Limits to Information
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The first chapter, 'Limits to Information', conveys that information does not and cannot exist in a vacuum but is socially, spatially, and historically positioned. How we create, design, employ and regulate the resources and technologies at our disposal is not only of vital importance for the shape our environment takes, but also a matter of moral responsibility towards the present and future generations.
Brown and Duguid argue that contemporary data-centrism fails to respect fundamental constraints. The authors contend that they know that reality is not hiding in the digital, but rather is being digitized. Their warning is that the informational aspects of life are becoming too important at the expense of what is not or cannot be reduced to information. It is the meaning, understanding, knowledge, and practices that constitute social contexts that cannot be reduced.
In reality we judge the trustworthiness of a person on many different factors and it is hard to code that many different variables. Human interaction revolves around issues of trust, and trust in the computer realm is hard to come by.
When it comes to knowledge management it is stressed that we have failed to understand how technology is meant to augment the social, not replace the social. Brown and Duguid state that much of technology had been designed with tunnel vision...