I visited the bookstore this morning to see what was availaable on Apache web servers. I found a couple, but after a fairly close look, secided to postpone buying ne for a bit and see how I make out with my Linux system. However since I was in the store, I did buy two other books: the novel An Equal Music by Vikram Seth and The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid. The latter promises to be interesting, I have always enjoyed their writing. The Seth book will be my first reading of his work, but he comes highly recommended.

I read the first two chapters of Brown & Duguid. It is living up to my expectations. The first sentence says it all. "The idea that information and individuals are inevitably and always part of a rich social network is central to this book". (p. ix)

Here are a few more quotes:

• This central focus [on information] inevitably pushes aside all the fuzzy stuff that lies around the ages - context, background, hisotry, common knowledge, social resources. (p. 1)
• Instead of thinking hard, we are encouraged simply to "embrace dumb power". (p. 15)
• 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 inforamtion essentially separated itself from the speed of human travel. (p. 17)
• "The paradise of the shared knowledge and a more egalitarian working environment just isn't happening. Knowledge isn't really shared because management doesn't want to share authority and power" [Shoshona Zuboff from In the Age of the Smart Machine] (p. 30)
• 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. (p. 31)
• "chatterbots" - software programs that simulate a human response to typed questions (p. 36)
• in the hands of some futurists, agents appear more as angels offering salvation for encumbered humanity than as software programs. (p. 38)
• ... 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. (p. 40)
• We might all be able to use agents, but how many are able to understand their biases... Is your agent, you must ask, neutral, biased, or merely weighted? Who really controls your agent, you, the designer, or the person feeding it information? (p. 45)
• ... despite all the rhetoric about the Internet "killing" the book and tailoring information, the first great flagship of Internet enterprise was a book retailer. (p. 46).
• in a description of a study by the anthropologist Jean Lave of supermarket behavior: "In between setting out and coming back, they continually shifted their goals, their preferences, and even their rules without hesitation." (p. 50). This is a fairly clear description of this Year of Learning activity. We are not machines, nor should we want to be.
• Judgement and discretion are not features of software. ... They are learned ... through social relations and participation in human activities (p. 54)