} or {\it dis-} in such
  futurist-favored words as
  
  \begin{itemize}
\item {\it demassification}
  
\item {\it decentralization}
  
\item {\it denationalization}
  
\item {\it despacialization}
  
\item {\it disintermediation}
  
\item {\it disaggregation\footnote{Readers of Toffler's (1980) {\it Third Wave} will 
  recognize the first three terms here, particularly the first, 
  {\it demassification,} to which Toffler adds three subtypes: demassification 
  of media, production, and society. Notions of {\it disintermediation} and 
  {\it decentralization} are features, for example, in the work of George 
  Gilder or Kevin Kelly's (1997) writing on the "new economy." There are more 
  "Ds" that could be added, such as Kevin Kelly's {\it displacement} and 
  {\it devolution.}}}
  \end{itemize}
  
 These  are said  to  represent forces  that,  unleashed by  information
  technology, will break society down into its fundamental constituents,
  principally  individuals  and information.  (As  we  scan  the Ds,  it
  sometimes feels  as though the only  things that will  hold up against
  this irresistible  decomposition are the  futurists' increasingly long
  words.)
  
 We  should say  at  once that  none  of these  D-visions is  inherently
  mistaken  or  uninteresting.  Each  provides  a powerful  lens  on  an
  increasingly complicated world. They help expose and explain important
  trends  and pressures  in  society.  Nonetheless,  the  Ds too  easily
  suggest a linear direction  to society-parallel movements from complex
  to  simple,  from group  to  individual,  from  personal knowledge  to
  ubiquitous information, or more generally from composite to unit.
  
 Yet  it does  not feel  that modern  life is  moving in  one direction,
  particularly in the  direction from complex to simple.  To most of us,
  society seems capable of moving  in almost any direction, and often in
  the  direction of chaos  rather than  simplicity. Indeed,  many shifts
  that the 6-Ds reveal are not the first step in an unresisting downward
  spiral from complex to simple.  Rather, they are parts of profound and
  often dramatic shifts in society's dynamic equilibrium, taking society
  from one kind of complex arrangement  to another, as a quick review of
  a few Ds will suggest.
  
 
  \section{Dimensions of the Ds}
  
 Much talk about disaggregation and demassification readily assumes that
  the new economy  will be a place of  ever-smaller firms, light, agile,
  and unencumbered. It was once commonplace, for example, to compare the
  old  Goliath, GM,  against the  new David,  Microsoft.  As Microsoft's
  market  capitalization  passed  GM's,  the  latter  had  some  600,000
  employees and the former barely  25,000. The difference is stark. Not,
  though, stark  enough to step from  here to what  the business writers
  Larry Downes and Chunka Mui call the "Law of Diminishing Firms." After
  all, it's GM that's shrinking. Microsoft continues to grow while other
  high-tech start-ups  compete for the title of  "fastest growing ever."\footnote{Downes and Mui, 1998.}
  
 Downes and  Mui draw on  the theory of  the firm proposed by  the Nobel
  Prize-winning economist  Ronald Coase.  Coase developed the  notion of
  {\it transaction costs.} These are the costs of using the marketplace,
  of  searching,  evaluating, contracting,  and  enforcing.  When it  is
  cheaper  to  do  these  as  an organization  than  as  an  individual,
  organizations will form.  Conversely,  as transaction costs fall, this
  glue dissolves  and firms  and organizations break  apart. Ultimately,
  the  theory suggests, if  transaction costs  become low  enough, there
  will  be  no formal  organizations,  but  only  individuals in  market
  relations.  And,  Downes  and  Mui argue,  information  technology  is
  relentlessly driving down these costs.
  
 Though he produced elegant  economic theory, Coase had strong empirical
  leanings. He developed his theory of transaction costs in the 1930s to
  bridge  the gap between  theoretical accounts  of the  marketplace and
  what he saw in the actual marketplace-particularly when he traveled in
  the  United  States.  There,   business  was  dominated  by  huge  and
  still-growing  firms. These defied  the purity  and simplicity  of the
  theoretical predictions, which  envisaged markets comprising primarily
  individual entrepreneurs\footnote{Coase, 1937. Coase's theory should be seen not so 
  much as an attack on neoclassical individualism as an attempt to save it from 
  itself. We return to transaction cost theory briefly in our discussion of the 
  future of the firm in chapter 6. There we take a "knowledge based," rather 
  than transaction cost, view of the firm.}.
  
 In honor of Coase's empiricism, it's important to look around now. When
  we began  work on this  book, Justice Department lawyers  opened their
  case against  Microsoft, accusing it of  monopolistic practices. David
  now  resembles Goliath.  At  the same  time, other  Justice Department
  lawyers   were    testifying   that   1998   would    be   the   first
  two-trillion-dollar year for mergers. Seven of the ten largest mergers
  in  history had  occurred  in the  first  six months  alone. We  began
  keeping a list of firms involved. These included Amoco, AT\&T, Bankers
  Trust,  BMW,  British Petroleum,  Chrysler,  Citibank, Deutsche  Bank,
  Exxon, Ford, IBM, MCI, Mercedes, Mobil, Travelers, and many more.
  
 Nor were these large firms buying  up minnows. They were buying up each
  other. Ninety years after the  era of trust busting, oil, banking, and
  tobacco, the  initial targets, were  all consolidating again\footnote{Among the targets of early, landmark trust cases 
  were Northern Securities (1911), Standard Oil (1911), and American Tobacco 
  (1911). In November 1998, Philip Morris acquired several brands from the 
  Ligget corporation.}. As
  the {\it Economist}  put it, after Exxon's merger  with Mobil followed
  British Petroleum's  purchase of  Amoco: "Big Oil  is Dead.  Long Live
  Enormous Oil."\footnote{{\it The Economist,} 13 December 1997.}
  
 Whatever else  was apparent,  we soon realized  that whenever  the book
  came out, any  list of ours would be profoundly out  of date. The only
  successful strategy in  such conditions would be to  imitate the great
  comic novelist  of the eighteenth century, Laurence  Sterne, who faced
  with  an  impossible  description  inserted  a  blank  page  into  his
  manuscript and told the readers to take up their own pen and do it for
  themselves. As we  were revising the manuscript, the  two behemoths of
  the   information  age,   AT\&T   and  Microsoft,   began  their   own
  extraordinary mating dance. That we found well beyond the reach of our
  pens.
  
 Undoubtedly, several of the mergers we mentioned may represent the last
  struggles of dinosaurs to  protect their ecological niche before other
  forces destroy  it. Investment and  even retail banking,  for example,
  may have particularly precarious futures.
  
 But  massification is  not  occurring in  dying  "second wave"  sectors
  alone.  Many  mergers have  involved firms based  in the  "third wave"
  information sectors. Here mergers  often involve not so much dinosaurs
  as phoenixes rising from the ashes of old business models. These might
  include  AT\&T's  absorption  of   TCI  and  Time-Warner's  of  Turner
  Broadcasting. They surely do include Internet-driven combinations such
  as MCI's  merger with WorldCom,  IBM's takeover of Lotus,  and AT\&T's
  purchase of  IBM's Global Network. Meanwhile, firms  wholly within the
  new economy, such  as AOL, Microsoft, Amazon, and  eBay, go on regular
  shopping sprees for other companies.
  
 Elsewhere in  the information sector, Sir  John Daniel, vice-chancellor
  of   Britain's  Open   University,   points  to   the   rise  of   the
  "mega-university." Daniel presides over some 160,000 students, but his
  school hardly  qualifies as "mega" in  a field in which  the largest -
  China's  TV  University  System  -  has  580,000  students  in  degree
  programs. According  to Daniel's  figures, two universities  break the
  half-million mark, one  exceeds one-third of a million,  and three are
  approaching  a   quarter  million\footnote{Daniel, 1996, table 3.2. We take up this topic again 
  in chapter 8.}.  These   are  all  "distance"
  universities,  using a  variety of  information technologies  to reach
  their students.  So no simple demassification  here either. Similarly,
  the concentration of  the media in recent years  challenges any simple
  idea of media demassification\footnote{The concentration of media ownership was the subject 
  of a special edition of {\it The Nation} (March 13, 1997). The picture drawn 
  there recalled Frank Norris's famous image of the railroads as an "octopus," 
  but, as with any list we might produce, the {\it Nation's} octopus is already 
  well out of date.}.
  
 It  doesn't  feel  then  as  if  firms  are  shrinking  under  an  iron
  law. Rather, it  feels more as if, as the  economist Paul Krugman puts
  it,  "We've  gone  from  an   economy  where  most  people  worked  in
  manufacturing-in   fairly   large   companies  that   were   producing
  manufactured  goods and  engaged in  things like  transportation-to an
  economy where  most people work  for fairly large  companies producing
  services."\footnote{Paul Krugman, quoted in Kelly, 1998.}
  
 The   resilience  of   the   large  organization   is   not  all   that
  surprising. Given that  information technologies are particularly good
  at  taking advantage  of large  networks, the  information  economy in
  certain  circumstances  actually   favors  the  aggregated,  massified
  firm\footnote{The appearance of the fax provides a conventional 
  example of network effects at work. At first, for most people, it was hardly 
  worth owning a fax machine because so few others did. But with each new buyer, 
  owning a fax became more useful and so more valuable. Each addition to the 
  network meant that everyone had more people to fax to and receive faxes from. 
  By the late 1980s, the network had grown to such a size that owning one became 
  almost a necessity.
  
 The fax spread on the back of nonproprietary standards that allowed many 
  different firms to compete in the fax market, as they still do. But if someone 
  had owned those standards, the results would have been quite different. Here 
  the obvious example is not the fax, but the video recorder and the battle 
  between VHS and Betamax. This battle was in effect a race between the two to 
  establish network effects. In such races, a small lead can produce a "tipping" 
  effect, where whoever gets ahead can quickly end up taking it all. In such 
  conditions, firms will grow, not shrink.}. These are  firms that  can or  have knit  diverse networks
  together,  as AOL  hopes to  do with  its purchase  of Netscape  or as
  Microsoft hopes  to do with  the insertion of Windows  into television
  set-top boxes. Consequently, the small,  agile firm with big ideas and
  little money is less likely to be the viable start-up of legend. (As a
  recent article  in {\it Red Herring}  put it, referring  to the famous
  garage-based  start-ups  of Silicon  Valley,  the  "garage door  slams
  shut.")\footnote{Raik-Allen, 1998.} And  any that  do start  up in  the traditional  way are
  likely to be snatched up by the giants of the industry.
  
 So,  while  stories abound  about  the  new  "niche" markets  exploited
  through the  Internet, the examples  often come not from  niche firms,
  but from  large ones  with well-established networks.  The paradoxical
  phrase "mass customizing" suggests  that fortune favors the latter. It
  is  possible,  for  example,  to  have  jeans  cut  to  your  personal
  dimensions.  But it  is  quite probably  Levi's  that will  do it  for
  you. Here  the strategy  for customized goods  relies on a  large firm
  with  a  large  market  and  a highly  standardized  product.  So  the
  demassification of  production relies on the  massification of markets
  and consumption. The Henry Ford of  the new economy would tell us that
  we can all have jeans made to measure, so long as they are Levi's.
  
  
 Finally, firms are  not merely taking power from  one another. They are
  accumulating power  that once  lay elsewhere. The  political scientist
  Saskia  Sassen traces  the  decline  of the  nation-state  not to  the
  sweeping  effects of  demassification and  disaggregation, but  to the
  rise  of powerful,  concentrated transnational  corporations.  The new
  economic citizen of  the world, in her view, is  not the individual in
  the  global  village  but  the  transnational  corporation,  often  so
  formidable that  it has "power over individual  governments."\footnote{Sassen, 1996, p. 38.} The
  state  and the firm,  then, are  not falling  together along  a single
  trajectory.  At least  in some  areas, one  is rising  at  the other's
  expense.
  
 In sum, as people try to plot the effects of technology, it's important
  to understand that  information technologies represent powerful forces
  at   work    in   society.   These   forces    are   also   remarkably
  complex.  Consequently,  while some  sectors  show disaggregation  and
  demassification,  others show  the opposite.  On the  evidence  of the
  6-Ds, attempts to explain outcomes  in terms of information alone miss
  the way these forces combine and conflict.
  
 So while it  might seem reasonable to propose a  law of increasing, not
  diminishing,  firms, that  too would  be  a mistake.  It would  merely
  replace one linear argument with  another. It's not so much the actual
  direction  that worries  us about  infocentrism  and the  6-Ds as  the
  assumption   of   a   single   direction.  The   landscape   is   more
  complex.  Infocentricity  represents  it  as disarmingly  simple.  The
  direction of organizational change  is especially hard to discern. The
  6-Ds present it as a foregone conclusion.
  
 
\section{More Dimensions}
  
 Similarly, despite talk  of disintermediation and decentralization, the
  forces involved  are less predictable and unidirectional  than a quick
  glance might  suggest\footnote{With the rise of the Internet, many people argue 
  that information can travel straight from its producer to its consumer, 
  without need for any intermediaries. Kelly (1997), for example, envisages 
  music going from musicians to listeners and then leaps to gourmet coffee from 
  producers to drinkers. Undoubtedly disintermediation along these lines is 
  happening; however, there's a good deal of wishful endism here, too. Specific 
  examples always seem to include unpopular professions that people want to see 
  ended, with banking and real estate falling in behind travel agents and car 
  salespeople. One curious example of a job relentlessly pushed off the stage 
  yet refusing to sing its own swan song is that of the humble meter reader. 
  Most recently, Jeremy Rifkin (1995) sang a requiem for this job in 1995. 
  Curiously, so did articles on the effects of computers in 1970 in {\it National 
  Geographic,} and as far back as 1952 in {\it Fortune.}}. First, the  evidence for disintermediation
  is far from clear. Organizations, as we shall see, are not necessarily
  becoming flatter.  And second, where it  does occur, disintermediation
  doesn't necessarily do away with intermediaries.  Often it merely puts
  intermediation into fewer  hands with a larger grasp.  The struggle to
  be  one  of  those few  explains  several  of  the takeovers  that  we
  mentioned above. It also  explains the "browser wars" between Netscape
  and  Microsoft,  the  courtship   of  AT\&T  and  Microsoft,  and  the
  continuing struggle  for dominance between  Internet Service Providers
  (ISPs).  Each   of  these  examples   points  not  to   the  dwindling
  significance but to the continuing importance of mediation on the 'Net
  (as   does  the   new  term   {\it  infomediary,}   another   case  of
  infoprefixation).  Moreover  this  kind of  limited  disintermediation
  often leads to a {\it  centralization} of control. These two Ds, then,
  are often pulling not together, but against one another.
  
 {\bf Not flatter.} Francis Fukuyama  and Abram Shulsky conducted a RAND
  study in  1997 into  the relationship between  disintermediation, flat
  organizations, and centralization on behalf of the army. They began by
  studying the private sector. Here they give little hope for any direct
  link between information technology and flatter organizations. Indeed,
  like us, they believe  that the conventional argument that information
  technology (IT)  will lead to flatter organizations  is an infocentric
  one
  
 
\citacao{
  [that] focuses on a single, if very important, function of 
    middle management: the aggregation, filtering, and transmission of 
    information. It is of course precisely with respect to this function that 
    the advances in IT suggest that flattening is desirable, since IT 
    facilitates the automation of much of this work. On the other hand, middle 
    management serves other functions as well\footnote{Fukuyama and Shulsky, 1997, p. 63.}.}{}
  
 
  
 If    managers    are    primarily   information    processors,    then
  information-processing equipment might replace them, and organizations
  will be  flatter. If, on the  other hand, there is  more to management
  than   information   processing,   then   linear   predictions   about
  disintermediation within firms are too simple.
  
 Empirical evidence suggests such predictions are indeed oversimplified.
  Despite  the talk  of increasingly  flatter and  leaner organizations,
  Paul  Attewell, a workplace  sociologist, argues  that "administrative
  overhead,  far from  being  curtailed by  the  introduction of  office
  automation  and  subsequent  information technologies,  has  increased
  steadily  across a broad  range of  industries."\footnote{Attewell, 1994, p. 36.}  Attewell's data
  from  the U.S.  Bureau of  Labor Statistics  show that  the  growth of
  nonproduction employees in manufacturing  and the growth of managerial
  employment  as  a  percentage  of  the nation's  workforce  has  risen
  steadily as the workplace has been infomated.
  
