By PETER CALDER
John Seely Brown's not answering the telephone at the appointed time, but his recorded voice invites me, concisely, to "leave a concise voicemail." I do so - then call back at 10-minute intervals and finally encounter him on the fourth try. He's apologetic and trying to work out why my number didn't show up on his mobile phone "so I could just have pressed 'Call Back' and got you."
Worse, he confesses, his assistant who had set up our discussion has left for the day and he been scrabbling fruitlessly among the papers on her desk and trying, with equal futility, to get into her e-mail.
It seems at first an ironic state of affairs for a man who is acknowledged as the guiding hand behind the world's foremost technology think tank - the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (Parc), whose directorship he resigned last year. These are the boffins who created the mouse (the computer kind) and the so-called Graphical User Interface (Gui), which enabled us to use computers even though we couldn't type long strings of geekspeek in green on a black screen. (The company famously stumbled in failing to turn the idea into a product that every home had to have, which is where Microsoft and Macintosh were born but that's another story).
But it soon emerges that having this prophet of the future fumbling to find something from the recent past is rather apt.
For if there's one thing Brown - who goes by the name and the e-mail login JSB - is not, it's a geek. In fact, he has a healthy disrespect for them, which is immensely heartening to those of us driven to tears by error messages or instructions on those inappropriately named "Help" files on our home PCs.
He calls the supergeeks "digerati" - the digital age's equivalent of "literati" - and says they are "the techno-macho types."
"The info-enthusiasts we call them," he says with a chuckle (almost everything JSB says is attributed to a "we," the other half of which is Paul Duguid, a historian and social theorist at the University of California at Berkeley).
They pretend to control everything but "all they control is the hype and the mystique. Very few of the digerati have profound technical knowledge, believe it or not."
Since the 80s (remember the 80s?) these digerati have been striking terror into the hearts of us in the new-tech proletariat with claims about the digital revolution, most of which have turned out to be false.
And, argues JSB, one of the speakers at the Knowledge Wave Conference taking place in Auckland at the beginning of next month, the reason is almost invariably that the doomsayers have failed to understand the true complexity of the world in which the revolution is taking place. They suffer, he says, from tunnel vision - seeing only the narrow way ahead, and not the rich and confused landscape on each side.
"They proselytised the concept," he says, "that the information revolution will make everything we've ever known obsolete, all the institutions you know have to be blown up, the rules of the game are changing everywhere.
"That was a startling message to many people, but the techno-enthusiasts have so little understanding of how institutions and communities and people actually work that they ignore the way we communicate and make sense of the world."
The paperless office, for example, which was confidently predicted as being just around the corner in the mid-70s, never arrived. In fact, in the last quarter-century in the United States, paper consumption in offices doubled, from 40kg to 80kg a person each year.
It's bad news for environmentalists despairing about deforestation, but good news for those who enjoy a morning newspaper that they can leaf, rather than click, their way through. And JSB and Duguid (pronounced "Dogood") include a charming anecdote in their latest book, The Social Life of Information, which demonstrates the point that information is equally text and context - the information it contains is inseparable from the form in which it is delivered.
Working in an archive of correspondence written at the time of the American Revolution, Duguid saw another historian going through some letters, sniffing each envelope in turn but opening only a few. It turned out he was a medical historian, documenting outbreaks of cholera and knew that 18th-century Americans disinfected their mail with vinegar when the disease was active. In the faint, 250-year-old traces of the vinegar's scent the progress of cholera was plainly charted.
It's may seem like a simple update of Marshall McLuhan's "medium is the message" for the 21st century. But JSB's ideas, as he intends outlining them at the conference, have profound implications for what he calls innovation ecologies - environments in which creative thinking that will spark economic growth can occur.
Fundamental to that is the distinction he draws between knowledge and information.
"Knowledge is something that you have integrated into your own internal framework that affects your ability to act," he explains. "Information is a very passive notion. It gets stored in machines; knowledge does not. And with new technology, the need to store huge amounts of information in your brain is less important than the need to make sense out of the information, engage in judgment calls, critically assess it."
The internet is as dramatic a demonstration as may be asked for of the need for that change. Type "cardiovascular disease" into a search engine and you'll be offered the latest research from Johns Hopkins University alongside the millennial mutterings of a tied-dyed stoner in a New Mexico tepee.
JSB acknowledges that's "a fundamental foible," but says it brings the attention squarely back to the ability of the user to separate fact from fancy.
In that sense, he explains, the challenge facing 20th-century education is the same one that faced the ancient Greeks when they developed mass learning hand in hand with, and as a basis for, a system of government they called democracy.
"The importance of critical thought is now of increasing essence. Having huge amounts of information in your head is no good. I can find that anywhere. I have to be able to triangulate and to know whether I should trust it."
So creating "innovation ecologies" involves having a broader concept of what constitutes knowledge, and you can bet your hard drive that JSB won't be asking computer geeks for help with that one. In fact Xerox Parc famously hired an anthropologist to study the way technical reps on its customer helpdesk team worked together. He discovered that while eating, playing cards, engaging in what might seem like idle gossip, the reps talked about work continuously.
"They pose questions, raise problems, offer solutions, construct answers, laugh at mistakes and discuss changes in their work, the machines, or customer relations. Both directly and indirectly they keep one another up to date with what they know, what they have learned and what they are doing."
Such findings have enormous implications for the way businesses monitor what they call productivity and how they organise workspaces. (JSB derides office cubicles as "disciplinary silos" and says the challenge is to "get people to talk across the silos.")
"A company needs to shape its physical space and social space to bring people together in creative ways. Workers need safety on the one hand and creative abrasion on the other."
But it also has implications for the composition of staff. Just as education needs to be seen as more than a mastery of technology, staff need to be valued for their diversity from, rather than their conformity to, corporate norms.
Xerox Parc - whose personnel number barely 300 - employs its share of boffins such as mathematicians, physicists, chemists, but anthropologists, philosophers and artists are on the payroll too.
It's an idea that may sound weird in a country where artists of all stripes are routinely asked what they do during the daytime, but it's common sense to JSB.
"Artists help us understand," he says. "Most of them are avant-garde artists so they know how to push and probe the boundaries of things. That's what we do. We push boundaries and to them it's absolutely second nature."
The good news for this little country hoping to surf the knowledge wave on to a bright new shore is that being little doesn't mean coming last.
"Almost every success in Silicon Valley came from thinking smart when you're small. The catch is how do you take a constraint and turn it into a resource."
Xerox Parc competes with - and routinely outperforms - research centres with 5000 to 25,000 staff because "we found a way to leverage being small."
Size doesn't matter, then. Innovation consists of tapping our own resources - social and individual - rather than hoping to ape others' success.
"There are lots of people who want to copy other economic miracles, but one of my deep messages is that you can't just copy others' ideas. You have to look at creating success in a way that is highly sensitive to the context you are in.
"You have to look at your constraints in particular ways and turn them from shortcomings into advantages."
href="http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?reportID=57032">Catching the knowledge wave
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