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October 24, 2005

Let me be your filter

Lee Rainie, Director, Pew Internet and American Life Project presented this morning's keynote on what's happening with the Internet in our world. He's thrilled that the work he and his team are doing means something to someone, and his colleagues were stoked that he was coming to speak to a crew of librarians. (Lee also encouraged people to ask questions real time, because he loves a good discussion, but also because he would rather the audience really enjoy the information they want to get. So awesomely interactive.)

In surveying Internet and technology trends trends, there appears to be overwhelming evidence that when new technologies hit the mainstream:

• The role information professionals changes. Our jobs, in particular, become very different.


• Any attempts to "choke off libertarian efforts" is met by serious liberal backlash, because much of th argument rests in issues of intellectual property and freedom.


• Online communities multiply in general, but particularly communities around new technologies get big and prominent.


• New language arises. Everything from acronyms and SMS word abbreviations to how people talk about things.


• New ways to study come about, and, to go with this, new professions emerge.


• Literacy grows, and training becomes more of a priority, particularly an increase of emphasis on training children to do new stuff.

And now we get into some tasty numbers from Pew.

In general, the saying goes that "the more commonplace and invisible the technology, the more impact it has".

• 67% adults use the Internet
• 87% young adult users consider themselves adult users
• More than half of Internet users have broadband, 2/3 have broadband int heir lives, at home or work. Broadband users also use the Internet differently from dial up, spending my time, using it for more purposes, and taking much more pleasure out of it.

To follow that last point, dial up users of today are not intereseted in large amounts of information, and they aren't interested in using the Internet to communicate. While Mr. Rainey explained that he believed the old digital divide of haves and have nots has been replaced by a new classification system of users, I think it's more of a new way to classify the haves as:

• Cold: not so much into the Internet, and not really big users at all. More of a "if I have to" sort of mentality on the Internet.
• Tepid: on again off again users, user who aren't too excited about the Internet taking a "role" in everyday life, more experienced than Cold users overall, and probably dial up by choice.
• Hot: broadband users who are also gadgeteers, all sorts of hungry for information, which hyper manic interconnection with other people.

So what are people doing online these days? The Internet is used tons email, IM, looking up health and government information. Chat rooms are actually being used less, partly because they've become inhospitable environments, and partly because IM groups, blogs, and discussion groups (web bulletin boards) are taking the place of chat rooms.

Let's look at the different categories of recently-harvested stats Lee focused on.

Teens and the Internet
12 to 17-year old are more connected than ever. They absolutely adore IM, so much so that 1/2 of all teen users use IM every single day. I've seen it in my library, so I totally see it. Teens also love mobile phones, and while the percentage of teens using mobile phones is smaller than the percentage of adults with mobile phones, if a teen has a mobile phone, they love every feature of it into the ground.

IM + mobile phones + teens = redefinition of "what it means to be present with other people". Physical proximity to friends means less and less, and these users are the future of technology use, we definitely need to rethink the idea of what it "literally means to be with other people". It also means that the media ecology of today's teenagers is basically "the conversation never ends".

This also means that teens are "*fanatic* multitaskers". The Kaiser Family Foundation studied kids aged 8 to 18 -- dubbed "Generation M" (for media), pursued some interesting research about how teens can cram 8 hours of TV, gaming, reading, browsing, IM, everything, 6 hour bag.

More teen stats:

• 8 of 10 teens are gamers


• 38% increase in teens who get news online


• 43% of teens buy stuff online


• 47% of teens look up health information online (especially topics that make teens uncomfortable)


• 19% have created blogs, 3 times the rate of adult blog creation

These stats and more will be available in a Pew report to be published in the next few weeks.

Select questions from the floor on Teens and the Internet:

How do teens respond to advertising?

With a mix of skepticism and viewing it as just another form of input. Parents are turned off, but teens see it as input and assess it in different terms.

Do teens experience lower depth in interpersonal contact because of interactions with an increased influx of information and more use of technology?

There is an interesting sense of teens judging other teens on the basis of ability with technology and multitasking, but not so much less retention or attention as a result of technology and multitasking.

Politics and the Internet
Definitely and increase of use of the web for political research.

• These days, the Internet is a more important source for political information than radio.
• Internet rivals newspapers as an information source for broadband users.
• The Internet rivals TV as an information source for users under 35-years old

Select questions from the floor on Politics and the Internet:

Are users aware of how search engine results optimisation can dictate what information appears in search results?

By and large, no. Most don't even know the difference between paid and unsponsored results. There's still a large public education effort that needs to be made [by librarians, naturally].

Are you finding that people use the Internet to find other people of similar beliefs as a self-confirmation of their own beliefs?

The Internet is helpful for finding like minded people, no matter what the views (even if those views are nefarious, racist, etc.). But more users are also reading more about opposing views because of the serendipitous browsing nature of the Internet.

People using the Internet at major moments in life
This past February/March of 2005, Pew sponsored a report that was a repeat of an early 2002 report, on users utilizing the Internet for major life decisions like buying a house, getting a job and the like. The findings showed a growing intensity of feeling of usefulness of the Internet taking more of a role in their major life decisions.

• 21 million feel that the Internet has a crucial/important role in education
• 18 million used the Internet to find a new college or to research educational opportunities
• 17 million use the Internet to research health information to help and supportanother person with an illness (more than 1/2 of all health searches are performed by someone other than the patient)
• 7 million use the Internet to cope with a major illenss themselves
• 2 million use the Internet when getting married
• 1 million (I think that's what he said) use the Internet to research or cope with divorce

Select questions from the floor on the Internet and major life decisions:

Are people as a lifestyle choice moving away from being connected?

Yep. Some Comapnies are even promoting email-free Fridays.

Stuff coming down the pipe as a result of Internet usage changes:

• More people are more connected to the Internet going forward. See it as a parallel between the Internet of things and internet of people, as a result of the RFID-ification of America (dog tags with RFID tags, smart houses), and things part of the global intelligence.


• Mobile phones as the remote controls of life, like controlling your Microsoft smart house from your phone.


• Content creation on the rise bigtime.


• Tagging, social software, and social dimension on the Internet will grow

What does it mean to librarians?

Technology and Internet use and the librarian

The new era is not hit driven. It's all about The Long Tail, where librarians can be the people that pick up the bits of content spread out over many more content providers to aggregate them. Let us be your filter.

The smart mob

Look up Howard Reingold, researcher of smart mobs. Here's an example of a smart mob situation:

Lee and his daughter went to a Broadway show in NYC. It happened that George Bush senior also attended the same show, and as soon as he came in, everyone under 25 in the audience whips out a mobile phone to tell everyone they know that he's there. By the end of the show there were several groups of people outside protesting.

It's about people connected to each other gathering together to affect a change, without a centralized leader or plan.

"Continuous partial attention"

Linda Stone defined continuous partial attention as not the same as multitasking, but more of a scanning incoming information for one best thing to jump on and learn. Microsoft is getting as sense of how attention can be fractured but still functional, and studying how to exploit that ability and build products on it.

In Lee's mind, librarians among the few to be able to help culture evolve into an "information habitat", where libraries encourage balance: balancing collections and reading rooms, being connected and recharging offline, technology and analog entertainment. How can we do it? By helping ourselves as librarians find balance between tranditional and new technologies, philosophies, and interactions with our patrons, to become better filters for the world.

October 24, 2005 2:23 PM