In his past life, John Seely Brown was chief scientist of Xerox Corp. and director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). In the simplest terms, his job was to shape the future.

During his tenure, Brown expanded the PARC staff, adding artists, linguists, anthropologists, and sociologists to a roster of world-class physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists.

In 2000 he coauthored "The Social Life of Information," a book that has steadily gained popularity since it was published. "It seems to be speaking to people in ways that even seven or eight years ago it was not," Brown says.

In your book you argue that information acquires meaning only through social context. Explain that.

What we're saying is that an utterance takes on much more meaning when you understand the context it came from. In the old days, everything happened face to face, and the context was implicitly understood. Today we're having conversations across cultures and over all kinds of distance media whether it's IM, e-mail, or Skype, and the context is not necessarily shared. For example, not long ago I was walking down a road in a village in China, and my cell phone rang. The caller had no idea I was at the other end of the world, and because I didn't render the context for him, he probably thought I was being a little bit rude. I'm sure he didn't understand that my desire to cut the conversation short was because of the cost of the call!

You call yourself a chief of confusion. What does that mean?

We live in a world where things are changing so rapidly and information is so confusing. I feel myself almost always moderately confused. What did that message mean? How do I interpret what I just heard? So I decided to acknowledge that the question is often more useful than the information. Just saying to somebody, "Did you really mean what you just said," gets them to step back and reflect on what they said, which often produces more value.

What's been the most significant change in information management in the last decade?

Google and cloud computing put together have been dramatic. This ability to index the world and then to use that index for all kinds of purposes is really astounding. I can sit in my armchair and do almost as much—if not even more—than I did 10 years ago with nine full-time librarians working on my behalf. The ability to engage in incredibly rich interactions and take on amazing problems on your own now is totally possible.

Can you give another example?

We're not only generating more data than ever, but we also have new and powerful ways to image the data. For example, technology that was developed for gaming lets us visualize very complex systems. Recently I was playing with a protein inside a virtual three-dimensional cave, and I got wrapped inside the protein and saw how it was folding itself. I began to understand for the first time why modeling the dynamics of proteins is so incredibly complicated.

In a corporate context, you've said information from the top is not getting down, and information from the bottom is not getting up. What did you mean?

The CEO has no way of understanding what people five levels down are thinking because the management chain is famous for only passing up those messages the CEO wants to hear and not what the real game is. As a result, it's very hard for people five levels down to actually get heard. There are a couple of ways this is being circumvented. One is blogging. Another is idea markets, where people in an organization can buy options on whether they believe this or that product will succeed in the marketplace. That technique is turning out to be very interesting in terms of giving people in the trenches a voice.

Is there a gap between Information Age hype and reality?

I think something more serious is happening. The world is very confusing, and uncertainty is rising, which means that we often are in a situation where the unintended consequences of acts can easily swamp the original idea. The past seven years has been a study in unintended consequences, almost without fail.