Henderson's approach will also remind some readers of Shoshana Zuboff's work In the Age of the Smart Machine , though this book is easier reading. That book was also a participant-observation study of the modern workplace and the impact of computers on those practices. This blurring of disciplinary pigeonholes makes On Line and On Paper an interesting boundary object. Where Henderson looks in great detail at one specific network, Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O'Day's fieldwork take them to a half a dozen networks, of libraries and librarians, high-schools and teachers. In keeping with the biological analogy, they are more interested in the organs of the body, not the individual cells or the entire physiology.
Information ecologies share similar characteristics with their biological counterparts.
They are systemic, in that the parts and the whole interact in complex ways. Since an information ecology is made up of people and technology along with practices and values, the interactions between these elements cannot help but to produce complex, even unpredictable change. Like a rainforest, if you change one part of an information ecology, then the entire system is affected. Information ecologies are diverse, in that a variety of tools and people make up any healthy, thriving system. The authors suggest, for example, that an ATM machine is not an ecology, since one experiences a small number of technologies, in a simple process with very few other people.