 {\bf Nor  more egalitarian.}  Fukuyama and Shulsky  also argue  that in
  instances where  information technology has  led to disintermediation,
  this  has  not necessarily  produced  decentralization. "Despite  talk
  about  modern computer  technology  being necessarily  democratizing,"
  they argue, "a number of important productivity-enhancing applications
  of information  technology over the  past decade or two  have involved
  highly centralized data systems  that are successful because all their
  parts conform  to a single  architecture dictated from the  top."\footnote{Fukyama and Shulsky, 1997, p. 11.}
  Among the successful  examples they give are Wal-Mart  and FedEx, both
  of which have famously centralized decision making.
  
 These  two are  merely  recent  examples of  a  clear historical  trend
  whereby information technology centralizes authority. Harold Innis, an
  early communications  theorist, noted how  the international telegraph
  and  telephone  lines  linking  European capitals  to  their  overseas
  colonies    radically   reduced    the   independence    of   overseas
  administrators. Previously, messages took  so long to travel that most
  decisions had to be made locally. With rapid communication, they could
  be  centralized. Similarly, histories  of transnational  firms suggest
  that  with the appearance  of the  telegraph, overseas  partners, once
  both financially and executively  autonomous, were quickly absorbed by
  the "home" office.\footnote{Innis, 1991. For a case study of previously 
  decentralized business organizations that were later centralized, see Duguid 
  and Silva Lopes, 1999.}
  
 Less  innocent  than  infoenthusiasts,  commanders  in  the  U.S.  Navy
  understood the potential of  information technology to disempower when
  they resisted the introduction  of Marconi's ship-to-shore radio\footnote{Fidler, 1997.}.
  They realized that,  once orders could be sent  to them on-board ship,
  they  would  lose  their  independence of  action.  (Their  resistance
  recalls a story of the famous British admiral Lord Nelson, who "turned
  a blind  eye" to his  telescope at the  Battle of Copenhagen  to avoid
  seeing his commander's signal to disengage\footnote{The same long arm of technology has led to the 
  direct intervention of politics into battlefield planning; for example, though 
  President Bush said he would leave decisions in the Gulf War to local 
  commanders, the White House began to exercise veto power and control over the 
  conduct of the war, after a smart bomb went astray and drew bad press.}.)

  
 In   contemplating  assumptions  about   the  decentralizing   role  of
  information  technology,  Shoshona  Zuboff,  a  professor  at  Harvard
  Business School,  confessed to becoming  much more pessimistic  in the
  decade  since  she  wrote  her  pathbreaking  book  on  the  infomated
  workplace, {\it  In the  Age of the  Smart Machine:} "The  paradise of
  shared  knowledge and  a  more egalitarian  working environment,"  she
  notes, "just  isn't happening.  Knowledge isn't really  shared because
  management doesn't want to share authority and power."\footnote{Shoshona Zuboff, quoted in Lohr, 1996.}
  
 Of  course this  need not  be  the outcome.  As Zuboff  argues, it's  a
  problem  of management,  not technology\footnote{Meanwhile, Royal Dutch/Shell, one of the most well 
  known and widely applauded decentralizers of the past decade, has announced 
  that it will recentralize its "treasury." Decentralization had been too costly 
  and inefficient. More generally, the {\it Economist} magazine's "Intelligence 
  Unit" has noted a trend toward "shared services" in large corporations - and 
  what they describe reads very much like recentralization.}.  Smaller organizations,
  less management, greater individual freedom, less centralization, more
  autonomy,  better organization,  and similar  desirable goals  - these
  arguments suggest  - will not emerge  spontaneously from information's
  abundance and the relentless power of the 6-Ds. Rather, that abundance
  is presenting us with new and complex problems that another few cycles
  of Moore's Law  or "a few strokes of the  keyboard" will not magically
  overcome\footnote{Negroponte (1995) suggests that "a few strokes of 
  the keyboard" will close the generation gap (p. 203).}. The  tight  focus on  information,  with the  implicit
  assumption that if we look after information everything else will fall
  into place, is ultimately a sort of social and moral blindness.
  
 
\section{The Myth of Information}
  
 
  
 6-D vision, while  giving a clear and compelling  view of the influence
  of the 'Net and its effects on everything from the firm to the nation,
  achieves its clarity by oversimplifying  the forces at work. First, it
  isolates  information  and  the  informational  aspects  of  life  and
  discounts all  else. This makes  it blind to  other forces at  work in
  society. Second,  as our colleague  Geoffrey Nunberg has  argued, such
  predictions  tend  to take  the  most rapid  point  of  change and  to
  extrapolate from there into  the future, without noticing other forces
  that may be regrouping\footnote{Nunberg, 1996. Coffman and Odlyzko (1998) show how 
  many projections about the current and future growth of the 'Net extrapolate 
  from a particularly rapid point in its development, failing to note that both 
  before and after this point, the growth curve, though impressive, was far less 
  steep.}.
  
 This  sort of reductive  focus is  a common  feature of  futurology. It
  accounts,  for example,  for all  those confident  predictions  of the
  1950s that by the turn of  the century local and even domestic nuclear
  power  stations  would  provide  all  the  electricity  needed  at  no
  cost. Not only did such predictions overlook some of the technological
  problems ahead, they also overlooked the social forces that confronted
  nuclear  power with  the rise  of environmentalism.  (Fifties futurism
  also managed to  miss the significance of feminism,  civil rights, and
  student  protest while continually  pointing to  the imminence  of the
  videophone and the jet pack.)
  
 We  began  this  chapter with  a  brief  look  back to  the  industrial
  revolution.   In   many  ways   the  train  epitomized   that  earlier
  revolution. Its development was an extraordinary phenomenon, spreading
  from a 12-mile  line in the 1830s to a network  of nearly 25,000 miles
  in  little  more  than  a   decade\footnote{Hobsbawm, 1977, pp. 61-62. The spread of the 
  telephone was more dramatic, growing from 14 miles in 1845 in the United 
  States to 670,000 in 1886, but the infrastructure of the telephone was far 
  easier to build than railway lines. The spread of the radio was more 
  impressive yet.}.  The  railway  captured  the
  imagination  not  only  of  Britain,   where  it  began,  but  of  the
  world.  Every society  that  could  afford a  railway,  and some  that
  couldn't,  quickly built one.  Standards were  developed to  allow for
  interconnections.  Information  brokers   emerged  to  deal  with  the
  multiple   systems  involved\footnote{See Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, 1996.}.   The  train   also  sparked   an
  extraordinarily  speculative bubble,  with experienced  and first-time
  investors putting  millions of pounds and dollars  into companies with
  literally   no  track   record,  no   income,  and   little   sign  of
  profitability.   Unsurprisingly, in popular  imagination, both  at the
  time and since,  the train has presented itself as  a driving force of
  social and economic revolution.
  
 Economic  and social  historians have  long argued,  however,  that the
  story of  the industrial revolution cannot  be told by  looking at the
  train alone.  Historians might as well whistle for all the effect they
  have had. The myth of the train is far more powerful.
  
 Today,  it's  the  myth  of  information that  is  overpowering  richer
  explanations.  To say  this is  not  to belittle  information and  its
  technologies.    These   are   making   critical   and   unprecedented
  contributions to the changes society  is experiencing. But it is clear
  that the  causes of those  changes include much more  than information
  itself. So the  myth significantly blinds society to  the character of
  and forces behind those changes.
  
 In particular, the  myth tends to wage a  continual war against aspects
  of society that play a critical  role in shaping not only society, but
  information itself, making information  useful and giving it value and
  meaning. It's  hard to see what  there is other  than information when
  identity is reduced  to "life on the screen,"  community thought of as
  the    users   of   eBay.com,    organization   envisaged    only   as
  self-organization, and institutions merely demonized as "second wave."
  
 We  do  not  believe  that  society is  relentlessly  demassifying  and
  disaggregating. Though we admit it  would be much easier to understand
  if it were.  The social forces that resist  these decompositions, like
  them  or  not,  are  both  robust and  resourceful.  They  shaped  the
  development of the railroad, determining where it ran, how it ran, and
  who  ran  it. And  they  will continue  to  shape  the development  of
  information networks. As  we hope to show in the  course of this book,
  to participate  in that shaping and  not merely to  be shaped requires
  understanding  such  social organization,  not  just  counting on  (or
  counting up) information\footnote{Wellman (1988) provides one of the few worthwhile 
  studies of the effects of information technologies on social communities and 
  networks.}.
  






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  Force and the Dawn of the Post-market Era.} New York: Putnam.
  
 Saskia Sassen, 1996. {\it Losing Control: Sovereignty in an Age of 
  Globalization.} New York: Columbia University Press.
  
 Alvin Toffler, 1980. {\it The Third Wave.} New York: William Morrow.
  
 Barry Wellman, 1988. "The Community Question Reevaluated," In: Michael 
  Peter Smith (editor). {\it Power, Community, and the City.} New Brunswick, 
  N.J.: Transaction Books, pp. 81-107.
  
\chapter{Agents and Angels}
  
\begin{quote}
  
 
  {\it I'm sorry to hear that you are depressed.}\\It's true, I 
    am unhappy.
    
 
    
 {\it Do you think coming here will help you not to be unhappy?}\\I 
    need some help, that much seems certain.
    
 {\it What would it mean to you if you got some help?}\\Perhaps I could 
    learn to get along with my mother.
    
 {\it Tell me more about your family.}
  
\end{quote}
  
 
  
 In this exchange, the therapist was Eliza, a legendary computer program
  written  in 1966  by Joseph  Weizenbaum of  MIT. The  identity  of the
  patient is fortunately unknown.  According to folklore, Eliza software
  persuaded many  people to pour  out their souls  in the belief  that a
  person, not a software program, was responding.
  
 The  software behind  Eliza  has since  developed  in many  directions,
  including,  for  example, customer  service.  (This  is  not all  that
  surprising.  Irate customers often  resemble the deranged and customer
  service  agents,  automatons.) On  the  Web  site  of Neuromedia,  for
  example, you can  meet the prototype, Shallow Red,  who will greet you
  as follows:
  
 
  \begin{quote}

  {\it Hello. I'm Shallow Red. I'm a Virtual Representative made 
    with NeuroStudioTM. What is your name?}\\John
    
 
    
 {\it Are you ready to ask some questions, John?}\\Yes
    
 {\it What would you like to know about Neuromedia?}\\What does 
    Neuromedia do?
    
 {\it Neuromedia makes authoring and serving tools to assist people in the 
    development and deployment of VSRs.}
    
  \end{quote}
  
 
  
 Eliza and  Shallow Red  are both examples  of "chatterbots."  These are
  software  programs  that  will  simulate  a human  response  to  typed
  questions.  There's an old joke  (old, that is, by Internet standards)
  with the  tag line "on the  Internet, nobody knows you're  a dog." And
  sometimes it can be quite hard to tell if what you are dealing with is
  a chatterbot. There's one,  apparently, that plays Jeopardy with great
  skill\footnote{Distinguishing a computer from a human is the essence 
  of the famous Turing test, developed by mathematician Alan Turing (1963). He 
  argued that if you couldn't tell the difference then you could say the machine 
  was intelligent. Shallow Red is not quite there yet. Indeed, the continuation 
  of the exchange suggests that Shallow Red is still rather shallow (though 
  pleasantly honest):
  
 
  What are VSRs?\\The botmaster has not provided me with a 
    definition of "VSRs." Thank you for asking. The botmaster shall provide me 
    with an appropriate definition.
  
 
  
 Shallow Red could be found at http://www.neurostudio.com/, retrieved 
  21 October 1998. It has since been upgraded to Red, though it is not yet quite 
  as deep as that promotion might suggest.}.
  
 Chatterbots,  in  their  turn,  are instances  of  "autonomous  agents"
  (familiarly known as "bots"). These agents, it seems likely, will play
  an increasingly  critical role in the organization,  in particular the
  self-organization,  of social  life. First,  they help  deal  with the
  cascades of information that  many people find so threatening. Second,
  they promise to  handle many intricate human tasks.  If they can, they
  promise to sweep away many conventional organizations and institutions
  previously involved in  those tasks. So bots offer  an interesting way
  to evaluate some of the endisms threatened by information technology.
  
 These  agents are  not  just the  dream  of eager  futurists. Many  are
  already hard  at work. Without them  the Internet, which  has grown so
  dramatically   in   the   past    few   years,   would   by   now   be
  unmanageable. Diligent agents that  endlessly catalogue the World Wide
  Web  for such  familiar services  as Yahoo!,  Lycos, Excite,  and Alta
  Vista have helped  to manage it. As a result, you  can find needles of
  information in the  Web's vast haystack and order in  the midst of its
  apparent chaos. Indeed, it  was the search-and-catalogue capability of
  their agents that principally transformed these sites from mere search
  engines  into lucrative  portals-points  where people  plan and  begin
  their  voyages  on  the 'Net  (and  so  points  of great  interest  to
  advertisers).
  
 Agent software also runs on the sites of major Internet retailers. When
  a regular shopper arrives, for example, at the sites of the bookseller
  Amazon.com or the CD seller  CDNow, a personalized list of suggestions
  greets  him  or  her.  Agents  track the  customer's  preferences  and
  purchases  and,  by  "collaborative  filtering," compile  these  lists
  dynamically.  The suggestions  reflect purchases  made by  others with
  apparently  similar tracks  (and so,  presumably, tastes)\footnote{The lists you get if you shop for other people or buy 
  gifts on-line make it clear that tastes and tracks are different things.}.  Agents
  will trim the  virtual "shop window" that a  customer sees on arriving
  at the retailer's  site to reflect his or her  interest. In some cases
  they  may also  offer  personalized discounts  tailored to  particular
  buying patterns and not available to other shoppers.
  
 Agents   don't  only   work   for  portals,   retailers,  and   similar
  organizations.   Increasingly  people have  agents  at their  personal
  disposal,  even on  their desktop.  Macintosh computers,  for example,
  come with "Sherlock," a  customizable agent that will orchestrate many
  of the  Web's different search engines  into a collective  search on a
  user's behalf.  (Search engines  don't catalogue the  Web in  the same
  way, and  none catalogues  more than a  fraction, so  orchestration is
  more powerful  than solo performance.)  Web users also have  access to
  shopping agents or "shopbots" that  on request will roam the Web sites
  of different vendors, comparing prices.
  
 There  are   many  plans  for   agents  to  perform  other   tasks  and
  responsibilities  on  behalf of  individuals.  Already they  undertake
  highly complex institutional financial trading, so it isn't surprising
  that developers  envisage them trading for  individuals. Already, too,
  NASA's infomatics division has  a "smart T-shirt," remotely connecting
  its  wearer's body  to large  central computers  that can  track vital
  signs   and   provide  medical   advice   or   summon  assistance   as
  necessary. This work, done for the military, is expected to migrate to
  civilian use\footnote{The study, done at Yale, was reported on National 
  Public Radio's {\it All Things Considered,} 18 November 1998.}.
  
 These examples seem part of  a general trend leading from institutional
  agents to individual, personalized ones. As one book puts it, over the
  next few years, bots will be  ever "more tightly woven into the fabric
  of  our daily lives."\footnote{Leonard, 1997, p. 186.} By  2005, a  study offering  more precision
  predicts, "at least 25 percent of the then-current PC/workstation user
  base will allow their personal agents to anticipate their needs."\footnote{Hoggdon, 1997, p. 15.}
  
 
  \section{The Road Ahead}
  
 
  
 There's  undoubtedly a  great deal  of reasonable  forecasting  in such
  predictions. There's a good deal of technological evangelism, too\footnote{Though less so, perhaps, than with the telegraph, 
  which the president of the Magnetic Telegraph Co., W. M. Swain, suggested 
  might be the fulfillment of scriptural prophecy.}.
  Indeed, in the  hands of some futurists, agents  appear more as angels
  offering   salvation  for   encumbered  humanity   than   as  software
  programs. They  will hover over our virtual  shoulders, monitoring our
  good  deeds  and correcting  our  failings.  They  will have  all  the
  advantages of  their ethereal, wholly  rational character to  see past
  our  earthly foibles and  overcome our  bounded rationality.  But they
  will  also be  capable of  entering into  the material  side  of life,
  mowing lawns, stocking the refrigerator, and driving the car.
  
 The evangelistic view, however,  may overlook some significant problems
  on the road ahead. And  in overlooking those problems, it may actually
  miss  ways  in  which  agents  can and  will  be  practically  useful,
  preferring  instead  to   trumpet  ideal  but  ultimately  impractical
  uses. In considering  agents in this chapter, then, our  aim is not to
  dismiss them.  We are great  admirers. But we  seek to ground  them in
  social life rather than "information space."
  
