#15 (week six)

Thoughts on Web 2.0; quality, quantity, technology, money, true accessibility, real learning, sweeping statements, baby & bathwater...

Quality, quantity, technology I love the idea of technology and technological breakthroughs, and ways to lower barriers between people and between people and the information that they want/need/whatever. XML, for example, seems like a great tool advance to me, and it has opened the internet up to so many more people being able to do things in different ways. But why is there so much [expletive deleted] spouted about 'it's all out there' 'the web is the answer' 'the 2.0 way is all of us accessing everything' and the like? What there is to know is indefinably vast - and only the tiniest amount of it is readily and freely accessible to any significant proportion of [for now confining myself to the NZ] the population, and much of what is available is unvalidated or untested or undesirable. Yes, the web continues to grow, and 2.0 may well be a way to allow better or different access to more or different parts of that vastness, but I mean, really, some perspective - more/different is not necessarily better, it may just be more/different.

Money, true accessibility Why do none of the articles or commentators or bloggers or whatever talk about money? In many instances 'it' - whatever that may be for the individual - is not available unless you (or some large institution/corporation/organisation with which you are affiliated) are prepared to pay for it. It's not libraries locking up print journals and 'forcing' customers to emerge from whatever nest they are comfortably ensconced in and make an actual visit to a building somewhere that stops most of Joe Public from getting to the latest issue of Nature or Science or Whatever - the publishers (and by extension the writers etc) want to be paid for their intellectual content. Even where my library does provide electronic access to material, it isn't 'all' material. Firstly, because there is vastly more information not available electronically than is and, secondly, because huge amounts of material that is available electronically is gated based on money. Lots of money is required to access the information, and someone is required to pay. Taxes are real money, honest, even local taxes/rates. And I don't see people leaping up and down to pay more local or central government taxes (or students begging to pay more in fees) so more of us can access more peer-reviewed, validated - or whatever - content. I don't want my doctor doing his research via his blog before operating on me, (or mechanic/car, or pharmacist/prescription, or...) thanks all the same...

Sweeping statements I see versions of everywhere like 'At a minimum, this means placing library services and content in the user’s preferred environment (i.e., the Web); even better, it means integrating our services into their daily patterns of work, study and play.' My preferred work environment is not the web, and many of my customers do not see the web as their preferred environment. Yes, reach out, move on, keep exploring opportunities and possibilities - but don't imply that books and real human interactions and personal connections are passe and no longer relevant. I feel the same way about advertisers of any other product that seem to want to pursue me into every avenue of my existence (speaking of sweeping statements) - I wish they wouldn't. Hmmm.

Real learning I think the heart of it is a phrase in the OCLC Web 2.0 newsletter. It somewhat caught my eye when I first read it, but after video-ing, further reading, linking and surfing etc, I went back to the newsletter to see if I understood it differently , as it were - and this phrase, the second time through, sprang out: "You and your mobile and nonmobile devices—PDA, MP3, laptop, cell phone, camera, PC, TV, etc.—are always online, connected to one another and to the Web."

Because I'm not always online, I don't want to be always online, and see it as unhealthy to be this way. The connectivity sensation is false. You aren't connecting to 'people, thoughts, ideas and experiences...' as one article put it. You are alone in front of an electronic device sending out remote electronic signals. I don't want to be remote, or rather disconnected from genuine human contact and interaction. And I don't think video conferencing or video phoning is much of a connection either. I want to have the be-online option available to all people, myself included, but I want neither my work nor home life absorbed by/into it.

Is being exposed to more data or taking in more unverified 'facts' enough? What about real learning, and learning to apply your critical faculties (and being helped to develop these, and see why you need them) to what you see/hear/read. I come across a lot of regurgitation of, for example, an essay/fact/etc 'picked up off the net...' that therefore 'must be accurate, because I found it online...'. I don't think this kind of thinking and/or level of understanding will lead to productive or valuable collaborative results on a library website. So yes, a place for it, but a more important, or prominent, or exposed, part of our offer should be authoritative, defensibly so.

I don't want the library to *not* become a part of the whatever web 2.0 is, and will become. I don't want us to lose touch with those for whom the e-connectivity is a core aspect of their lives and worlds, or fail to reach out to them with services and resource options that mean something to them and work for them.

I love books, book-y stuff, and (apart from a very few exceptions in a totally plutonic and intellectual way) love other book-y loving people. So I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. For many people, probably for some time to come, a website is somewhere to check what time XYZ is open, or what events are on at LMN or how to get to ABC, or where GHI can be found, etc, etc.

I hope we can embrace both concepts & communities, paper/building/flesh-and-blood-person & virtual/e-world, & also embrace those that are a bit of these and other stuff, as it were... I think I like best the idea of web 2.0 as a platform to spring off from, rather than a way or means in itself. Federated searching of reliable sources of information does make me a little weak at the knees - I'm possibly still in touch with the geek-potential within me... Roll on web 4.0, where all things are everywhere for & too everyone, where 2.0 doesn't supplant 1.0, or 3.0 supplant 2.0...