The Social Life of Information is a 2000 book by John Seely Brown (the former Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and director of Xerox PARC) and Paul Duguid (Adjunct professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information), which discusses recently developed practices in the transmission of information in social and business contexts.
The authors argue that information technology needs to be considered in a broad context that includes the entirety of society and social resources, in contrast to the narrow focus on information that tends to be the framework of such technology – what the authors criticize as "tunnel design".[1] That is, increased technological delivery of information does not in and of itself contribute to a better future. The text, in part, analyzes examples of the office world's adoption of technology, offering a differentiated rather than an unquestioningly affirmative view of the effects.