Author: Dan Ryan

I've been an Academic Program Director at MinervaProject.com, a professor at University of Toronto, University of Southern California, and Mills College teaching things like human centered design, computational thinking, modeling for policy sciences, and social theory. My current mission is to figure out how to reorganize higher education and exploit technology so that we can teach twice as many twice as well twice as easily.

Organizations, e-information and the law…

On NPR’s Morning Edition, reporter Ari Shapiro’s “New Rules on Retaining Digital Business Documents” described rules “that help companies decide how many e-mails and other digital items they have to keep in case someone sues them and demands the documents be brought to court. Even small companies can generate millions of digital documents in a very short time, and systems for managing them can be expensive.” (NPR 2006)

Consider Weber’s observation that maintaining written records is a hallmark of bureaucratization. He was primarily observing the internal rationalization of organization. Information retention rules would seem to push things at the other end of the spectrum and a sort of external rationalization oriented not toward organizational performance but rather the organization’s existence in a social context. Hmmm.

See Also

uscourts.gov 2006. E-Discovery Amendments and Committee Notes

Can a "realization" change the world?

Generic notion #257b. Consider the quote that begins “When IBM realized that it was not in the office automation business but rather the information processing business, everything changed….” Is there a generic term for this kind of realization? Part of it is just coming to see the truth, overcoming illusions, getting it right finally. But there seems to be a separate dimension here, something other than just coming to a correct empirical understanding of the world. One piece of this seems to be reframing; the realization has implications for re-interpreting other information and re-channeling how actions will be based on existing information/knowledge. Hints here, then, of a sort of “paradigm shift” (to use an overused and misused term). Hmmm, back to work.