Internet Librarian 2005: OPENING KEYNOTE — Shifting Worlds: Internet Librarians at the Forefront

Program: Lee Rainie, Director, Pew Internet and American Life Project

Our world is definitely shifting with the Internet at the core of changes in behavior. Rainie discusses his project’s current findings about how people use the Internet and looks at the profound impact ubiquitous connectivity is having and will have on the way people interact, participate in groups, and influence their surroundings in the future.

Blog entries for the session:
InfoToday Blog 1
InfoToday Blog 2

My notes:

The term "continuous partial attention" crops up over and over during the conference, as a way to describe how people are working and utilizing technology today. This is not the same thing as multitasking. It means scanning incoming information for the one best thing to seize upon. This is a major behavioral change with implications for social life, commerce, political life, etc.

The "long tail" concept also cropped up – here's a definition by the person who coined the term. It originally refers to an economic distribution curve, where a few items have high demand and a lot of items have low demand – the curve exhibits a long tail for those items. Traditionally, suppliers have concentrated on the few items that fall into the high points of the curve, but the most demand is actually in the long tail, where people want niche items that fit their needs and wants more specifically. This applies to information, too: people seeking information often want the more specific, less one-size-fits-all information in the long tail, and librarians are specialists in finding where that information is hidden away. (Google hits the high points, librarians find the long tail.)

Items that the Pew Internet and American Life Project have found in their research:

Teens are all connected today, IMing, cellphones. They're redefining what it means to be present with other people. They play with their identities, using images, quotes, etc. to define themselves online. They are surrounded by media and create media themselves through art, stories, blogs, and websites. They're multitaskers.

"Social capital" – civic engagement. Is the Internet helping restore civic ties? Turns out that people who use the Internet for political news are more likely to vote than people who don't.

Are people using the personalization aspect of the Net to isolate themselves from opposing views? No, the opposite was found, Internet users do not limit their exposure to opposing viewpoints.