Internet Anxiety Disorder
All too often I read someone hyping blogs and, particularly in the online librarian world, saying that it’s a choice between blogging and digital death. One of the great things about the past 10 years is that the world has shrunk dramatically and information is now so completely accessible. Particularly in the case of someone in an academic library with electronic databases up the wazoo, virtually everything is a couple clicks, or an ILL request at most, away.
But in the blogging world, it goes beyond that. Blogging is largely viewed as the act or writing about what going on now, as in right now. You’ve missed the train if you wait a day or two to comment on piece of news. I think this is where this whole “blog or die” attitude comes from. After all, the biggest proponents are bloggers.
Taking a broader view, however, and we see that this issue extends beyond the blogs. If you aren’t aware of the lastest developments (meaning 5 minutes ago) you instantly become an outsider to information society. For librarians, this can be a more pointed issue, since a large part of the profession is to be on top of advancement in information management and dissemination.
What we are seeing is a continuation of the boom-era problem of internet/information anxiety. With librarians, however, it can seem worse for the reasons described above. Because of this, I think it’s important for librarians to realize that, contrary to popular belief, blogging isn’t God’s gift to libraries and not everyone should worry about it quite so much.
Anyway, more on the subject later, but if you want to feed your info anxiety a little bit, here are some links:
Om Malik
Slashdot comments
N.A.D.D.
More coming in part 2…