We can be forgiven for not noticing, but the world changed not long ago.
Sometime after the academics gave up complaining about the apparent commercialization of the internet, and while Wall Street was licking it’s wounds after the first internet boom went bust, the world changed.
Around the time we realized that over 200 million Americans have internet access, that 94 million Americans use the internet ?on an average day, and that 80% of them believe the internet is a reliable source of information, we looked around and found that along with doing their banking, their taxes, and booking tickets for travel and movies, those users were making about five billion web searches each month.
Now that over 62 million households (55%) have internet-connected computers at home, and 87% of youth 12-17 are active online, is it any surprise that children may learn to type before they write? Bloggers are changing the way we get news, but it’s Craigslist that’s killing newspapers’ old cash cow.
And perhaps most amazingly, the internet became not simply a market, a bazaar, it became a component of almost every facet of our lives. Facebook and MySpace were born of this simple desire to be human, with other humans, regardless of medium. A desire that drives, to greater or lesser extents, services like Flickr and 43things.
As Kevin Kelly noted in Wired:
?The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous.?
It may seem as unlikely as Norman Bel Geddes realizing his Futurama, or Chesley Bonestell achieving interplanetary flight, but what was once science fiction has become a part of our daily lives. The internet age is here. It is now. We just don’t know what it means yet.
And here’s the library connection: We will all struggle with questions of relevancy in this new world. Inevitably, this will require us to examine our core values and change our services, but the results will be magical. As never before has the technology been available to so connect questions with answers, patrons with libraries.
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[...] As part of a larger message to faculty returning from winter break, our CIO offered this summary of how he sees advancing internet use affecting higher education [...]
[...] The basis of this, is of course the critical mass of users who are making online services a part their everyday lives. And it’s not just the millennial generation, as it turns out that it’s the 35 to 44-year olds who are most likely to buy movie tickets online, just as one example. But a recent Pew Internet Project study on millennials does reveal an interesting trend, one that the above manifesto seeks to address: These teens would say that the companies that want to provide them entertainment and knowledge should think of their relationship with teens as one where they are in a conversational partnership, rather than in a strict producer-consumer, arms-length relationship. [...]
[...] But there is something to learn from these new technologies. I just saw numbers that suggested Facebook (an optional service) gets about the same usage by our students as our university portal (which students are required to use, even to check email). Match that with the growing number of stories I’ve been hearing of students using Facebook to collaborate on class projects, and we have to conclude that something interesting is happening. [...]
[...] This sucks, it doesn’t do X, and your plan for Y is all wrong. You’re probably right. The plan here is to build a framework that let’s us ask questions, build possible solutions, and share them easily. The only thing I’m certain of is our need to find ways to make our systems easier to use, easier to extend, and integrated into the larger stream of progress that’s shaping the internet that over 200 million Americans are making an essential part of their lives. Take this as an invitation to get involved, there’s lots to do. [...]
[...] The above is largely a confirmation of the incredible growth in internet use/communications dependency that that we’ve seen in the past couple years, but they do follow it up with some more detail (and if you read the PDF, a few examples): [...]
[...] The internet changes everything, where will you be when you realize it? [...]
[...] Not only does the Internet change everything, but it makes some good things work even better. [...]
[...] Just when you thought I was done been talking about how the internet really does touch everything now, Lichen posts some details from the most recent University of New Hampshire Res Life student survey and it gets me going again. In order, the top three activities are: [...]
[...] Part of the problem is that the information landscape and our behaviors — well, our users’ behaviors anyway — have changed faster than our systems and services. That is, the value of the library is distributed among our catalogs, institutional repositories, digital archives, many dozens of databases, and thousands of ejournals. We struggle for ways to differentiate between them when all our patrons really want is â??information.â? [...]
[...] I sometimes get accused of blue sky thinking when I speak of the role of technology in our lives, but while I go on about how access to huge volumes of instantly searchable information is changing us, this video shows a rather near future where we can manipulate it ways that seemed like science fiction just the other day. [...]
[...] We’ve been talking about social calendaring, but Peter’s comments obviously address a much larger concept, one that suggests the web really is turning things upside down. Now we’ve heard it from a dot-commer. We’ve heard it from the Pew Internet Project study on teens. And we’ve heard it from Jenny Levine when she talks about the â??4Csâ? of â??conversation, community, commons, and collaboration.â? [...]
[...] At the center of all of this, however, was the unspoken but undeniable fact that huge numbers of people were turning to the internet for their information, news, and entertainment. [...]
[...] Technology changes things, sure. The question is, how do you recognize the early signs of change before they become catastrophic? I spend most of my days working on that question in academia, but what about our armed forces? Noah Shachtman regularly covers that issue in DefenseTech: Like a lot of other sage observers, Naval Postgraduate School professor John Arquilla isn’t nuts about the idea of spending a ton on Cold War-style weapons systems when we’re supposed to be fighting terrorists and insurgents. But Arquilla is one of the first military analysts I’ve heard say that â??the Pentagon’s big platforms [aren’t] merely the wrong weapon systems to fight present and future wars, but [are] actually likely to bring defeat.â? [...]
[...] My third reaction is a question of politics. The movement of people online doesn’t respect geographical borders, nor those of gerrymandered political districts. Libraries may serve online users, and some of them will be successful, but our funding models are for local libraries that serve geographically constrained communities. [...]
[...] A discussion on Web4Lib last month raised the issue of Google indexing our library catalogs. My answer spoke of the huge number of searches being done in search engines every day and the way that people increasingly expect that anything worth finding can be found in Google. [...]
[...] Increasing use of the web is changing our expectations of information services and places greater demands of self-service on them. If â??Web 2.0â? has any meaning, it’s this notion that internet services are no longer the stuff of science fiction, but a part of our every day reality. [...]
[...] In another sign of the arrival of the stupendous, i.e. that the internet is changing our world, Engadget some time ago reported on the SellSmart Knockbox real estate selling dohicky. What is a KNOCKBOX? A KNOCKBOX is a sleek, self-contained appliance that is placed unobtrusively inside your home for sale. It contains a photographic tour, custom buyer presentation, and other important details about your home, which potential buyers can access without ever having to enter your home. [...]
[...] by example, Time Magazine echoed Kevin Kelly’s assertion in naming You as person of the year: Web 2.0 is about people. And â??the rulesâ? are emerging as a matter of market forces and natural [...]
[...] been the success of network-enabled efficiencies that allowed aggregation of improvements from a broad range of [...]
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