Information Ecologies

I’ll definitely recommend this book to others, especially Section I, which was more idea-rich. Section II was helpful, though I felt it could have made its points more briefly.

I agree that we shouldn’t view all technology as inevitable. Fear complicates things, though. Oppenheimer helped to create the Bomb in part because it was a sweet problem, but “we” created the bomb because we were afraid that “they” would beat us to it. That argument gets played out in less grim scenarios whenever a company innovates to avoid losing money or jobs to another company. It’s a troubling reason, but it increases inevitability.

I agree that rapid change can stress our minds and souls. It devalues the wisdom of age, too, which deprives us of a centering force. I’ve also seen an interesting argument that it’s leading to a rise in immaturity among adults: a “child-like flexibility” that leaves many modern adults with minds that are “unfinished”. I’m hoping to finish mine this semester.

I loved the idea of technology as text, with designers sending us messages in bottles and hoping that we’ll receive and understand them. The Design of Everyday Things, and a book that I have a love/hate relationship with, Alan Cooper’s The Inmates are Running the Asylum, make the point that sometimes designers put very little thought into the message before sealing up the bottle.

I was struck in the Pueblo example by the value of identity (non-anonymity). They could address many problems in their small information ecology because everyone’s identity was public. Anonymity tends to diminish civility in large ecologies.

I enjoyed the idea of Gardeners, who are in some sense domain-limited volunteer librarians, acting as intermediaries between people and information (technology). In many situations a full-time information professional isn’t needed.

That the Internet removes intermediaries is in many ways a good thing. I hadn’t thought of that ecologically before, though: some of those intermediaries provided value through context and advice. Can information professionals help to fill that void?

The idea of Information Ecologies is a beautiful one, and works well. Nardi and O’Day provided some great examples and teased out some helpful principles. I'll look at more situations in terms of their ecology now. I would have liked more concrete advice on creating or tuning a good ecology. That seems at least as intimidating as the System model: a rainforest is a complex place to understand, let alone balance.