Article from 1996, worth reading today DoingStuff.DonaldNoyes.20141019
---Quotes from article:
"To fully assess the document's evolving role requires a broad understanding of both old and new documents. For documents are much more than just a powerful means for structuring and navigating information space -- important though that is. They are also a powerful resource for constructing and negotiating social space. It is the latter quite as much as the former that has made the documents of the World Wide Web so popular."
- "Simultaneously, some claim that written documents are moving from the permanence of old forms to the performance of new ones. Certainly, notions of "real-time response," "collaborative work," "multi-authored hypertexts," "shared documents," "relational databases," "on-line editing," "continuous up-dates," "interlinked data," "live video links," and other properties suggest that their malleability makes new documents significantly different from old ones. Those who struggled for years with stencils and White Out undoubtedly appreciate the shift from fixed to a different sense of fluid."
"As Fitzgerald's version of Omar Khayyam puts it, "The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all their Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all they Tears wash out a Word of it."
- "In contrast, voice once left no trace beyond the fallibility of memory. But today, as we write on screens, our writing may sometimes be as ephemeral as the voice. Whereas, as Richard Nixon discovered, whispered comments can be captured as robustly as a stone inscription. Changes in technology make it clear that we can no longer take for granted a correspondence between social purpose and technological resources. Now a trace may appear where it wasn't expected, or disappear when it was taken for granted. This change doesn't insist we simply leap from product to performance, renounce fixity and embrace transience, become digital where once we were material."
"In passing between communities, documents play an important role, bringing people from different groups together to negotiate and coordinate common practices. Such negotiations are particularly significant in institutions, such as bureaucracies and corporations, that comprise many different communities. Here the direction of the institution as a whole depends on the successful outcome of negotiations among its constituent groups, all of whom have particular interests at stake. Both the means and a willingness to come to a shared understanding are vital to the effectiveness of such institutions. Because documents (or as the sociologist Leigh Star calls them "boundary objects") passing between communities face different interpretive strategies in each one, the challenge of coordinating practice around them is always theoretically and often practically problematic. One result of frequent intercommunal communication may be cross-border communities, groups of people who are, collectively, capable of dealing with the codes of both worlds and of talking a common language among themselves. These groups are essentially bilingual in terms of the two dominant communities their members come from. Institutions can strive to create such groups, but the more effective ones tend to emerge."
Extending RunningSixYearsBehind another 12 years.
The Social Life Of Documents