The latest New Yorker includes an excellent piece by Adam Gopnik about how the Internet is affecting our thinking and our culture. Gopnik skillfully describes three groups: the "Never-Betters" who feel that the Web is an unalloyed improvement; the "Better-Nevers" who wish the Internet had never come to be; and the "Ever-Wasers" who believe that the Web, and its attendant dislocations, is our generation's version of disruptive change.
Sometimes people assume that librarians are "Better-Nevers" who curl up with dogeared, leatherbound books and loathe the Web. Not always. If anything, health sciences librarians--myself sometimes included--are too quick to fetishize new tools that will supposedly change everything...whether RSS, social networks, Second Life, or the next big thing. We're more "Never- Better" than the other way around.
But we should we "Ever-Wasers." The Web is indeed our generation's disruptive technology, which will make some technologies obsolete (anyone need a card catalog?) and coexist well with others (I read Gopnik's article in print). For all the talk of how new technologies displace the old, the world still has radios, movie theaters, and television stations.
But then again, we no longer have telegrams. Sometimes technologies do die, and maybe this will happen with print. The Sunday Times in print remains a great pleasure for me, but if the Times decides to stop printing because of a hemorrhage of subscribers I'll find other ways to get the news. So we should admire the benefits of older technology without confusing form with function. For as Clay Shirky notes (in Gopnik's parlance, Shirky is the ultimate "Never-Better"), societies need journalism, not newspapers. Likewise, we need librarians and not libraries.
We do need librarians and archivists. Ideally these individuals will insure that information, new technology and old technology is preserved.
Posted by: Historyatnih | February 16, 2011 at 05:56 AM