 The problems bots face, however, may be hard to see. Agents are victims
  of the sort of procrustean redefinition we mentioned in chapter 1. The
  personal  names -  Sherlock, Jeeves,  Bob, or  Red -  though  they are
  surely harmless enough on their own, hint that the gap between digital
  and  human is narrow  and narrowing.  Using human  job titles  such as
  "personal assistant"  or "agent" for digital  technologies closes this
  gap a little further, suggesting that these jobs might soon be open to
  real  or virtual applicants  alike. Other  terms, "digital  broker" or
  "electronic surrogate," also elide the world of software and the world
  of  humans, suggesting  the possibility  of  having the  best of  both
  worlds.  And many  accounts  simply endow  digital  agents with  human
  capacities.   They  talk of  bots'  "decision-making powers,"  "social
  abilities,"  "learning  capacities," and  "autonomy."\footnote{These quotations come from IBM's research into 
  intelligent agents, reported on the 'Net at: http://www.networking.ibm.com/iag/iagwp1.html, 
  retrieved 16 November 1998. IBM has since abandoned this work and taken down 
  the site. (See http://www.networking.ibm.com/iag/iaghome.html, 
  retrieved 21 July 1999.)} Bill  Gates
  confidently predicts that bots will soon develop personality\footnote{Gates, 1995, p. 83.}.
  
 Redefinition  comes  from  the  other  direction, too.  That  is,  some
  accounts  don't so much  make bots  sound like  humans as  make humans
  sound like  bots. One definition puts  both in a broad  class of "goal
  pursuing agents, examples [of which] are to be found among humans (you
  and  I),  other animals,  autonomous  mobile  robots, artificial  life
  creatures,  and software agents."\footnote{See Franklin, [1995]; for a taxonomy of agents, see 
  Franklin and Graessner, 1996.} This  kind of  redefinition not
  only makes humans seem like bots, but makes human activity - learning,
  developing taste, wanting,  choosing, pursuing, brokering, negotiating
  - appear  principally  as different  kinds  of individual  information
  processing  done  equally  by  software  goal-pursuing  agents  or  by
  "wetware."\footnote{People familiar with the old programs of artificial 
  intelligence (AI) will recognize some of these redefinitions. For classic AI, 
  it eventually became apparent that such activities could not be reduced to 
  notions of mental representation and thus made computationally tractable. The 
  real strength of AI came from recognizing that computers were not like 
  people.}
  
 Faced with such redefinitions, it becomes important to pay attention to
  ways  that  human   learning,  developing  taste,  wanting,  choosing,
  pursuing,  brokering,  and negotiating  are  distinct. In  particular,
  these  human  practices  reflect  social  and  not  simply  individual
  activities.  Redefinition,  however, makes  it  easy  to overlook  the
  significant  challenges that  this social  character presents.  As the
  history of  artificial intelligence  shows, computer science  has long
  found social issues  particularly hard to deal with  (as, indeed, have
  social scientists). Social issues  are remarkably hard. "It isn't that
  these  issues aren't  interesting,"  Robert Wilensky,  a professor  of
  computer  science of the  University of  California, Berkeley,  put it
  succinctly,   "it's   just  that   these   problems,   like  so   many
  social/psychological issues,  are {\it so}  hard that one had  to hope
  that they weren't on the critical path."\footnote{Pretext Forum, 1997.}
  
  
 But with the  sort of agenda for agents that  we have summarized above,
  technologists and designers have now  put these issues directly on the
  critical path. So  whether as designers, producers, or  users, we will
  all have to confront them, asking  to what extent agents should or can
  be woven into the fabric of  human life in all its complexities. These
  are issues that everyone must face.
  
 Furthermore, they are issues that,  from a technological point of view,
  cannot simply be  read off from past successes  with agents, admirable
  though  these successes are.  If social  and psychological  issues lie
  ahead  (and  they  surely  do  when dealing  with  taste,  style,  and
  judgment),  and if  Wilensky's  insight that  such  matters have  been
  avoided in  the past is  right, then the  road ahead is not  likely to
  continue  directly from  the one  behind.  We cannot  cry "full  speed
  ahead" and trust that the outcome  will be desirable. A tight focus on
  information  and  behaviorist  aspects  of individuals  has  propelled
  development successfully to its current position. But it will probably
  not suffice  to take  us to  the less restricted  future laid  out for
  bots. To understand  where to go next, it's time  to open the aperture
  and look around.  In what follows,  we try to raise some of the social
  and  psychological issues that,  for good  reasons, have  usually been
  left out of discussions, both of the past and of the future.
  
 
  \section{Ranks of Agents}
  
 
  
 To understand the strengths and limits of agents, let us look primarily
  at personal assistants and some  of the tasks planned for them. First,
  we look at  the sort of information brokering  done by the Macintosh's
  Sherlock. We then  consider three categories of what  might be thought
  of as market brokering.  Here  Pattie Maes (a professor at MIT's Media
  Lab and one of the most insightful designers of collaborative filters)
  and  two colleagues distinguish  three stages  in the  overall "buying
  process" that bots can handle. They are "product brokering," "merchant
  brokering," and "negotiation."\footnote{Maes, Guttman, and Moukas, 1999. See also Jonkheer, 
  1999.}
  
\subsection{Information Brokering}
  
 Information brokering  puts agents in  their own backyard,  weeding and
  selecting from among the very stuff that is central to their existence
  - information.  As  we said,  there  are  many successful  information
  brokers currently  in use, not  only combing the  World Wide Web  as a
  whole  but also, for  example, gathering  market information  from the
  major exchanges, collecting  weather information from diverse sources,
  indexing  online newspapers, updating  citation links  between on-line
  journals,  and gathering,  "mining," and  processing  information from
  multiple databases. From here, it's easy to assume that these sorts of
  agents  might   make  those  classical  providers   and  selectors  of
  information  - newspapers, publishers,  libraries, and  universities -
  redundant.   Another   handful   of   institutions  appears   set   to
  disappear\footnote{It has been suggested, for example, that if bots can 
  match learners' needs with teachers' capabilities, then the distance 
  university will be no more than a software program with an income stream 
  (Chellappa, Barua, and Whinston, 1997). See chapter 7 for a further discussion 
  of this point.}.
  
 To explore  the strengths of information-brokering  bots, however, it's
  important also to recognize their limitations. We sent Sherlock out on
  a  relatively  simple search,  and  to keep  it  well  within its  own
  interests,  we asked  it  to search  for  {\it knobot.}  Orchestrating
  half-a-dozen major  search engines, Sherlock very  quickly returned 51
  "hits." That is, it pointed to  51 documents in the vast cornucopia of
  the Web containing  the word {\it knobot} -  an apparently rich return
  in such  a short time.  But an  hour or so  of follow up  exposed some
  limitations.
  
  \begin{itemize}
\item  7 were simple repeats (different search engines turned up the 
    same site and Sherlock failed to filter them out).
    
 
    
\item 3 more were simple mirrors. Here, a site on one server carries the direct 
    image of a site on another, so although the addresses were different, the 
    document containing knobot was exactly the same.
    
\item 11 pointed directly or indirectly to a single document apparently held at 
    an "ftp" site of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (NRI), a 
    high-powered research center in Reston, Virginia. NRI computers, however, 
    refused to acknowledge the existence of this document.
    
\item 2 pointed indirectly to a document at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) via 
    the word Knobot (TM). TM (trademark) suggested that the JSC has some 
    proprietary interest in the term and so its site might be particularly 
    rewarding. Alas, the link to the JSC was dead, and a search using the JSC's 
    own knobot returned the answer "Your search for knobot matched 0 of 418337 
    documents."
    
\item 2 others led to documents that did not contain the word {\it knobot.} 
    Here the document itself had probably changed, but not the index.
    
\item 14 led to a single document maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium. 
    Unfortunately, the word {\it knobot} seemed more or less irrelevant to the 
    document.
    
\item 2 led us to the Music Library at Indiana University, which curiously was 
    peripherally involved in some rather overblown claims about the digital 
    library and the Internet\footnote{For more on this see chapter 8.}.
    The documents there, alas, only pointed us on to the World Wide Web 
    Consortium again, but this time to a document apparently removed.
    
\item 2 pointed to papers using the word {\it knobot} in passing.
    
\item 4 led to glossaries defining the word {\it knobot} to help people read 
    documents using the word {\it knobot.}
    
\item 4 led to two documents at Stanford University, two chapters in a report 
    outlining how agents could make searches of the Web and digital libraries 
    more usable\footnote{None, unfortunately, took us to the alternative and 
  more usual spelling, {\it knowbot.}}.
  \end{itemize}
  
 
  
 We  cannot read too  much significance  into this  outcome of  a single
  search.   Sherlock is a  relatively crude  engine and  our single-word
  search, with  no refinements, was  itself yet more crude.  Our results
  primarily serve to  remind us that the Web is  a vast, disorderly, and
  very fast-changing information  repository with enormous quantities of
  overlapping and duplicate information  and that all its catalogues are
  incomplete  and out  of date.  That in  itself, however,  is  a useful
  lesson when we consider  whether the Web, self-organized but patrolled
  by bots, might be an alternative to libraries. Automatic organization,
  like automatic search, has its perils.
  
 More significantly, perhaps,  Sherlock's objective search, conducted on
  relatively friendly  territory, hints  at difficulties that  might lie
  ahead in sending  out a Sherlock-like surrogate with  requests to "get
  me a knobot," let alone to get the "best," the "most interesting," the
  "most useful,"  or the "most reliable"  knobot. This brings  us to the
  marketplace kinds of brokering discussed by Maes and her colleagues.
  
\subsection{Product Brokering}
  
 Product  brokering,  the first  in  their  basket  of shopping  agents,
  involves agents  that alert people  to the availability  of particular
  items  that, given  a  person's  previous track  record,  might be  of
  interest. It's  the sort of brokering  done by the bots  at Amazon and
  CDNow.  Like  Ian Banks?  Well,  there's  a  new William  Gibson  book
  available.  Listen to  the  MJQ? Well,  there's  a new  issue of  John
  Lewis. eBay, the  on-line auction offers agents to  alert users when a
  particular type of  item comes up for sale. This  kind of brokering is
  enormously useful.  But because it is  so useful, all  sorts of people
  are interested in it, both  as producers and consumers. When interests
  conflict,  they can  lead  to  major problems  for  brokers and  their
  users\footnote{In all, visions of automated brokering often 
  trivialize the complexities of a broker's work.}.
  
 The  flap  over  Amazon's  endorsements  indicated  the  potential  for
  difficulties.   The   Amazon   site   offers,  among   other   things,
  recommendations  and endorsements  for  books it  stocks.  In this  it
  recalls conventional book (or  wine) stores, where staff often provide
  personal  recommendations, and customers  come to  rely on  them. Such
  recommendations thus have something of a "mom and pop" or corner-store
  charm  to them  and can  draw people  who might  otherwise  resist the
  impersonal character of the on-line retailer. But when it was revealed
  that  publishers  paid  Amazon   for  some  endorsements,  that  charm
  dissipated. Amazon was  quick to insist that it  would always indicate
  which endorsements were paid, but the fall was irreversible. Innocence
  was  lost, and faith  in good  agents on  "our" side  had to  face the
  specter of bad  agents purporting to represent "our"  interests but in
  fact secretly representing someone else's.
  
 The Amazon  problem recalls the famous case  against American Airlines'
  SAABRE system. Ostensibly this system would find all available flights
  from a  computer database.  In fact, it  was subtly weighted  to favor
  American's  flights. Both  examples raise  questions  of technological
  transparency. We  might all be  able to use  agents, but how  many are
  able  to understand  their  biases among  the  complex mathematics  of
  dynamic  preference matching? Is  your agent,  you must  ask, neutral,
  biased,  or merely  weighted? And  can  you tell  the difference?  Who
  really controls your  agent, you, the designer, or  the person feeding
  it  information? How  can you  be sure  that your  agent has  not been
  "turned," being now  a double agent? As with the  SAABRE case, will we
  all need to rely on  some supervening agencies, rather than agents, to
  ensure  fair play?   An infocentric  approach does  not  resolve these
  questions.
  
\subsection{Merchant Brokering}
  
 Maes and her colleagues'  second category, merchant brokering, includes
  agents that can  roam the 'Net comparing prices and  so report back on
  "best buy" options. Again, these sorts  of bots are already in use and
  are helpful  resources, providing the  sort of information  that makes
  markets  more  efficient, removing  layers  of  intermediation in  the
  process.
  
 But again, too, they present some problems for the idea of the Web that
  they are  assumed to promote.  The buzz is all  about personalization,
  product diversity, the  demassification of production and consumption,
  and  niche  markets.   Merchant  brokering,  however,  heavily  favors
  standardization.
  
 Consider, for example, that despite all the rhetoric about the Internet
  "killing" the book and tailoring information, the first great flagship
  of Internet enterprise was a  book retailer. There is no real surprise
  here.  Books   are  the  oldest  mass-produced   commodity.  They  are
  wonderfully standardized, with each copy of a particular edition being
  almost   identical  to   its  fellows.    And   markets,  particularly
  long-distance  markets,  work  best  with  standardized  measures  and
  standardized products\footnote{The Polish economic historian, Witold Kula (1986) 
  tells the fascinating story of the standardization of measurements and how 
  important that was to international trade. Another historian, Theodore Porter 
  (1994), has shown how standardized grades enabled the Chicago Corn Exchange to 
  broker deals between farmers in the old West and merchants around the 
  world.}.  The integration of the European market,
  for example, has driven  nonstandard varieties of fruit and vegetables
  out of  the market  altogether, while wine  regions that  once blended
  seventy varietals now find themselves  with five. So the first concern
  about merchant  brokering is whether it  may lead to  less choice, not
  more as is often promised.
  
  
 A second problem  is that, as part of the  process of price competition
  and  standardization, subjective  issues such  as quality  and service
  disappear. Both  service and quality,  the economists Brad  DeLong and
  Michael Froomkin have argued, tend to get squeezed out of markets when
  low price becomes the decisive  factor\footnote{De Long and Froomkin, 1999.}.  From the decisive factor,
  low price soon  becomes the only factor. Network  effects will tend to
  marginalize merchants who try to resist. With bots, which are not well
  suited to weigh  subjective issues such as quality  and service, these
  will probably disappear much more quickly.
  
 In fact,  though, quality and  service don't simply disappear  in these
  conditions.  They can become  highly problematic  "externalities," not
  subject to the sales and purchase contract, but imposing heavy burdens
  after the fact.  Low-bid environments have frequently shown this. Many
  government agencies award contracts  to the lowest bidder to eliminate
  costly  corruption. Instead they  get costly  headaches from  inept or
  deceptive   bidding,  poor   service,   cost  overruns,   supplemental
  negotiations,   "change   orders,"   out-of-their-depth  firms   going
  bankrupt, and  complicated litigation-all of which  must ultimately be
  paid for. Led  by Rhode Island and Washington,  several states are now
  exploring alternative, more reliable  indicators than the lowest price
  to choose suppliers\footnote{Maynard, 1998; Markus, 1997.}. 
  
 And as with product brokering, the question of good and bad agents also
  haunts merchant  brokering. This time the  user must ask  not "Is this
  recommendation really what I wanted?" but "Is the price quoted in fact
  the lowest  price available?" Amazon  again became involved in  such a
  question  when  it stepped  from  the  market  of highly  standardized
  commodities,  new   books,  to  the  far  less   standardized  one  of
  out-of-print books. These are  priced from the subjective influence of
  such  things  as  provenance  (who  owned  the  book  before),  author
  signatures, wear and tear, scarcity,  and the like, so prices can vary
  significantly. Amazon  offers a bot  to search for  out-of-print books
  for  customers  with  the   promise  that  this  would  recommend  the
  lowest-priced book.  But people who used the service have claimed that
  it  would  often recommend  a  copy that  was  not  the lowest  priced
  available.
  
 Again the questions  arise, "Is this an inept or  a corrupt agent?" and
  perhaps more important  "Can you tell the difference?"  The 'Net, some
  economists believe,  will become home to perfect  information. It will
  be harder to make it a place of perfect (and trustworthy) informers.
  
