In "The Social Life of Information", John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid (cite) present a strong argument for the danger of the current trend to view information as a specific entity that can be divorced from its social context.

Simply put, people access, manipulate, and interpret information within specific social contexts that add important meaning to the information at hand. Indeed, the quality of the information diminishes dramatically when separated from this context. They characterize the forces advocating this divorce as the "6-D's": demassification, decentralization, denationalization, despacialization, disintermediation, and disaggregation. Together, these forces point toward a world where each individual acts as a free economic agent interacting with other individuals worldwide, with little or no regard for traditional social or political structures.

They argue that this view of the future is hopelessly simplistic because it ignores the potent social forces that bind people into communities as well as the social contexts that give meaning to the isolated bits of information. For example, the slow growth of telecommuting despite the optimisting predictions of technology enthusiasts derives not from inertia but from a fundamental misappreciation for the importance of social interaction as a critical aspect of worker productivity. As technologies become increasingly sophisticated, people have even greater need for peer interactions in order to use the technologies effectivel: "The office social system plays a major part in keeping tools (and people) up and running." Paradoxically, "in order for people to work alone, technology may have to reinforce their access to social networks.

Brown and Duguid also emphasize humanity as the key difference between knowledge and information. Quite simply, knowedge always implies a "knower", while people commonly think of information as an entity that can readily exist outside of the context of individuals. Similarly, while information can readily be passed recorded and distributed, the underlying knowledge is very difficult to share. "Knowledge is something we digest rather than merely hold."