Today, the UC Berkeley School of Information hosted, as part of its distinguished lecture series, a debate between Andrew Keen and Paul Duguid, moderated by Geoff Nunberg (the event was co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for New Media, Mass Communications at UC Berkeley, and the UC Berkeley Library).
Paul Duguid is an adjunct professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information; a professorial research fellow at Queen Mary, University of London; and an honorary fellow of the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development at Lancaster University School of Management. At Berkeley, he co-teaches the “Quality of Information” and the “History of Information”, and his current research interests include the history and development of trademarks and a three-year archival research project funded by the ESRC of the UK and administered through Queen Mary, University of London. Throughout the 1990’s, he worked at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, and his book The Social Life of Information, co-written with John Seely Brown, is a reflection on the digital bombast of that era.
Paul Duguid (duguid@parc.xerox.com) Research Associate in Social and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and consultant at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center Native of Wallasey on the banks of the River Mersey. Graduate of Bristol University, England (English & Philosophy) and Washington University, St. Louis (English Literature).
Over the past few years, I have written a series of articles with John Seely Brown (Chief Scientist of the Xerox Corporation and former Director of its Palo Alto Research Center) about learning, working and design. Some of these articles are now available on the Web. We welcome comments, reactions, and suggestions and do our best to respond to as many of these as we can. We have developed ideas that run through these articles into a book, The Social Life of Information, published by Harvard Business School Press in Spring, 2000. In Material Matters, an article written for a collection of essays called The Future of the Book, I set out some thoughts about the limits of predictions about technology. Send mail to: Paul Duguid