\subsection{Negotiating}
  
 These problems suggest that agent brokering is more problematic than it
  may first appear. The difficulty  of agent negotiating is already well
  known.  Despite the way many  pundits talk of their presence just over
  the  horizon, true negotiating  bots do  not yet  exist. Maes  and her
  colleagues   are  more  circumspect   about  their   development.  And
  experimental results show serious  problems. Nonetheless, it's easy to
  find confident  talk about the speedy appearance  of "Situations where
  your software agent  meets my agent and they  negotiate for prices and
  conditions."\footnote{These quotations come from the IBM intelligent agent 
  research (see note 7).}
  
 Difficulties with bots arise  because human negotiating is an intricate
  process that tends to keep an  eye on externalities such as the social
  fabric as well  as on the immediate goal.  This social fabric embraces
  such things  as social capital  and trustworthiness, things  that make
  social relations, including  market relations, possible. The confident
  predictions about markets of negotiating bots, however, tend to assume
  that negotiating is  little more than a matter  of matching supply and
  demand.
  
 The first thing to notice is  that people negotiate all the time. These
  negotiations,  however,  are only  occasionally  over price.  Usually,
  humans negotiate behavior.  They continually accommodate themselves to
  one  another, and  in  the  process construct  and  adjust the  social
  fabric. In negotiating this way, people are barely conscious that they
  are negotiating  at all. Indeed, when negotiations  surface and people
  do  become  aware  of  them,  it  is  usually  a  sign  that  implicit
  negotiation has  broken down  or that  there is a  tear in  the social
  fabric.
  
  
 Consider, for example, the way people negotiate with one another in the
  flow of  collective conversation. Conversations  demand individual and
  collective decisions over who will  speak, when, and for how long. But
  in  informal  conversation  the  negotiations involved  in  such  turn
  taking, though rapid and efficient,  are all but invisible. To claim a
  turn, people will merely shift their gaze, subtly alter body position,
  or wait  for a  break to  interject. Others will  turn from  or toward
  them, inviting them in or leaving them out. Speakers will hand off the
  conversation with a  look, rising intonation, or a  direct question to
  another person. Or  they may attempt to keep hands  on by avoiding eye
  contact, speaking rapidly, rejecting counteroffers, or pausing only at
  words like {\it and} or {\it  so.} (One of the reasons that conference
  calls can  be so awkward is that  they remove many of  these cues used
  for effective negotiation.)
  
 Or  consider a  speechless negotiating  practice: the  way people  on a
  crowded street  negotiate a passage,  pulling to one side  or another,
  standing  back,  hurrying  forward,  dropping into  single  file  then
  falling back  to two abreast, and so  forth. All of this  is done with
  rarely a word  among people who have never seen  each other before and
  will never  see each  other again. Such  negotiation does not  rely on
  simple rules like "keep left" or "keep right."  Rather it is a dynamic
  process.  It too  only becomes  noticeable  when it  fails, when,  for
  example, both pull in the  same direction, stepping toward the street,
  then  toward the wall,  then back  again, each  time finding  the same
  person  in their  way.  (Such accidental  deadlocks  have been  nicely
  called {\it faux pas de deux.})\footnote{Of course, this sort of breakdown is not always 
  accidental. The opening of {\it Romeo and Juliet} reminds us that rivals can 
  deliberately refuse this sort of implicit negotiation.}
  
 In  conversation,  such  impasses  might  be  called  a  committee.  In
  committees, particularly acrimonious  ones, such implicit negotiations
  often don't work.  Then participants  have to invoke formal rules: the
  right  to  speak, the  right  to  resist  interruption, the  order  of
  speakers, the topics permitted, the length of time allotted, points of
  order, and so forth.  This sort of explicit, rule-governed negotiation
  is clumsy, but necessary when the social fabric will not bear implicit
  negotiation. It looks  more like the sort of  thing developers have in
  mind  when they  talks of  bots negotiating,  but it  is only  a small
  portion of what human negotiation involves\footnote{Indeed, part of the process of negotiation involves 
  negotiating what sort of behavior, formal or informal, is appropriate. People 
  have to understand what rules apply, for identical behavior can have different 
  consequences depending on the situation. A wave across a room might welcome a 
  friend or make you highest bidder at an auction. Recently, a young boy was 
  discovered to be highest bidder in an eBay on-line auction. He bid \$900,000, 
  believing, apparently, that he was taking part in an on-line game. 
  ("13-Year-Old Makes \$3 million in Bids on eBay," {\it USA Today Online,} 29 
  April 1999, at http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/ctf027.htm, 
  retrieved 21 July 1999.).}.
  
 {\it Human  foibles.} To understand  human negotiation and  imitate it,
  then, requires understanding humans as more than simple "goal pursuing
  agents." For  humans, rules and goals bear  a complicated relationship
  to  the  social  fabric.   Both  may  shift  dynamically  in  practice
  depending on the social conditions that prevail.
  
 This human shiftiness is present  even when people shop, let alone when
  they talk. In shopping, as elsewhere, humans have the awkward habit of
  changing  rules and  shifting goals  in mid-negotiation.  The Berkeley
  anthropologist  Jean Lave  discovered this  in her  studies  of people
  shopping  in  the  supermarket\footnote{Lave, 1988.}.    The people  that  she  and  her
  colleagues  studied  set out  with  a list  that  looks  like a  bot's
  instructions. When they returned, they accounted for their behavior in
  bot-like  terms, talking about  "best buys,"  "lowest prices,"  and so
  on.  But studying  their actual  shopping behavior  revealed something
  quite  different.  In  between  setting  out  and  coming  back,  they
  continually  shifted their  goals, their  preferences, and  even their
  rules  without hesitation.   Shopping was  in many  ways a  process of
  discovering or  creating underlying preferences rather  than acting in
  accordance with them.
  
 This sort of  goal shifting is even more  evident when people negotiate
  directly with  one another.  (In a supermarket,  we are often  more in
  negotiation with  ourselves than with  anyone else. "Do I  really want
  this?" "Is this worth it?" "Will  the family eat it?" are questions we
  try  out  on  ourselves,   not  on  other  people.)  In  interpersonal
  negotiation, people  change their immediate  goal for the sake  of the
  higher goal of preserving  the social conditions that make negotiation
  possible. For example, people will  back off demands, even if they are
  in the right, because asserting rights may damage the social fabric.
  
 People don't only abandon  goals. They abandon rules, too. Authorities,
  for example,  turn a blind  eye if they  sense that enforcing  the law
  could be more damaging\footnote{"No tolerance" policing refuses to turn such a blind 
  eye. Its critics have argued that while such policing may meet short-term 
  goals, it can be profoundly damaging to the social fabric, destroying for 
  example, police relations with minority communities.}.   Stock exchanges not only suspend trading
  (particularly  electronic trading),  they may  even suspend  the rules
  when to do otherwise would damage  the exchange or the market. In such
  circumstances, people  implicitly invoke  the axiom that  if following
  the rules causes  damage, then abandon the rules -  an axiom it's hard
  for bots  to follow.  Immediate goals, longer-term  relationships, and
  creation and preservation  of the social fabric are  always in balance
  in this  way. Indeed, this interdependence  paradoxically affects even
  those who deliberately break the  rules. Liars have a heavy investment
  in  truth  telling,  opportunists  in  dependability,  speculators  in
  stability.
  
 {\it  Bot  foiblelessness.}  Negotiating  bots  favor  the  direct  and
  explicit side of human negotiation. They are the economist's idealized
  "homo economicus,"  anonymous traders working  in a spot  market. They
  are blind to  the complex social trade-offs between  goals, rules, and
  the social fabric.  So it's no surprise to find  that they are capable
  of tearing rents in that fabric.
  
 Experiments at  both IBM and  MIT with bots in  apparently frictionless
  markets indicate  potential for destructive behavior.  Not "subject to
  constraints  that   normally  moderate  human   behavior  in  economic
  activity,"  as   one  researcher  puts  it,  the   bots  will  happily
  destabilize  a market  in pursuit  of  their immediate  goals. In  the
  experiments, bots engaged in  savage price wars, drove human suppliers
  out   of   the   market,   and   produced   unmanageable   swings   in
  profitability. "There's  potential for a  lot of mayhem once  bots are
  introduced on  a wide scale,"  another researcher concluded\footnote{Jeffrey Kephart quoted in Schwartz, 1998, p. 72. See 
  also Ward, 1998. Work of the HEDG group at MIT (http://www.lucifer.com/$\sim$sasha/HEDG/HEDG.html, 
  retrieved 21 July 1999]) suggests that cooperation among bots may help offset 
  these wild swings, but there is significant debate among scientists about what 
  cooperation entails.}.   The
  research  suggests  that   frictionless  markets,  run  by  rationally
  calculating bots, may not be  the efficient economic panacea some have
  hoped  for.   Social  friction  and  "inertia"   may  usefully  dampen
  volatility and increase stability.
  
  
 DeLong  and  Froomkin even  suggest  that  such frictionlessness  might
  disable the "Invisible Hand." The great classical economist Adam Smith
  used the image of the invisible hand to describe forces that reconcile
  the pursuit of private interests  through markets with the public good
  and  with what  we  have called  the  social fabric.  If not  actually
  producing good,  at least the  invisible hand prevents the  pursuit of
  private  interests from  doing harm.  "Assumptions which  underlie the
  microeconomics of the Invisible  Hand," de Long and Froomkin conclude,
  "fray badly when transported to the information economy."\footnote{De Long and Froomkin, 1999.} 
  
 Better  bots,  then,  will  require  a better  understanding  of  human
  negotiation, the  contribution of the  social fabric, and the  role of
  human restraint in the  functioning of the invisible hand. Development
  will  be ill  served by  people who  merely redefine  elaborate social
  processes in terms of the things that bots do well.
  
 
  \section{How Autonomous?}
  
 
  
 If human  negotiation is a delicate  and complex art,  it is inevitably
  more delicate and more complicated when conducted by proxies. And bots
  are  proxies.  They  act not  on their  own behalf,  but on  behalf of
  others. As such,  they also lead us to  questions about delegation and
  representation,  which  will  take  us  once  more  to  the  issue  of
  transparency.
  
\subsection{Delegates}
  
 One account of bot delegation,  defining it in human terms, explains it
  as follows: "Just  as you tell your assistant, 'When  x happens, do y'
  an agent is  always waiting for x to happen!"\footnote{These quotations also come from the IBM intelligent 
  agent research (see note 7).}  The first and most
  obvious question to  confront is: Is that really  how human assistants
  work?
  
 If humans are not, as we suggested, strict in following rules, they are
  far  worse at  laying them  out. Human  delegation relies  as  much on
  sympathetic  disobedience  when circumstances  change  as  it does  on
  strict obedience.  As people working  with computers have  long known,
  strict  obedience  leads  to  disaster.  Internet  stock  traders  are
  becoming  increasingly aware  of this  problem as  on-line  trades are
  executed  as  ordered  in   conditions  of  insufficient  liquidity  -
  conditions  in  which  a   broker  would  wisely  have  disobeyed  the
  order. Labor organizations have long  known that by "working to rule,"
  following only the letter but not  the spirit of a work contract, work
  becomes impossible.
  
  
 Behind  the stock  traders'  difficulties and  labor  tactics lies  the
  simple  truth that  giving orders  that have  to take  account  of all
  possibilities    is    impossible   in    all    but   the    simplest
  tasks. Consequently,  rules, contracts, delegation, and  the like rely
  on unspecifiable  discretion and  judgment on the  part of  the person
  following those orders. These return  us once again to the differences
  between bots and  people. Judgment and discretion are  not features of
  software. They are products  of human socialization and experience. As
  the  political  philosopher Michael  Oakeshott  has  argued, they  are
  learned not by the acquisition  of facts and rules, but through social
  relations and participation in human activities\footnote{In Oakeshott's (1967) words:
  
 
  By "judgement" I mean the tacit or implicit component of 
    knowledge, the ingredient which is not merely unspecified in propositions, 
    but which is unspecifiable in propositions. It is the component of knowledge 
    which does not appear in the form of rules and which, therefore, cannot be 
    resolved into information or itemized in the manner characteristic of 
    information. (p. 167)}.  As Mark Humphrys
  of the School of Computer Applications, Dublin University, points out,
  even if bots could learn like  humans, they lack the rich stimuli that
  humans depend on to develop such things as judgment. Bots, in contrast
  to humans, live a wretchedly impoverished social existence\footnote{Humphrys, 1997.}.
  
\subsection{Representatives}
  
 Of  course, the  view of  bots  as blindly  obedient, "doing  x when  y
  happens," denies  them much of the  autonomy that is  central to their
  identity as autonomous agents. Consequently, it is more usual to think
  of  bots as  having  "control over  their  own actions  and their  own
  internal state," as one account puts it\footnote{Jennings et al., 1996.}.  While it might solve the
  problem  of blind  obedience,  this autonomy  raises  problems of  its
  own. If  bots make decisions  and give advice autonomously,  who takes
  responsibility  for those  decisions? Can  Eliza be  sued  for medical
  malpractice? And  if not, should  the programmer be sued  instead? Can
  Shallow Red be  sued for business malpractice? And  if not, who should
  be sued, the programmer or the company that the chatterbot represents?
  
 If the  owner of  a bot should  take responsibility for  those actions,
  then that owner must have some control over and insight into them. Yet
  for most bot users, the digital technology around which bots are built
  is opaque.  Because bots are autonomous,  it can be  difficult to know
  what decisions a bot has taken, let alone why.
  
 Once,   as  promised,   bots  start   interacting  with   one  another,
  understanding bot  behavior may become impossible. Anyone  who has had
  to call a  help line with a problem about the  way an operating system
  from one vendor  and a program from another are  working together - or
  failing  to  work -  knows  how  hard it  is  to  get  anyone to  take
  responsibility for  software interactions\footnote{This may turn out to be the biggest challenge in 
  adjusting Y2K problems.}.   Support staff rapidly
  renounce  all knowledge  of (and  usually interest  in)  problems that
  arise   from   interactions   because   there  are   just   too   many
  possibilities. So it's easy  to imagine sophisticated programmers, let
  alone ordinary users,  being unable to unravel how  even a small group
  of bots reached a particular state autonomously. The challenge will be
  unfathomable if,  as one research group  has it, we  can "anticipate a
  scenario in which billions of intelligent agents will roam the virtual
  world,  handling all  levels  of simple  to  complex negotiations  and
  transactions."\footnote{These quotations also come from the IBM intelligent 
  agent research (see note 7).} 
  
 If  human agents are  confused with  digital ones,  if human  action is
  taken as  mere information processing, and if  the social complexities
  of negotiation, delegation, and representation are reduced to "when x,
  do y,"  bots will end  up with autonomy without  accountability. Their
  owners, by contrast, may have accountability without control.
  
 These are not trivial matters. As  we have seen, people are being asked
  to put everything  from the food in their  refrigerator to their cars,
  houses, assets,  reputation, and health  in the hands of  these agents
  despite the difficulty of  understanding what these agents actually do
  or why.
  
 One of  the remarkable  features of the  recent failures  of derivative
  traders (such  as Barings Bank, Long-Term Capital,  and Orange County)
  has been how little investors, even major financial institutions, have
  understood  about the  ventures  to which  traders  armed with  highly
  complex   mathematical  calculations   and   software  programs   were
  committing  them.  They  took   it  all  on  trust,  had  insufficient
  safeguards  (though  somewhat  paradoxically  they  called  themselves
  "hedge" funds), and lost disastrously.  The question "Do you know what
  your agent is  doing tonight and with whom?" and  the worry that their
  agent  is  no  angel  may  loom  increasingly  large  in  the  already
  overburdened late-night worries of executives.
  
 
\section{"The Brightest Fell"}
  
 
  
 Once you worry about bots that  represent, you also have to worry about
  bots that misrepresent. Bots may not  be like people in every way, but
  they can  give a  good imitation of  human deceit  and in so  doing be
  quite  disruptive.  And  as  with  humans,  it  can  be  difficult  to
  distinguish good from bad.  "There's no way," one system administrator
  insists,  "to tell the  difference between  malicious bots  and benign
  bots."\footnote{Quoted in Quittner, 1995.} The  similarity is  already significantly changing  the way
  the 'Net is viewed.
  
 
  
  
 Since its early days, the 'Net has been an extraordinary source of free
  help and information.  Some have suggested that it is  an example of a
  "gift economy." One of the most  useful areas of this economy has been
  the  newsgroups.  Though these  are  probably  more  famous for  their
  pornographic content, newsgroups provide  a great deal of esoteric and
  not  just erotic  information. Divided  into groups  by  subject, they
  allow people  interested in a  particular topic to pose  questions and
  receive   advice   and    suggestions   from   people   with   similar
  interests.  There   are,  for  example,   multiple  Microsoft  Windows
  discussion groups where people  having difficulty with everything from
  basic use to Visual Basic programming can get help\footnote{Those who are unhappy, by contrast, can express 
  their rage by posting messages to the microsoft.crash.crash.crash or 
  microsoft. sucks newsgroups.}.
  
