BKINFECO.RVW   990512

"Information Ecologies", Bonnie A. Nardi/Vicki L. O'Day, 1999,
0-262-14066-7, U$27.50
%A   Bonnie A. Nardi
%A   Vicki L. O'Day
%C   55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA   02142-1399
%D   1999
%G   0-262-14066-7
%I   MIT Press
%O   U$27.50 800-356-0343 fax: 617-625-6660 www-mitpress.mit.edu
%P   232 p.
%T   "Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart"

I have only the greatest sympathy for any attempt to ensure that
technology serves people, rather than the other way around.  This
book, however, adds almost nothing to the ongoing debate and work on
the subject.  And it is ongoing.  One of the more surprising features
of this text is the repeated implication that nobody else has ever
considered that there might be a middle path between uncritical
technophilia and rabid Neo-Luddism.

Part one of the work is entitled "Concepts and Reflections."  The
promised ideation is rather sparse, while the opining takes up the
bulk of the space.  Chapter one is a rather error filled (the book
actually contradicts itself on some points) description of Fritz
Lang's silent classic "Metropolis."  The main point of a rather
meandering chapter two seems to be the assertion that technology is
not "inevitable."  The metaphors of technology as a tool, text, and
system are examined in chapter three.  Unfortunately, while the models
do provide differing ways of looking at practices, the analysis is so
orthogonal that almost no useful comparisons can be made.  Chapter
four finally brings us to "information ecologies," but not in any
defining way.  The discussion feels like all too many discussions of
the "free market" system: new products influence the market, and the
market influences new products, and it all just sorta works, you know? 
Deliberation about values, in chapter five, is undercut by the
immediate jump into the relativist camp.  Which makes the subsequent
insistence on "core" values rather ironic.  Chapter six does not,
therefore, provide any useful guidance on how to evolve an information
ecology.

The "case studies" of part two does not help in any attempt to
understand what an information ecology might be.  While all of the
communities involved; libraries, MUDs (Multiple User Domains),
informal "help" networks, school courses, and teaching hospitals; use
technology, the descriptions provided deal strictly with social
interactions.  While some of these behaviours may be affected by
computers and new forms of communications (and, in some cases, may
require them), the analysis does *not* deal with differences between
traditional and "computer-aided" dialogues.  Indeed, in most cases the
fact of technology could be removed entirely from the essays, and it
wouldn't make any difference.  "Odd man out" in this section is a
chapter on the Internet.  This may be because of the demand that
information ecologies be somehow "local," which the net decidedly is
not.  A concluding chapter recapitulates the episodes of the book, but
does not help to clarify whatever concepts the authors intended to
present.

copyright Robert M. Slade, 1999   BKINFECO.RVW   990512