Internet Librarian Keynote Day 1

Shifting Worlds – by Lee Rainie

Lee Rainie is the Director of the Pew Internet and American Life project. He talked about including IRC content in the presentation. The content showing on the screen while a presentation is going. He asked how many people were blogging live or going to blog the session later. He talked about the impact that this has on doing a presentation.

Rainie talks about the impact of collaboration and communications have had on us. Elizabeth Esenstien’s work discusses the effect of the printing press on society. Many of the effects she discussed are similar to those things that people note are happening now with recent technological changes.

The more commonplace and invisble the technology the larger the impact is. The Internet is fading into the woodwork. Broadband use is the norm, more than half. 2/3 of people have broadband in their life. Broadband users utilize the internet more extensively in their lives. Value of the internet in their lives is greater. 1/3 of adults don’t use the internet. 1/5 have never use the internet. New set of distincts for the “Digital Divide”. 3 sets of people. Group one people who aren’t interested at all. Group two people who are tepid towards the internet. Dial-up users by choice, don’t want the internet infused anymore in our lives. Group 3 broadband users, multiple devices, information voracious. Chat rooms are being used by fewer and fewer people. People are having these conversations in other places using other technologies.

Teenagers and the Internet

• 12-17 more connected than ever
• 1/2 use it ever day for hours at a time, use cell phones extensively if they have them
• redefining what it means to be with other people
• love to play around with their identity
• significant growth in the number of teen gamers
• more teens get news online, growth of teens buying things online
• growth of teens getting health info (often forbidden, or sensitive info)
• media creators themselves (artwork, stories, photos, blogs, websites)
• fanatic multi-taskers
• teens see advertising as just another stream of input
• different attention metric

Politics and the internet

• 75 million people used the Internet for some political activity
• More important source of campaign news than newspapers, indications that the
• internet may be increasing the stories of social/political capital, and civic ties
• if you use the internet to get political news then you are more likely to vote
• Internet seems to have contributed to a wider set of political views being seen by people. People are not filtering information so that they only see people with like ideas, values, etc.
• People don’t know how results are being ranked and that candidates can work to alter those search results

Internet Use in Relationship to Major Moments in their Lives

• Notable growth of people using the Internet at major moment in the life and the value of the internet in that experience
  • Education and training
  • New college
  • Deal with a serious illness
  • Marriage
  • Divorced

Four trends going on right now

• more things (public toilets in France, appliances) and more people connected to the internet
• More people are accessing the internet mobilely
• Content creation will continue to grow (podcasts, blogs, wikis)
• Social aspects of searching and tagging

The idea that some people are choosing to shut down. Email free Fridays.

The idea of the long tail! (See the October Wired article by Chris Anderson) Looked at data from Amazon, Raphsody, etc. A significant number of sales aggregately are coming from the long tale. How to people discover it? Social networking.

Smart mobs – Howard Rheingold sharing information on the fly. New kinds of social organization

Linda Stone (formerly of Microsoft) – Modern life is characterized by continuous partial attention. Scanning for multiple streams for the best possible thing for us to sync upon.

Joseph Piper work “Leisure” and David Levy at University of Washington. Right mix of being connected and being completative.