 Given this  aspect of the  'Net, it wasn't  too surprising to  get some
  helpful  advice  when Paul  put  an advertisement  to  sell  a car  in
  Yahoo!'s  classifieds.  This  is a  free  service that  allows you  to
  describe the car in your own  words and provide details of how you can
  be reached. Within twenty-four hours a friendly message came back:
  
  \begin{quote}
  {\tt From: shelby@dallas.quick.com\\Subject: FYI ON AUTO 
    SALES\\Date: Tue, 21 Jul 1998 17:33:22 -0600\\X-Mailer: Allaire Cold 
    Fusion 3.0\\X-UIDL: 8e772fe616fe165b05ca43f75d8ea500
    
 
    
 i saw your vehicle ad on the internet. i just wanted to let you know 
    about the realy neat system i found where mine sold after many inquiries 
    shortly after listing it. you can get to that system by clicking on the 
    following link:\\http://www.aaaaclassifieds.com
    
 just thought you might be interested.
    
 Dan}
    
  \end{quote}
  
 
  
 Thanking Dan  for his kind recommendation, however,  was more difficult
  than it  first appeared. "shelby@dallas.quick.com" turned out  to be a
  bogus address.   The message, ingenuous misspelling and  all, had come
  from an anonymous  remailer in the Czech Republic  designed to conceal
  the identity of the actual sender. "Dan" was no doubt little more than
  a software  program, combing  the 'Net for  postings on car  lists and
  sending out this advertisement  disguised as a personal recommendation
  from a  "user like you."\footnote{The car, by the way, found a buyer within a 
week.}   As the political  scientist Peter Lyman
  points out,  strange things  happen when a  gift economy and  a market
  economy collide\footnote{Lyman, 1997.}.
  
 
  \section{War in Heaven}
  
 
  
 Dan is only a minor case of what has become close to bot warfare on the
  'Net. While  bots have yet  to develop personality, they  have already
  been  involved in  "personality theft,"  sending out  messages  in the
  names not only  of people who do  not exist but also of  people who do
  exist but did  not send the message. One journalist  found he had been
  widely impersonated  by a bot that  sent e-mail and  joined chat rooms
  using his name\footnote{Quittner, 1995.}. 
  
 Besides creating messages  in others' names, bots can  also erase them,
  wiping out messages that people  have sent. {\it Cancelbots,} as these
  are sometimes  called (perhaps they  could more simply be  called {\it
  Nots}), are  an unfortunate  case of good  intentions gone  awry. They
  developed in  response to a notorious newsgroup  incident. Two lawyers
  used a bot to post  a message offering immigration assistance on 6,000
  newsgroups. Angry  newsgroup users took  corrective action, developing
  cancelbots,  which could  patrol newsgroups  and remove  messages that
  were posted indifferently to  multiple groups. Such a design, however,
  was  too tempting  to  remain only  a  force for  good.  One night  in
  September 1996, a rogue cancelbot wiped out 30,000 bona fide newsgroup
  messages\footnote{Leonard, 1997, p. 192.}. 
  
 The 'Net  now has a  robust army of  antisocial bots. These  attack the
  innocent and  the guilty  alike. They make  misleading recommendations
  and  erase  useful   ones.  They  throw  dust  in   the  eyes  of  the
  collaborative filters  and others tracking  patterns of use\footnote{"Collaborative tracking" of this sort can easily 
  fall prey to Goodhart's law, which states that statistical regularities break 
  down when used for control. Because the digital footprints people leave across 
  the Web can provide guidance, people have an interest in creating fake 
  footprints.}.  And
  they  overload mailboxes  and attack  Web sites  until they  crash. As
  rapidly as the diligent bots find  ways to see through their ruses and
  overcome these tactics, others find new ways to produce mayhem.
  
 Meanwhile, the line  between good and bad becomes  increasingly hard to
  draw.   Intel,  for example,  recently  persuaded  Symantec, maker  of
  antivirus software  to take  action against what  was deemed  by Intel
  "hostile"   code   written   by   a  company   called   Zero-Knowledge
  Systems. People who rely on Symantec's software now get a warning when
  they  visit  Zero-Knowledge's site  that  they  may  be at  risk  from
  viruses. Zero-Knowledge,  however, insists that its software  is not a
  virus,  but   a  program  designed   to  reveal  a  flaw   in  Intel's
  chips.   Intel's   categorization,   Zero-Knowledge   maintains,   was
  deliberately self-serving\footnote{Markoff, 1999.}. 
  
 
  \section{Moore Solutions}
  
 
  
 Faced with the rebellions of  these fallen agents, people often suggest
  that  another cycle  of  Moore's Law  will  produce suitably  powerful
  encryption  to   resist  them\footnote{See chapter 1 for our discussion of Moore's Law 
  solutions.}.    Better   encryption  (and  fewer
  government restrictions) will  almost undoubtedly be advantageous. But
  it is important to realize that  it alone cannot solve the problems at
  issue. Why not? First, the same  power that is used for defense can be
  used  for attack. As  a (perhaps  apocryphal) detective  from London's
  Scotland Yard is said to  have put it fatalistically, in fifteen years
  computers will  be involved in the  solution of most  crimes, but they
  will also be involved in the perpetration of most crimes.
  
 Second, solutions that rely on  encryption already focus too tightly on
  information  systems, ignoring  the  fact that  these  are always  and
  inevitably part of a larger social system. Just as bots only deal with
  one   aspect  of  negotiation,   the  information-exchange   part,  so
  cryptography deals  only with one  part of technological  systems, the
  classical information  channel. The human activity  that encryption is
  designed to protect, however, usually involves much more.
  
 For  example,  in  the  1990s  a  number  of  companies  have  produced
  strategies for  secure and private digital cash  transactions over the
  Internet.  Some  of  these  -  in  particular  David  Chaum's  company
  DigiCash,  founded  in  1994   -  matched  powerful  technologies  and
  admirable social  goals. Futurists have greeted each  such company and
  its encryption tools  with confident claims that here  was the "killer
  application" of the era. It would allow secure microtransactions (cash
  exchanges  worth  pennies),  provide  suitable anonymity  and  thereby
  unleash  net commerce,  dismantle  the current  financial system,  and
  undermine  the power  and authority  of  major banks.  It all  sounded
  plausible, with more institutions satisfyingly looking to fall.
  
 Unfortunately, DigiCash  itself, like other similar  efforts before it,
  fell, filing  for bankruptcy in  November 1998. It failed  not because
  encryption isn't  important, nor because  DigiCash's encryption wasn't
  good (it was very good), but because encryption isn't enough. A viable
  system must embrace not just  the technological system, but the social
  system - the people, organizations, and institutions involved. It must
  be able to  verify not just the encryption, but a  user's right to use
  the encryption, that  this right has not been revoked,  and that it is
  being  used  correctly.  "A  digital  signature," says  Dan  Geer,  an
  encryption  specialist and chief  strategist for  CertCo, "is  only as
  valid as  the key (in which  it was signed)  was at the moment  it was
  signed,  it  is only  as  good as  the  procedural  perfection of  the
  certificate   issuer  and  the   timely  transmission   of  subsequent
  revocation."\footnote{Geer, 1998.}   In short,  encryption is  a strong  link in  a long
  chain whose very strength points up the weakness of other links, which
  cannot be  made so  secure.  Overall, such  systems, Geer  argues, are
  only  as   secure  as  the  financial   and  institutional  investment
  committed.  Consequently,  interactions over  the  'Net, financial  or
  social, will  be as secure not  as its digital encryption,  which is a
  relatively cheap  fix, but as the  infrastructure - social  as well as
  technological-encompassing that interaction\footnote{To illustrate his point by analogy, Geer (1998) 
  reveals that, while conventional handwritten signatures are a relatively 
  reliable means of verification, "actually verifying handwritten signatures" is 
  so costly that banks generally bother only for checks over \$20,000. Below that 
  they are willing to incur the risk of insecurity rather than the cost of 
  security. With digital signatures, too, banks must balance their risk against 
  the costs of the full organizational and institutional infrastructure of 
  verification. The encryption may be more or less the same for both high- and 
  low-risk transactions, but the important procedural formalities (the weak 
  links in the chain) will be quite different.}.
  
 
  \section{Separate Spheres}
  
 
  
 The   human  and   the   digital  are   significantly,  and   usefully,
  distinct.   Human  planning,   coordinating,   decision  making,   and
  negotiating seem  quite different from  automated information searches
  or following digital  footsteps. So for all their  progress, and it is
  extraordinary,   the   current   infobots,  knobots,   shopbots,   and
  chatterbots are still a long way from the predicted insertion into the
  woof and  warp of  ordinary life. Current  successes may not,  as some
  hope,   point  directly   to  the   grander  visions   laid   out  for
  agents. Optimists may be  underestimating the difficulties of "scaling
  up" from successful but narrow  experiments to broader use. (It's been
  said that computer  scientists have a tendency to count  "1, 2, 3, one
  million, ...  ," as if scale  were insignificant once  the first steps
  were taken.)
  
 Digital  agents  will  undoubtedly   play  a  central  part  in  future
  developments of the 'Net. They are powerful resources for all sorts of
  human interactions.   But to pursue their development  needs more cold
  appraisal and less redefinition or evangelism.
  
 First, developers and futurists must recognize that their goals address
  fields  of human activity  that lie  well beyond  the simple  realm of
  information.  "The humanizing  of technology," the sociologist Anthony
  Giddens argues,  "is likely to involve the  increasing introduction of
  moral issues into the now largely 'instrumental.'"\footnote{Giddens, 1990, p. 170.}  Designing bots
  to  imitate  or replicate  human  actions  introduces  both moral  and
  social-institutional questions. Your  willingness to put your paycheck
  into a slot in the wall is, in many ways, remarkable. But it relies on
  much more  than the instrumental  reliability of the ATM.  Indeed, for
  most people a particular ATM  isn't transparent enough for us to judge
  whether it  is instrumentally  reliable or not.  Instead, we  look for
  reliability,  both  instrumental   and  moral,  in  the  organizations
  represented  by  the ATM  and  by  the  institutions regulating  those
  organizations\footnote{The SETI project, which we mentioned in chapter 1 
  (see chapter 1, note 2), is an interesting case in point. Thousands of people 
  are downloading data over the Internet and letting it run on their machines in 
  the belief that they are processing data from outer space. It is the 
  reassuring presence of the University of California in the arrangement that 
  keeps at bay the idea that our machines might be processing data for the 
  National Security Agency (NSA) or even providing data for a major marketing 
  venture.}.
  
 But, as Robert  Wilensky rightly points out, such  issues have not been
  on the  critical path of  much computer science.  They are now  on the
  road   that  lies  all   before  us.   They  are   not  insurmountable
  roadblocks. But if people do not  open their eyes a little wider, they
  will  act  as  potholes  into  which much  research  may  unprofitably
  stumble.
  
 Second, and  most important, bots  and humans operate in  different, if
  overlapping, spheres. By redefining one as the other, or reducing both
  to information-processing  or goal-pursuing agents,  these differences
  are submerged or confused. Some futurists seem continuously anxious to
  replace humans  with bots in certain tasks  without quite appreciating
  how {\it people} accomplish those tasks. In general, it will be better
  to  pursue not substitution  but complementarity.  (We want  ATMs that
  will supply  us with money, not ones  that will spend it  for us.) But
  complementarity    requires    seeing    the    differences    between
  information-processing agents and human agency.
  
 
  
 
  \section{Bibliography}
  
 
  
 Ramanath Chellappa, Anitesh Barua, and Andrew B. Whinston, 1997. 
  "E3: An Electronic Infrastructure for a Virtual University," 
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  and Beyond: The Economics of Digital Information and Intellectual 
  Property.} Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, at\\ http://www.law.miami.edu/$\sim$froomkin/articles/newecon.htm, 
  retrieved 21 July 1999; a revised and updated version can be found as J. 
  Bradford DeLong and A. Michael Froomkin, 2000. "Speculative Microeconomics for 
  Tomorrow's Economy," {\it First Monday,} volume 5, number 2 (February), at\\ http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue5\_2/delong/, 
  retrieved 21 July 1999.
  
 Stan Franklin, 1995. "Autonomous Agents, Mechanisms of Mind," at\\\texttt{http://www.msci.memphis.edu/$\sim$franklin/aagents.html}, 
  retrieved 21 July 1999.
  
 Stan Franklin and Art Graessner, 1996. "Is It an Agent, or Just a Program? 
  A Taxonomy for Autonomous Agents," In: {\it Intelligent Agents 3: Agent 
  Theories, Architectures, and Languages .} Proceedings of the ICAI '96 
  Workshop, Budapest, Hungary, 12-13 August 1996. New York: Springer-Verlag, and 
  at http://www.msci.memphis.edu/$\sim$franklin/AgentProg.html, 
  retrieved 21 July 1999.
  
 Bill Gates, 1995. {\it The Road Ahead.} New York: Viking.
  
 Dan Geer, 1998. "Risk Management Is Where the Money Is," {\it Risks 
  Digest,} volume 20, number 6, at http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/20.06.html, 
  retrieved 21 July 1999.
  
 Anthony Giddens, 1990. {\it The Consequences of Modernity: The Raymond Fred 
  West Memorial Lectures.} Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
  
 Paul N. Hoggdon, 1997. "The Role of Intelligent Agent Software in the 
  Future of Direct Response Marketing," {\it Direct Marketing,} volume 59, 
  number 9, pp. 10-18.
  
 Mark Humphrys, 1997. "AI is Possible ... but AI Won't Happen: The Future of 
  Artificial Intelligence," paper presented at the symposium "Science and the 
  Human Dimension," Jesus College, Cambridge, 29 August, and at http://wwwnewscientist.com/nsplus/insight/future/humphrys.html, 
  retrieved 20 March 2000.
  
 N.R. Jennings, P. Faratin, M.J. Johnson, P. O'Brien, and M.E. Wiegand, 
  1996. "Agent based Business Process Management," at\\ http://gryphon.elec.qmw.ac.uk/dai/projects/adept/jcis96/introduction.html\#top, 
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 Kees Jonkheer, 1999. "Intelligent Agents, Markets, and Competition: 
  Consumers' Interests and Functionality of Destination Sites," {\it First 
  Monday,} volume 4, number 6 (June), at\\ http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue4\_6/jonkheer/, 
  retrieved 21 July 1999.
  
 Witold Kula, 1986. {\it Measures and Man.} R. Szerter (translator). 
  Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
  
 Jean Lave, 1988. {\it Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture 
  in Everyday Life.} New York: Cambridge University Press.
  
 Andrew Leonard, 1997. {\it Bots: The Origin of New Species.} New York: 
  Penguin Books.
  
 Peter Lyman, 1997. "Documents and the Future of the Academic Community," 
  paper presented at the Conference on Scholarly Communication and Technology, 
  Emory University, 24-25 April, at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july98/07lyman.html, 
  retrieved 21 July 1999.
  
 Pattie Maes, Robert H. Guttman, and Alexandros G. Moukas, 1999. "Agents 
  That Buy and Sell," {\it Communications of the ACM,} volume 42, number 3, pp. 
  81-91.
  
 John Markoff, 1999. "Intel Goes to Battle as Its Embedded Serial Number Is 
  Unmasked," {\it New York Times} (28 April), section C, p. 1.
  
 Edward Markus, 1997. "Low Bid Alternatives Earning Respect," {\it American 
  City and County,} volume 112, number 9, pp. 22-25.
  
 Michael Maynard, 1998. "Architects Oppose California Initiative," 
  {\it Architecture,} volume 87, number 4, p. 26.
  
 Michael Oakeshott, 1967. "Learning and Teaching," In: R.S. Peters (editor). 
  {\it The Concept of Education.} London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 
  156-177.
  
 Theodore M. Porter, 1994. "Information, Power, and the View from Nowhere," 
  In: Lisa Bud-Frierman (editor). {\it Information Acumen: The Understanding and 
  Use of Knowledge in Modern Business.} London: Routledge, pp. 217-231.
  
 Pretext Forum, 1997. "A Panel of thinkers and Technologists Debate the 
  Future of Libraries," at http://www.pretext.com/oct97/columns/forum.htm, 
  retrieved 21 July 1999.
  
 Joshua Quittner, 1995. "Automata Non Grata," {\it Wired} volume 3, number 
  4 (April), pp. 118-122, 172-173, and at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.04/irc.html, 
  retrieved 21 July 1999.
  
