The Future of Information

Lisa Sloniowski, Information Literacy Programme

CoordinatorYork University Libraries

Free Writing Exercise

• Take out a piece of paper and a pen

• In 5 minutes, write about one trend (in research and/or technology) that you think will have the most impact on the future of information

What do you see?…

“Predictions of the future are never anything but projections of present automatic processes and procedures, that is, of occurrences that are likely to come to pass if men do not act and if nothing unexpected happens …”

Hannah Arendt

Outline

• Why predictions matter

• Scarcity of information to abundance

• Information as a conversation

• Finding

• Preserving

• Managing

• Fee vs Free

Why predictions matter:

• An observance of what stakeholders and skeptics are saying at the dawn of a new communications age is vital in the formation of policy and thoughtful planning.

• Future of the Internet - Pew Internet & American Life Project

Pew Findings…

• attacks on the infrastructure of the Internet, will become more pervasive

• more broadband/high speed connections, more deeply integrated into our physical lives

• increased government and workplace surveillance as devices become more ubiquitous

...continued…

• more online learning

• telecommuting and home-schooling increasing … work/leisure boundaries will diminish and family relationships will be affected

• continued, easy music file-sharing

Biting, Incisive Quotations

• Computers will no longer be a place to hide from girls or zits or lack of social skills, as it was for many of us. - David Liddle, 1993

• …matters have reached such proportions today that for the average person, information no longer has any relation to the solution of problems ... Our defenses against information glut have broken down; our information immune system is inoperable. We don't know how to filter it out; we don't know how to reduce it; we don't know to use it. – Neil Postman, 1990

From Scarcity to Abundance

• Papyrus

• The Printing Press

• The Internet

What’s happening?

• Google’s digitization project

• Scholarly journal backfile digitization

• Objects being born digital

• Content in the hands of individuals

• Affordable access

• More access to the previously ephemeral

Problems for the researcher?

• Filtering will become increasingly important – personal and technological

• Information literacy will become crucial, specifically …critical reading, understanding tools and types of information

Information as Conversation

• A form of filtering … looking for existing conversations, rather than single items

• New technologies have emerged which enable more interactivity on the part of the researcher/reader

Newish technologies with Biggish Implications

• Blogs/RSS … Citizen Journalism

• Pods/Podcasting

• Wiki’s

• Sharing software ... Del.icio.us, Flickr

• Folksonomies

One ring to rule them all..

• Federated Searching Scholarly examples:

• Illumina

• Google Scholar

Non-scholarly

• Meta-search engines

• Feedster

Problems with information as conversation

• Are the popular kids the smartest?

• Ideological blinkering?

• And of course … issues of analyzing  bias, accuracy, and reputation are just as important if not more in this environment

Preserving the historical record

• No paper trails

• Digital obsolescence

• Who owns the backfiles?

• Archiving the blogosphere

Some hope…

Wayback Machine

But …

What about Privacy?

• Do a Google search on yourself … anything there that you don’t want?

• Is your email safe?

Managing Your Information

• Email

• Documents

• Book, article citations

• Music files

• Bookmarks

Management tools

• Google Desktop

• Refworks

• Del.icio.us

Free or Fee?

• Open Source vs Proprietary Software

• File Sharing vs File Buying

• Open Access Movement vs Publishers

Further Reading

• Pew Future of the Internet Survey:

http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Future_of_Internet.pdf

• Predictions Database

http://elon.edu/predictions/