John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid, The social life of documents, First Monday, 1996
"abstract"
The advent of new technology has suggested to many that the document was nearing the end of its influential reign. Old document forms and institutions -- books, journals, and newspapers, on the one hand, publishers, and libraries, on the other -- seemed about to dissolve before our eyes. Some assume that technology will allow us to distill pure information, leaving the document, as such, behind in the ashes.
Yet, just as the elegies were being written, the explosion of the World Wide Web (for which the $2 billion launch of Netscape is not the most significant piece of evidence, merely the most countable) has made us think again about not just the resilience, but also the significance of documents. The success of the Web, particularly following the development of Mosaic and Netscape software, argues that both the document metaphor and documents themselves may be as important to the "information galaxy" of cyberspace as they have been in its Gutenberg equivalent.
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.
A summary is available.