 Evan I. Schwartz, 1998. "Shopbot Pandemonium," {\it Wired} volume 6, 
  number 12 (December), p. 72, and at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.12/mustread.html, 
  retrieved 21 July 1999.
  
 Alan Turing, 1963. "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," In: Edward A. 
  Feigenbaum and Julian Feldman (editors). {\it Computers and Thought.} New 
  York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 11-35.


 

   
  
 
  \chapter{Home Alone}
  
  \begin{quote}
     Monday: Cannot access personal e-mail box from home using 
    company's Internet access. Call company. Unbeknown to me or support 
    services, I have been accessing my personal e-mail for four years through a 
    leak in the company's firewall. Will no longer be able to access this e-mail 
    account, where most of my mail accumulates, an e-mail message tells me, 
    adding a smiley face for consolation. Suggests opening a third ISP [Internet 
    Service Provider] in addition to company and remote site in order to dial 
    locally and use remote mail address. (The alternative is to close the remote 
    account and lose mail from people who still have that 10-year-old address or 
    who continue to get it from records remaining on the Web, over which I have 
    no control.)
    
 
    
 Tuesday: After a little research, choose local Baby Bell as a cheap, 
    reputable ISP from a large enough company with a large enough interest to do 
    it well. Go to their Web site to download Internet access software. Download 
    crashes my machine. Try again. Successful after two more crashes and an 
    hour. Next, install software. Crash. Try again. Success. Reboot. New 
    software starts automated registration process. Crashes. Reboot. Recrash. 
    Have to remove ISP sign-up software to start machine successfully. Try to 
    install once again. Same problems. Same crashes. Same process to remove. 
    Call service center. Polite confession, download is "a little buggy." 
    Recommended the more reliable CD kit. Will send. In all about 5 hours lost. 
    CD takes 5 days to arrive. The provider's compelling slogan "How will you 
    use it?" remains moot.
    
 Monday (following week): Try to install Internet kit using CD-ROM. 
    Invokes Crashguard (designed to prevent crashes) and brings everything to a 
    halt. Remove Crashguard. Load Provider kit successfully. Start installation 
    again. Crashes. Repeat. Repeats. Use a second computer to reach ISP's "Help 
    me find a solution" Web site. Apparently if the version of Netscape already 
    on your machine is newer than the one in Provider's kit, a Java bug may 
    cause installation to fail. Discard my better version of Netscape. Run 
    registration kit. Refuses to recognize modem. Contact provider. Apparently, 
    if the modem is very new, the installation kit doesn't contain 
    initialization information. My modem is two years old; the company that made 
    it has long been taken over. About 4 hours lost.
    
 Tuesday: Call ISP. Tell them I would prefer to do my own manual 
    installation if they would let me have the necessary details. Service center 
    discourages this, politely but firmly. I tell them the troubles I have had 
    with their automation, tell them I believe I am competent to do a manual 
    installation but cannot find details (phone numbers, TCP/IP numbers) on 
    their Web site. The details are not there. They exist on an automated fax 
    system. Obligingly, provider representative agrees to fax them. Sit, wait. 
    Nothing happens. Call provider. Tell details to a new (equally polite) 
    provider representative, who again tries to discourage me from going it 
    alone, who again agrees to fax, but who acknowledges automated fax system 
    can sometimes take a long time-even days, apparently. Kindly agrees 
    (probably against rules) to copy the details into an e-mail message and send 
    it to the one account I still have easy access to. Sends it. Insert details. 
    Log on successfully. Open an account successfully. Try to log onto 'Net. 
    Fails. All settings work for registration only. Must remove all settings, 
    reinsert a new list to use for all other purposes. Finally, 9 days later, 
    with the help of two computers, three e-mail accounts, phone, fax, and the 
    best part of four days lost, I'm on the 'Net. It's just a click away.
    
 Thursday: Automated fax with details for manual installation chugs slowly 
    through my fax\footnote{{Home Office Diary}}.
  \end{quote}

  
 
  
 Information,  as  the phrase  has  it, "wants  to  be  free," and  that
  freedom,  it  is widely  hoped,  will in  turn  make  people free.  In
  particular, many people  hope that it will free them  from the ties of
  the office and  the firm. The era of "organization  man" may be coming
  to  an  end,  and  a  society of  entrepreneurs  emerging.  There  are
  certainly many reasons  to hope for this and some  to believe it might
  be possible.
  
 The  idea  that  the   individualized  technology  of  the  information
  revolution will  undo the massification produced by  the technology of
  the   industrial   revolution  underlies   most   such  scenarios   of
  disaggregation. Steam mills brought  people together to work at single
  sites. They  thus helped to  drain the countryside of  its inhabitants
  and   concentrate  the  population   in  factory   towns.  Information
  technologies,  many hope,  might at  least halt  this two-century-long
  process. Supported by  the 'Net, people can drift  apart to hot desks,
  home offices, and telecenters.  The drain from the countryside appears
  pluggable with technology.
  
 
  \section{Yearning to Breathe Free}
  
 
  
 Thus Microsoft,  for example, emphasizes the value  of its technologies
  to the survival of the small  town (pop. 1,500) of Lusk, Wyoming. "The
  people of Lusk," Microsoft's  Web site proclaims, "are using Microsoft
  software and technology as a means to preserve their way of life."\footnote{http://www.microsoft.com/QUESTIONS/who\_motivates\_us/Lusk\_text.htm, 
  retrieved 21 July 1999.}
  Others hope that this trek from country to city may not just stop, but
  reverse. In  the view of  some futurists, information  technology will
  help  rediscover  {\it  gemeinschaft,}   the  sort  of  small,  local,
  community-based   way  of   life  broken   down,  according   to  some
  sociologists,  by industrialization.   Hence the  quasi-rural  talk of
  "televillages" and "electronic cottages."\footnote{Toffler, 1980, p. 221. For {\it gemeinschaft,} see 
  Tonnies, 1963. Some of the predictions of the new pastoral life recall the 
  enthusiasm for "garden cities" at the turn of the century, and some the gap 
  between promise and reality that Dickens's (1968) Martin Chuzzlewit found on 
  the new frontier.} Somewhere in here, then,
  is that familiar hope that the road to the future will somehow take us
  back to the simplicities of the past.
  
 Yet  other  enthusiasts see  no  reason to  stop  at  the village.  The
  cyberguru and writer John Perry Barlow extols the nomadic life. He was
  a  rancher in Wyoming,  but now  believes his  laptop and  cell phone,
  allowing  him  to  work anywhere,  free  him  from  ties to  place  or
  community, making  him an itinerant  citizen of the global  village of
  cyberspace (for which he issued a declaration of independence)\footnote{See Barlow, n.d.}.
  
 In all  of this, there is  a mixture of  hype and hope with  some quite
  reasonable  forecasting.  The  idea  that  technology  can  untie  the
  unwanted  ties that  bind people  together seems  to have  been around
  since  those  ties  started  to  bind. The  canal,  the  railway,  the
  telephone,  and  rural electrification  were  all  taken  as signs  of
  hope. With the Internet, that  hope seems more reasonable. Now, people
  truly  can reach  colleagues, correspondence,  conferences, customers,
  and so forth instantly and remotely.
  
  
 Yet the  slow pace of transformation  to, for example,  the home office
  suggests that some critical challenges are being glossed over and some
  important  questions left  unasked.  Is it,  for  example, only  "path
  dependency"  (the legacy  of  history) and  inertia  that keep  people
  together  in  conventional  offices?  Can innovation  pick  apart  the
  uncomfortable social ties that bind, but leave the wanted ones intact?
  Can it undo the unprofitable  ties, but leave the profitable ones? Are
  these two goals the same? And,  to return to the question we raised in
  the last chapter, is the current approach to technology design leading
  in the right direction, or may  it again be focusing too tightly on an
  idealized view of information and how it - and individuals - work?
  
 
  \section{Just a Click Away?}
  
 
  
 The home office may seem little more than a click away, but predictions
  have put  it just over the horizon  for some time now.  In 1980, Alvin
  Toffler  predicted  that within  our  lifetime  urban downtowns  would
  "stand empty, reduced  to use as ghostly warehouses  or converted into
  living space."  Yet a 1998 survey  shows that the  office vacancy rate
  dropped to single digits for the first time since 1981, despite office
  completions doubling in 1997\footnote{See http://www.uli.org/pubs/LUD/landus27.htm, 
  retrieved 17 May 1999, reporting a survey of office vacancy by CB 
  Commercial/Torto Wheaton Research.}.
  
 Another prediction claimed  66 percent of workers would  work from home
  by the  millennium\footnote{Lyon, 1988.}.  Though reliable  figures are hard  to find, it
  would take  a startling  burst between  now and 2000  to reach  even 6
  percent. And the  greater part of the jobs would  probably still be in
  farm work or child care. In the late 1980s, the pace was so timid that
  one disgruntled researcher (who had  tried a home office and found how
  difficult  it   was)  claimed,  "if  things  go   well  for  high-tech
  homeworking, we may  get back to 1950s levels  of self-employment some
  time in the 21st or 22d century."\footnote{Forester, 1988, p. 229.}  Going forward to the past can be
  slow work.
  
 The data  on which such  assessments are made,  we need to  stress, are
  highly ambiguous,  and it  is easy to  make the proportions  look much
  more favorable.  Figures  for home workers in the  United States swing
  wildly from one  million to 41 million, depending  on how the category
  is  defined.  The  low-end  figure  comes from  government  data  (and
  includes 300,000  self-employed, the balance  working at home  but for
  someone else)\footnote{Edwards and Field-Hendry, 1996.}.  Higher figures (which usually come from people with
  something to sell) tend to bundle in anyone who takes any work (except
  their own  housework) home, including, for example,  teachers who take
  home papers to grade\footnote{The often-repeated 41 million figure appears to come 
  from a Pacific Bell survey. Telecommunications companies inevitably have a 
  strong interest in promoting telecommuting.}.
  
 Even the direction  of trends can be hard to read.  Some people trace a
  rise  in home  working in  the  early 1990s  to the  explosion of  the
  Internet  and related technologies.  Others attribute  it to  the last
  major  round of  corporate downsizing.  If the  latter  explanation is
  right, this  trend may have gone  into reverse with  the "upsizing" of
  the late 1990s. What little valuable research there is shows that even
  for those who triumphantly set  themselves free from the prison of the
  office, recidivism is quite high. One study of a telecenter found that
  25 percent of  the participants gave up within  the first five months,
  and 50 percent within a year\footnote{See Varma et al., 1998.}.
  
 
  \section{Leaving Home}
  
 
  
 A couple of articles in  {\it Wired,} emblematically in issues 2.07 and
7.02,   illustrate  such   reverses.  The   first  profiled   a  company
restructuring  its  offices  to  accommodate  the new  wired  future  in
1994\footnote{Dix, 1994.}.   Five  years later,  in  1999,  Wired  reported on  the  same
company's  retreat to conventional  offices\footnote{Berger, 1999.}.   The two  stories both
looked  at "hot  desking," the  strategy of  abandoning fixed  desks and
providing laptops,  cell phones,  and Internet connections  so employees
can work  where they choose. Though  some may have chosen  to take their
hot desk home, hot desking  is clearly different from the canonical home
office. But  it provides some  insight into the difficulties  of getting
out of the conventional office  and offers some explanations of why some
who return home to work leave home again before too long\footnote{Council on Environmental Quality, 1993, chapter 
  7.}. 
  
 First, many  of the difficulties  reflect a misunderstanding  of office
  work, which is  too easily painted as information  handling\footnote{See our discussion of this in chapter 1.}. This
  sort of redefinition drives  Toffler's analysis. He built his argument
  for the "electronic cottage" on firms that had seen significant shifts
  from manual  to managerial  work. At one  such firm, Toffler  was told
  that "fully half  of the 2,000 workers now  handle information instead
  of things, and  much of their work can be done  at home." Others firms
  concluded, "fully  75 percent  could work at  home if we  provided the
  necessary  communications  technology."\footnote{Toffler, 1980, pp. 212-13.}    The  idea  of  managers
  working  remotely with  information inevitably  ignores the  much more
  difficult, intangible, but inevitably face-to-face side of management,
  the management not of things or of information, but of people\footnote{In fairness to Toffler, we should note that he 
  claims that "social forces" are behind moves toward the electronic cottage. 
  Yet, what he offers as examples of social forces are employees who "hate" 
  their office, accumulate "frustration," and are "willing" to work at home. 
  These forces are undoubtedly important, but they are individual and 
  psychological rather than social.}. 
  
 Second, bold predictions about the spread of hot desking and electronic
  cottages may  also ignore the  frailty of technological  systems\footnote{On the release of Macintosh's system 8.5 software, 
  newspapers quoted an Apple employee saying triumphantly, "And my machine 
  hasn't even crashed yet." The exclamation nonetheless suggests how fragile the 
  technology still is. (We wish, by the way, that we could say the same.)}. 
  The more  cavalier futurists sometimes  appear to work with  a magical
  brand  of computer  not available  to  the rest  of us.  It's hard  to
  believe that if  they had to deal with  the inexplicable crashes, data
  corruption,  incompatibilities,   buggy  downloads,  terrifying  error
  messages,  and power  outages that  are standard  fare for  most, they
  could remain quite so confident about the ease of hot desking and home
  working. As  the home office diary  we began this  chapter with shows,
  simply downloading Internet software  can lose many billable hours and
  cause nightmares\footnote{In this case, an effortless installation required 
  two computers, two ISPs, two phone lines, a fax, and significant Internet 
  experience to get the job done. Both that technology and experience are often 
  beyond someone trying to set up a small business. Six months later the diarist 
  decided to change to another ISP with worldwide access numbers. While the 
  ISP's own software was again buggy, attempts to override it were met with the 
  response from the ISP that "if you don't use our software, we will not provide 
  technical support for your problems."}. 
  
  
 And  third, by  overlooking both  the social  aspects of  work  and the
  frailty of  technology, design  that attempts to  replace conventional
  work systems  may often  merely displace the  burdens of work.  In the
  transition to home offices, these burdens pass from the social system,
  where tasks  are shared,  onto the lap  of individuals. The  desire to
  show that  with a computer one  person can do everything  may look not
  forward,  but back  to the  stage  in social  evolution before  anyone
  noticed the advantages of the division of labor.
  
 In all, to achieve the  goals that technologists themselves set out, it
  will  become increasingly  important both  to reconceive  work  and to
  retool design. In particular, design needs to attend not simply to the
  frailty of technological systems and the robustness of social systems,
  but  to the ways  in which  social systems  often play  a key  part in
  making even frail technology robust.
  
 
  \section{No Room of One's Own}
  
 
  
 The {\it Wired}  hot desking stories that we  mentioned earlier covered
  the famous attempt by  the advertising company Chiat/Day to reconceive
  work in  a new way  and a new  building. The first story  followed the
  firm into its new offices\footnote{Dix, 1994.}.   The second, five years later, watched
  its retreat to a more conventional  way of working\footnote{Berger, 1999.}.  The agency is
  well known  for producing  Apple advertisements, including  the famous
  1984   Superbowl   ad,  which   portrayed   Apple   as  champions   of
  individualism,  and  the later  "Think  Different"  campaign. The  new
  offices of the early nineties  (in Los Angeles and New York) suggested
  that  Chiat/Day,  too, could  both  champion  individualism and  think
  differently.
  
 The exterior design of the Los Angeles building (by the architect Frank
  Gehry) expressed the forward-looking  approach directly - it resembled
  a   pair    of   binoculars.   But   inside,   it    was   even   more
  unconventional. Arrangements  were based on the  simple principle that
  no one should have a room of  his or her own. Instead, if they came to
  the office,  employees could check out  a laptop and  a cellular phone
  and then look for  somewhere to sit. At the end of  each day, they had
  to check  these back  in again-so  there were no  tools of  one's own,
  either.   In  a   curious   way,  then,   Chiat/Day   managed  to   be
  individualistic and collectivist at the same time.
  
 Not only  did people not have  offices, they also were  not supposed to
  sit  in  the same  place  on consecutive  days.  Jay  Chiat, the  CEO,
  occasionally walked  the floors asking  people if they had  been where
  they were sitting on the day  before and, if they had, would move them
  on. Anything not  stored in digital form on  the company's servers via
  the laptops - retrograde stuff like  books, papers, and files - had to
  be put away in hall lockers at the end of each day and taken out again
  in the morning. There were  meeting rooms for formal meetings, but all
  other deskwork and communication was to be done digitally.
  
 
  \section{Cooling Off}
  
 
  
 With hot desking, Chiat/Day sought  to keep people on the creative edge
  of the business. All reports  suggest that it primarily just kept them
  on edge.   Chaos rather than dynamism  was the most  noted result. But
  for  observers,  the Chiat/Day  experiment  (which  the company's  new
  owners  abandoned) exposes  to view  some of  the underlying  needs of
  people  working   together  that  the  infocentric   view  too  easily
  overlooks\footnote{Anderton, 1998.}. 
  
 First,  it made  some simple  material  needs clear.  Desks are  useful
  things  and  provide   more  than  a  surface  to   balance  a  laptop
  on.  Moreover files, documents,  and even  those wobbly  stacks people
  build on  their desks  often have a  useful sequential order  in their
  disorder  (which is  why  tidying can  be  so disruptive).  Similarly,
  people  customize   phones  and  laptops  to  fit   personal  ways  of
  working. Having  to rebuild your conventional or  your digital desktop
  every morning is  a highly disruptive chore that  ignores the needs of
  work and the nature of technology.
  
 Second,  the  experiment also  showed  that,  constraining though  they
  sometimes are, offices  keep people together for good  reasons as well
  as   bad.   Good  office   design   can   produce  powerful   learning
  environments.   But  much   of  that   power  comes   from  incidental
  learning. For  example, people  often find what  they need to  know by
  virtue  of where  they sit  and  who they  see rather  than by  direct
  communication. At  Chiat/Day people were spread around  roughly in the
  order  in  which  they  arrived.  People who  worked  together  didn't
  necessarily  sit  together  or  see  each  other.  (Chiat/Day  account
  managers reported coming back from client meetings and being unable to
  find their department.) With such lottery seating, incidental learning
  is much harder  to come by. As a result, the  need for more cumbersome
  formal learning and informing processes increases.
  
 Third, the Chiat/Day experiment also  showed that, despite the power of
  technologies, robust work patterns are  hard to disrupt. To get things
  done, people  rebelled. They  filled their lockers  and the  trunks of
  their cars with  the files they needed. They refused  to turn in their
  laptops  and telephones.  And  they used  various strategies  to build
  "virtual" departments.  Here, being virtual  was not an aspect  of the
  digital realm.  These were  physical areas of  the office  that people
  tried to occupy  collectively so that they could  re-create the useful
  connections of conventional departments.
  
 Finally,  accounts of  this  office-based civil  disobedience throw  an
  interesting light  on other social implications of  office design. One
  metaphor  for the  Chiat/Day  office  was the  campus.  Students on  a
  college campus  don't have offices,  the masterplan argued.  They move
  from classrooms, to libraries, to lounges. The same model was expected
  to work  for the  office. As some  employees pointed out,  however, at
  Chiat/Day the  result was  more like high  school. In  particular, the
  redesign  appears to  have  unleashed the  office  equivalent of  high
  school  bullying.  The  daily   unsettled  space  created  daily  turf
  wars.  Departments tried  to pull  rank on  each other,  each claiming
  favored areas because it  was "more important." Account executives and
  creative departments  went to battle  over pecking order.  People with
  sufficient authority  and power pulled rank on  those without, seniors
  shooing   juniors  away  from   comfortable  spots.   Executives  with
  assistants would order  the latter in early to hold  a place for their
  boss. And so on.
  
 Petty  though this might  seem, the  turf wars  remind us  that offices
  involve much more than the simple flow of information. Office space is
  not neutral ground.  Everyone who works in one  knows that, for better
  and  for   worse,  offices  are  dense  with   highly  charged  social
  relations. Power,  tension, authority, and insecurity  are all closely
  interwoven. They can  help get work done, and they  can hinder it. The
  troubles at  Chiat/Day indicate how the structure  of the conventional
  office,  while it may  pander to  petty fiefdoms  and yearnings  for a
  window or a corner office, helps  keep social tensions and turf war in
  check. Any  one settlement  may appear less  than optimal, but  it may
  nonetheless be better than no settlement at all.
  
  
 Breaking up such a  settlement has different consequences, depending on
  where  you stand (or  sit) in  an organization.  The urge  for radical
  reorganization, such as  tearing the walls down and  throwing away all
  badges of rank, generally comes from  the top. But it is usually those
  in  less secure positions  who bear  the adverse  consequences. Bosses
  lose little else  when they lose their space.  Their status is usually
  still  quite  evident.  Others  lower  in  the  pecking  order,  where
  authority and control are far more  tenuous, may find they lose a good
  deal more. Middle  management, one of the most  insecure points in any
  organization, may find managing increasingly difficult.
  
 Undoubtedly,  making  people  justify  their  position  and  authority,
  challenging  old  alliances and  divisions,  and  generally trying  to
  transform office  culture by transforming its infrastructure  can be a
  good way  to destroy inertia and  drive new thinking.  Breaking from a
  structured office to hot desking,  however, suggests that the only two
  alternatives are closed  stables or a stampede. Between  these two lie
  more subtle uses of office  space that can enhance working conditions,
  build  channels of  coordination  and communication,  and improve  the
  quality of work done.
  
 Indeed, while Chiat/Day has taken  many of the headlines, both euphoric
  and damning,  elsewhere modern office design has  proceeded along much
  more interesting  lines. Plans more closely  relate physical structure
  and  social  structure, revealing  the  pecking  order without  either
  reinforcing it or concealing it behind a faux egalitarianism. External
  models have been internalized, so that the floor plans of some offices
  now   resemble  town   plans   with  streets,   squares,  parks,   and
  locales. While the accolade "community" is often used to make the most
  tawdry design seem respectable, this "community-based planning" at its
  best can  both reflect  and magnify the  social resources  for getting
  work done\footnote{Despina Katsikakis, quoted in Anderton, 1998.}.  Forward-looking companies are finding that designing a
  new  company  and  designing   its  offices  are  intricately  related
  processes, with each feeding off  and into the other. Such designs are
  expected to  be dynamic as  well, with businesses looking  for designs
  that do not lock the company into  a single model of work but can grow
  with the company\footnote{Brand, 1994.}. 
  
 At their best, such design reflects  the social character of work - the
  way in which people act as resources for one another, rather than just
  as  one  another's information  provider.  Given  the  nature of  this
  resourcefulness, severing  the ties that bind people  together in work
  may be as damaging as  binding them together more tightly. Finding the
  balancing point between the  mix of centrifugal and centripetal forces
  needs to  be the goal. It  is admittedly a challenging  one, which may
  involve alternative or even shifting points of equilibrium.
  
 
  \section{Maintaining Balance}
  
 
  
 Information technology undoubtedly  must play an increasingly important
  part in  this balancing  act. Yet none  but an evangelist  could claim
  that technology will find the balance point automatically. Introducing
  new technologies and  overestimating what they could do  played a role
  in the imbalance felt at Chiat/Day, as it has elsewhere.
  
 More generally, new  technology often threatens not to  help find a new
  equilibrium  but  rather  to  unsettle equilibria  whenever  they  are
  found.  The  rapid  innovation   endemic  to  the  technology  can  be
  destabilizing, even for large organizations with copious resources. In
  well-supported offices, users often look to the next upgrade with much
  the same relish  with which they greet the annual  visit of the winter
  flu. They know it will  precipitate crises and shortages, increase the
  burdens  of  those  still up  and  running,  and  take weeks  for  the
  headaches to pass. They also know that just about the time that things
  return to balance, another  disruptive strain will come through. Where
  there  aren't technicians  to manage  the transformation  or  peers to
  share the  burdens with, the  weight of continuous  product innovation
  can be unsupportable\footnote{At the time it was introduced, some feared that the 
  installation of Windows 95 might contribute to a slowdown in national 
  productivity in the United States (Fried, 1995).}. 
  
  
 The instability that rapidly changing technology brings, however, often
  lies less  in the technology itself than  in enthusiastic expectations
  that everything being "just a click away" or "at your fingertips" will
  make  life easy.  Battered by  such hype,  it's easy  to  believe that
  everyone except you knows how to use this stuff without a problem.
  
 We saw this pressure  at work on a new employee at  Xerox PARC. She was
  intelligent and hard  working, but got mired in  difficulties with the
  office computer  system. That system  came with the usual  promises of
  "usability" and  self-explanatoriness, but she found  it impossible to
  use or understand. Being a  newcomer, she was reluctant to keep asking
  for help. Suffering  in silence, it seemed daily  more likely that she
  would have a breakdown if she didn't quit.
  
 Then chance moved her desk from an isolated office into the center of a
  group of offices. There  she immediately benefited from the incidental
  learning  that  we mentioned  earlier.  She  saw  that these  "stable"
  machines crashed for  everyone. She saw that there  was no more "ease"
  for  experienced assistants, long-time  employees, or  PARC's hallowed
  computer scientists than for her. And she also saw that when a machine
  did  crash, its user  would without  shame look  around for  help from
  someone  else who,  whatever  their status,  had successfully  steered
  around that particular problem. No one person knew how to handle these
  temperamental  machines.  But  spread  around the  office  was  enough
  collective knowledge to keep them up and running.
  
 Office help systems, this story  indicates, are not limited to manuals,
  vendor Web sites, IT departments,  or on-line files. The office social
  system  plays  a major  part  in keeping  tools  (and  people) up  and
  running.  The "geek" who  understands the  network, the  secretary who
  knows  the  secrets  of   Word,  the  one  colleague  proficient  with
  databases, the other  who has learned Java in her  spare time, and the
  one who knows how to nurse the server all contribute.
  
 Most systems, amalgams of software and hardware from different vendors,
  rely on social amalgams of  this sort to keep everything running. (One
  of the  first people mentioned on  the Microsoft Web  page about Lusk,
  the  Wyoming  town,  is  a  teenager who  "doesn't  mind  sharing  his
  expertise.")  In  this  way,  the   facts  of  office  life  reveal  a
  combination      of     technological      frailty      and     social
  resourcefulness. Infoenthusiasts, however, tend  to think of these the
  other way around,  missing the role of the  social fabric and assuming
  that individuals in isolation can do it all.
  
  
 Paul Strassmann, former vice  president of Xerox's Information Products
  Group and onetime chief information technologist for the Department of
  Defense,  argues  that most  businesses  that  are  well endowed  with
  computer  technology lose  about  \$5,000 a  year  per workstation  on
  "stealth spending."  Of this, he  argues, "22\% [is] for  peer support
  and  30\% for  the 'futz  factor.'"  The  second includes  "time users
  spend in  a befuddled state  while clearing up  unexplained happenings
  [and]  overcoming  the  confusion  and panic  when  computers  produce
  enigmatic messages that stop work."\footnote{Strassmann, 1997, p. 77.} 
  
 Home office workers usually lack this sort of cash. More significantly,
  they   lack  necessary  peer   support.  Consequently,   with  current
  technology,  money-losing futzing,  late  at night  and  early in  the
  morning, is  endemic to  the home office.  Lacking the  boundaries and
  structures provided by office life, work spills relentlessly over into
  private and family life.
  
 
  \section{Invisible Hands}
  
 
  
 Within  organizations, this  stealth  spending is  readily hidden  from
  those  at   the  top.   Unfortunately,  so  is   the  need   for  such
  spending. Life at Xerox brought us  face to face with this issue, too,
  this  time over  the  matter of  copier  design. Xerox  has long  made
  usability  a  critical issue  for  the  design  and marketing  of  its
  photocopiers. With  one series of copiers, however,  reports came back
  from the field saying that machines were proving unmanageable for most
  people.  Management disregarded these  reports, however,  because when
  they used the copiers, they found them thoroughly usable.
  
 Only  in time  did  it become  clear  why. The  most common  encounters
  between  senior management  and copiers  came when  new  machines were
  presented for  their inspection.  Inevitably, in such  encounters, the
  managers were  surrounded by people  whose jobs depended on  all going
  well.  Consequently, as  managers experimented,  the right  finger was
  edged toward the right button at  the right time, in a thousand barely
  perceptible  ways. What  everyone took  to be  a  successful encounter
  between an  individual, instructions, and  the copier was  actually an
  encounter made  successful by an informal and  almost invisible social
  network working hard to prevent the embarrassment of failure for all.
  
 Like  the story  of the  Xerox assistant,  once again  we see  that the
  office  help system  is  significantly  a social  system.  It is  also
  something that home  office workers don't have. But  instead of trying
  to  overcome this  deficit, futurists  and technologists  instead lead
  people to believe  that they don't need to rely  on social systems and
  would  be better  without them.  "Put a  computer in  people's homes,"
  Toffler  insists, "and  they no  longer need  to huddle,"\footnote{Toffler, 1980, p. 215.}    as if
  huddling  were always  a waste.  But  it isn't.  It's often  a way  of
  getting  things done  through collaboration.  At home  with  frail and
  fickle technologies and unlimited configurations, people paradoxically
  may need to huddle even more, but can't. After all, as Craig Mundie, a
  senior vice president at Microsoft acknowledges "there's no IT manager
  in  the  home"  - though  much  of  the  technology seems  to  require
  one\footnote{Mundie, quoted in {\it Wired,} volume 6, number 12 
  (December 1998), p. 202.}.   These cumulative problems  may lead to the  curious paradox
  that information technology, by  ignoring the role played invisibly by
  the  social system,  is keeping  people  out of  the home  and in  the
  conventional office, and not the other way around.
  
 
  \section{Concentrated Effort}
  
 
  
 In a home office  the only IT manager is the person  who wants to spend
  time  working with  the  tools, not  on  them. When  tools fail,  home
  workers  have  to  provide  their  own variety  of  the  peer  support
  Strassmann mentions.  All problems and all  futzing, shared elsewhere,
  fall into  the lap of the idealized,  individualized entrepreneur. Nor
  is  this  concentration  limited  to malfunctions.  In  attempting  to
  replace outmoded ways of  doing things, new technologies also displace
  work tasks  that were once  successfully shared across a  group. These
  are now concentrated on an individual.
  
 Desktop publishing, for  example, tries to put in a  box on the desktop
  all the tools that previously were distributed among authors, editors,
  copy editors, proofreaders, designers, typesetters, and printers, each
  with their own embodied, inarticulate  skill and judgment built out of
  experience. On  the one hand,  concentrating tools like  this produces
  enormous  benefits.   An  individual  gains,   at  least  potentially,
  tremendous  freedom and  control. On  the other,  that  individual now
  lacks  the experience  and support  that was  distributed  among those
  different roles. Inevitably, much  of this sort of concentration takes
  place  on  the assumption  that  the  task  involved, typesetting  for
  example, is  purely "mechanical" so  the experience is of  no interest
  once the mechanisms change.
  
 The purely  mechanical is  rarely so  pure. There's a  story told  of a
  typesetter working on a Greek  text at the Oxford University Press who
  announced he'd found a mistake in the text. As the typesetter couldn't
  read  Greek,  his colleagues  and  then  his  superiors dismissed  his
  claim. But  the man insisted.  So finally an  editor came down  to the
  compositing room. At first, she, too, dismissed the idea, but checking
  more closely,  she found there  was an error.  Asked how he  knew, the
  typesetter said he  had been hand picking letters  for Greek texts for
  most of  his professional life and  was sure that he'd  never made the
  physical move to pick the two letters in that order before.
  
 The story  may well be apocryphal,  but it does  illustrate the diverse
  sorts of  knowledge, including the "embodied"  knowledge, which people
  in different roles possess. (And may account for the absence of cogent
  editing  or design  in many  modern books.)  Putting this  all  on the
  desktop,  while supporting the  individual in  some ways,  ignores the
  support  and knowledge  latent in  systems that  distribute  work. The
  apparent "ease" offered by these  technologies hides much of the extra
  work they involve. So teachers  are encouraged to "put their materials
  up on the Web,"  as if that task too were merely  a click away. Anyone
  who tries  will quickly  find how demanding  making and  maintaining a
  worthwhile Web page can be.
  
 The displacement  and concentration provided by  digital technology may
  be  a legacy of  its design.  The legend  of the  'Net, after  all, is
  littered with stories of  people "hacking" around the clock, oblivious
  to  time or sleep.  It's still  a young  person's medium,  calling for
  intense  concentration and  few distractions\footnote{The family is often one of the missing 
  "distractions" in young people's lives. Talk about the home office often 
  overlooks how hard it can be to work at home with young people in the 
  house.}.  Andrew  Odlyzko, a
  mathematician at  AT\&T who has  pioneered studies of  Internet design
  and  behavior,  argues  that   most  systems  development  serves  the
  interests of such dedicated users. In so doing, it ignores the demands
  such development  places on ordinary users. In  consequence, there has
  been,  he  argues,  a  "migration of  administrative  and  maintenance
  duties" toward the  edges of the system - to  the individual user, who
  is the  person least equipped to  deal with these  problems. When that
  person is isolated in the home office, the migrants all beat a path to
  a single door\footnote{Odlyzko, 1998. The word {\it migration} is often 
  used to describe the process whereby content moves from outdated software to a 
  current version. It may thus conjure up the image of people with neatly packed 
  trunks waiting on the wharf for an ocean liner to take them to a promised 
  land. The reality of technological migration, however, often appears more like 
  the flight of refugees grabbing what little they can while escaping marauding 
  invaders.}. 
  
 
  \section{Something for Next to Nothing?}
  
 
  
 For the  home office, one of  the most significant  things displaced to
  the margin is cost. We all  know that the cost of hardware is dropping
  precipitously. The  \$500 computer with Internet  access already looks
  expensive.  It's easy, then, to imagine setting up a home office for a
  few thousand  dollars. But infoenthusiasts, who  tend to underestimate
  many  challenges, often  underestimate costs,  too.  Odlyzko estimates
  that capital  costs are  only about  20 percent of  total costs  for a
  networked environment;  as Strassmann argues,  many of the  true costs
  are often hidden "stealth" fashion, in budgets.
  
 Even without the stealth portion,  costs are high for both conventional
  and  unconventional  offices. Figures  for  the  1990s show  Microsoft
  spending  \$16,000   per  annum  for  each  of   its  workstations  on
  maintenance  and  upgrading\footnote{Berger, 1999.}.     (Given  these  expenses  and  the
  difficulties,  it's not  surprising to  read that  some  companies are
  "downgrading  and  'de-automating';   Chrysler  Financial  Corp.   and
  Pacific  Gas \  Electric, among  others, search  for perfect  blend of
  manpower and  technology.")\footnote{Wall Street Journal, 30 April 1998.}  These figures are  not that different
  from  those provided  by the  California advertising  agency  CKS (now
  USWeb/CKS). It had about one quarter of its employees working at home,
  but  estimated  that new  technologies  there  cost  the firm  between
  \$10,000 and  \$15,000 per employee  per year - though  employees were
  still paying half the costs of the hardware\footnote{Jaroff and Ratan, 1995.}. 
  
  
 Not only  are these costs hard for  a small office to  bear. It's hard,
  too, to bear  the hype which claims that a  principal advantage of the
  home office is that it's  cheaper. "The reason why companies are going
  towards telecommunications is simple," one advertisement argues: "They
  save millions."  They usually do not. Indeed, some people have claimed
  that many of Chiat/Day's  problems followed from its unwillingness (or
  inability)  to meet  the true  costs,  visible and  invisible, of  hot
  desking.
  
 Trying to transform the way  work is done and simultaneously save money
  is  usually a  mistake,  even  when moving  from  cost-laden atoms  to
  near-free  bits.  The  demands  of  turning work  that  has been  well
  supported by the  local social system into work  produced without most
  or any of  that system requires a commitment  to transformation, not a
  commitment to cost cutting. For when costs are not met up front in the
  home office,  they are deducted, stealth fashion,  from the unbudgeted
  and unbillable time of the home worker.
  
 
  \section{Paradox Lost}
  
 
  
 Frailty, displacement, and cost, then, are significant and continuously
  underestimated factors in the  evolution of work. Consequently it's no
  surprise  that the  introduction  of computers  has caused  widespread
  economic disruption not only  locally, but nationally, limiting growth
  in productivity. While multifactor productivity (which takes labor and
  capital into account) produced a  growth rate of 2.5 percent from 1948
  to 1973,  it produced  a rate of  growth of  0.7 percent from  1973 to
  1990. The  numbers may seem  abstract, but  their significance  can be
  directly grasped  from average earnings.  Had growth continued  at the
  1948  to  1973 rate,  U.S.  average income  in  1994  would have  been
  \$47,600. It  was, in  fact, \$35,300\footnote{Harris, 1994, p. 2.}.   Economists refer  to this
  surprising decline  in productivity growth  despite massive investment
  in computers as the "productivity paradox."
  
 Paul David,  an economist at Stanford University,  has argued, however,
  that the paradoxical  slowdown was not such a  paradox at all. Looking
  to the past,  he points out that a slump  in productivity followed the
  appearance of  industrial-strength dynamos in  the 1880s. Economically
  beneficial  effects of  the dynamo,  David  shows, did  not appear  in
  productivity  data  for another  three  decades.  Over those  decades,
  industry underwent a major  retooling as the old, heavily centralized,
  steam-driven  processes gave  way to  methods that  took  advantage of
  dispersed,  localized electrical  power.  A similar  process has  been
  underway  with the  computer, David  suggests. It  has taken  time for
  society  to transform the  "mature, ossified,  Fordist regime  of mass
  production"    to   the    new   regime    of   digital    tools   and
  demassification\footnote{David, 1990.}. 
  
 Productivity remained  stagnant for almost  a decade after  David first
  made this  argument. But recent  productivity figures lend  support to
  his case.   Manufacturing productivity  has been especially  high, and
  for the economy as a whole, the figures for 1995 to 1998 show a return
  to about 2  percent growth.  Those for 1999 may  approach 4 percent, a
  much  more  impressive  rate,  though  still some  distance  from  the
  sustained boom of the 1950s\footnote{Louis Uchitelle, "Productivity Set Fast Pace in Late 
  1998," {\it New York Times} (10 February 1999), section C, p. 1. Strassmann 
  (1999) argues that the recent boom in productivity can be attributed almost 
  entirely to interest rates.}. 
  
 In less  careful hands, however,  the thesis about  a lag can  be quite
  misleading.  It's easy  to  find people  claiming  that society  falls
  behind while technology streaks  ahead. Writing during the period that
  David  studied,  the  early  technological futurist  H.G.  Wells  (who
  admired the dynamos at Niagara  Falls more than the falls themselves),
  for example, already claimed  to see society falling behind electrical
  technology\footnote{Wells, 1902. The comments about Niagara Falls appear 
  in Wells, 1986.}.  It's harder,  by comparison, to find explanations for
  how society  catches up.  Yet  catch up  it must, if  only to be  in a
  position  to lag  again  in subsequent  technological  waves, as,  for
  example, the computer scientist Douglas Englebart, the inventor of the
  mouse, argues it is in danger of doing today:

\citacao{ 
  Real social danger today is that the technology is erupting and 
    moving so much faster than it ever ever ever has in all of our historical 
    experience. ... [It's] time to start adapting society to this revolution in 
    the technology. There's a lot of potential dangers ahead if we don't adapt 
    it successfully.}{Engelbart, interviewed on National Public Radio's 
  {\it Morning Edition,} 11 December 1998.}
  
 
  
 The business  writers Downes  and Mui turn  this sort of  argument into
  their "Law of Disruption,"  which holds that "[s]ocial, political, and
  economic   systems  change   incrementally,  but   technology  changes
  exponentially."\footnote{Downes and Mui, 1998, p. 29.}
  
 The implications  of this  formulation depend heavily  on what  sort of
  increments  and adaptation society  is capable  of. If  society cannot
  make occasional,  huge leaps and transformations, it  will forever lag
  technology.  On the other  hand, David's  argument would  suggest that
  society  did adjust.  If so,  we would  expect to  see signs  of major
  social transformation  and disruption in periods of  catch-up. Yet, if
  we set aside the appearance of  the Soviet Union and the defeat of the
  Axis  powers  as  not germane,  it  is  hard  to  see a  major  social
  transformation in  the industrial countries  between 1890 and  1920 or
  (setting aside  the collapse  of the Soviet  Union, this time)  in the
  1980s.   Change, yes; progress,  yes; but  not the  sort of  leap that
  would be necessary to keep pace with "exponential" growth\footnote{This argument offers another case of separating a 
  logic of information from the logic of humanity (see chapter 1). It's hard to 
  know who measures the "exponential" progress of technology if not 
  humanity-unless technology is allowed to set its own standards.}.
  
 It may be, instead, that thinking this way about technology and society
  is  backward.  It's a  wrong  way,  moreover,  that can  have  serious
  consequences. To accuse society  of lagging lets technology and design
  off the  hook too easily.  It implies,  in the end, that  you can tear
  down walls,  issue laptops and cell  phones, or send  people home with
  industrial-strength  technology  and then  blame  them  if they  don't
  adjust.
  
 Our  argument, in  the course  of this  chapter, by  contrast,  is that
  technology  design has  not taken  adequate  account of  work and  its
  demands but instead has aimed at an idealized image of individuals and
  information.  We  would  argue,   then,  that  the  predictions  about
  demassification and  the home office  inherent in this  idealized view
  cannot come  about until  not society, but  design adjusts.  (At which
  point, the idealized view will have to adjust a little, too.)
  
 Again,  parallels  with  the   development  of  electricity  are  worth
  noting.  For  example, the  1920s  and  1930s,  particularly with  the
  development of rural  electrification, also produced familiar-sounding
  claims that,  with this  new technology, work  and workers  would move
  from the  cities to the  countryside once they adjusted\footnote{Carey, 1989.}.   Seventy
  years  later, cities  are still  growing and  rural  communities still
  shrinking.
  
 Furthermore, a long  view of the dynamo would start  not with the first
  generating plants, as  David does, but with the  first dynamo. Michael
  Faraday invented  this in  1831. Initially, it  was too frail  and too
  expensive for much practical use.  For some forty years, its principal
  use was  to drive the telegraph. Only  by 1890 was it  "tamed," in the
  words of the  economic historian Joel Mokyr. Then  electric motors and
  dynamos had  become robust enough  to make adjusting to  factories and
  cities  worthwhile\footnote{Mokyr, 1990.}.   (This is  roughly the  point at  which David
  takes  up  his  story.)  Inevitably,  that adjustment  took  time  and
  proceeded in a series of feedback loops along with developments in the
  technology. But  this was a matter  not of society  "catching up" with
  technology, but of society adjusting technology to its needs.
  
  
 The computer  would seem  to follow a  similar trajectory.  Whenever we
  start  its process  of  development  (some would  go  back to  Charles
  Babbage,  a  contemporary  of  Faraday's;  others to  the  adding  and
  calculating machines of the turn of the century), there follows a long
  period  in which  it also  is  both too  expensive and  too frail  for
  widespread  social adoption.  Gradually,  it has  become more  robust,
  cheaper, and more  useful. Only in the past few years  has it begun to
  be "tamed" for  general use. For the home office,  there is still some
  house training to do\footnote{These developments of electricity and computers show 
  on a large scale something of the perennially difficult process from invention 
  to innovation, during which technologies are socialized, grand ideas trimmed, 
  and practical uses developed. The Internet has taken more than twenty years to 
  socialize, and it too has a way to go. We take up the topic of innovation in 
  chapter 6. These problems don't bedevil "high" technologies only. According to 
  {\it Prospect,} a British magazine, a study by the British Department of 
  Trade and Industry found that the time from invention to application of the 
  ballpoint pen was fifty-eight years, the zipper thirty-two ({\it Prospect,} 5 
  January 1999, p. 5).}. 
  
 
  \section{Socializing Technology}
  
 
  
 While we  don't want to let  design off the  hook, we must also  say as
  forcefully as possible that good design is very hard to do. It is easy
  and understandable to make fun of  bad technologies. It is not easy to
  make  good ones.  Given the  difficulties  of design,  however, it  is
  important  not   to  misrepresent  the  task  it   faces.  Too  often,
  information  technology  design is  poor  because  problems have  been
  redefined  in  ways that  ignore  the  social  resources that  are  an
  integral part  of this socialization process.  By contrast, successful
  design  usually draws on  these social  resources, even  while helping
  them change\footnote{Occasionally the lack of social resources in the 
  home may be recognized but not well understood. As we note in chapter 4, 
  British Telecom tried to overcome the isolation of its home-working operators 
  by piping the sound of background chatter into their home offices (Walsh and 
  Bayma, 1995).}. 
  
 One way to  engage such resources is to help  build them, engendering a
  sufficient number of competent users  that they can start to help each
  other.    Apple,  for  example,   liberally  provided   computers  for
  schools. This built a loyal user base and positioned the computer in a
  social  system  that  provided  both  formal  and  informal  help  for
  struggling users.  IBM and Microsoft, by contrast,  benefited from the
  corporate  preference  for  IBM's  machines.  The  necessary  informal
  resources then developed within the formal workplace.
  
 It's  much  harder  to  go  into  the  home,  a  more  isolated  social
  setting. So it's  also hard to be as confident  as Sun Microsystems in
  its prediction  that using Java  to connect household  appliances will
  make them  easier to  use.  People still  have difficulties  with much
  simpler appliances  like the VCR.  They continue to confess  (or maybe
  boast) that they cannot record or  set the clock.  Were there a social
  context  for VCR  recording (as  there is  for watching),  the problem
  would probably disappear (see chapter 5).
  
 Yet it is possible to socialize domestic appliances. Consider Alexander
  Graham Bell's strategy for  introducing the telephone, which drew both
  on the office  and on other situations for  social resources. By 1878,
  Bell's  English shareholders  were  becoming impatient  with the  slow
  development  of   this  new  technology  that  no   one  could  really
  understand.   The  well-entrenched  telegraph   with  its   reach  and
  increasingly sophisticated switching seemed far ahead of what appeared
  to  be an  interesting but  limited point-to-point  gadget\footnote{In his experiments that produced the telephone, Bell 
  had actually been trying to advance the cause of the telegraph. It was almost 
  by chance that he discovered an alternative use.}.   Both
  Western Union in the States and the post office in Britain had refused
  the offer to buy the  patents, though Bell's partners had been willing
  to all but give these away.
  
 To a great extent, the experts put their faith in the telegraph because
  the telegraph was in the hands  of the experts. It needed operators to
  encode  messages  at one  end  and to  decode  messages  at the  other
  end. And  it worked through  august organizations - Western  Union and
  the  General  Post  Office  -  that lent  significant  weight  to  the
  system. It was generally felt that only organizations like these could
  introduce the  telephone to society.  When they proved  unwilling, the
  venture looked increasingly unlikely.
  
 Bell,  however, invited  the shareholders  to  put their  faith not  in
  sophistication and  organizational expertise, but in  popular use. The
  company  needed, Bell  argued, to  abandon specialists  and specialist
  training and put phones in people's hands. In the right circumstances,
  the practicality  of the device would  do the rest. So  he crafted the
  circumstances.  Early  on,  he  put  telephones  in  hotel  rooms  and
  encouraged guests to  use them in the familiar task  of talking to the
  front desk.  In engaging a  regular practice, he subtly  taught people
  the use and the ease of use  of his new device. He also promoted their
  use for office intercoms, drawing in the resources of the office while
  nonetheless helping it to change.  Later, to pursue new users unlikely
  to stay in hotels or use office intercoms, the company developed a new
  strategy. It  put phones near  lunch counters. That way,  it reasoned,
  people who didn't  know how to use them would be  likely to see people
  who did know how and in this way learn about the phone system\footnote{Pool et al., 1977; Kraut, 1994.}. 
  
 As new technologies cascade into society, Bell's approach strikes us as
  illuminating. Though the telephone was a transforming technology, Bell
  nonetheless worked with the social  context of his day, not against it
  or in  isolation from it.  In the collective understanding  of groups,
  Bell  found  the  resources  for individuals.  Similarly,  e-mail  and
  collaborative  games have  had  profound socializing  effects on  some
  fairly antisocial technologies.
  
 Paradoxically perhaps, such social resources are nowhere more important
  than in  the home, because there  they are fewest.  In such isolation,
  the limitations  of usability, self-explanatoriness, and  ease and the
  gap between  promise and performance are most  cruelly exposed. People
  need to reach out from the home to find social resources.
  
 Already, it has become law that the way to learn to use a home computer
  is to get a kid. Senior citizens are also proving adept at learning to
  use computers  and are  currently the second-fastest-growing  group of
  customers  (after kids)  for computer  manufacturers. Both,  we should
  note, tend to have available the  time that such learning can call for
  (showing  that the technology  is not  yet quite  ready for  "plug and
  play" and  that users still cut  producers more slack  than the latter
  deserve). And both  tend to be fairly well tied  into peer groups, who
  provide  support.  Each  of  these  groups, young  and  old,  is  well
  positioned to help those in between.
  
 These examples continue to suggest that, in order for people to be able
  to work alone, technology may have to reinforce their access to social
  networks.  The  home worker, from this perspective,  resembles not the
  frontier pioneer, striking out  alone and renouncing society, but more
  a deep-sea  diver. The deeper a  diver works alone  beneath the ocean,
  the more sturdy the connections to the surface have to be.
  
 
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