In the 80’s our streets were characterized by booths for
telephone where people would queue to make that needed call. The end of 90’s
and the beginning of 200’s saw a change where green shops in the name of simu
ya jamii from Safaricom the new entrant to the telecommunication sector in
Kenya lined up the Kenyan street and villages shopping centers. This was to be
seen till the mid of 200’s when they died a natural death as they were rendered
absolute with almost two in every three adults owning a mobile devise. This signified
a revolution in communication and opportunities in the sector. The revolution created
a generation that matured from what used to be known as the dot com to the
digital generation and a more recently termed the google generation.
In this generation from a simple translation of a word to
the explanation of a phenomena or the description of an item or anything that
can be said, the tendency is to “Google” for answers by surfing the internet.
Alvin Toffler an American writer and the "world’s
most famous futurologist” according to the UK Financial Times , known for his works discussing the digital
revolution, communication revolution and technological singularity as well as
his books like the Future Shock, The
Third Wave and Powershift
hence being dubbed the third most influential voice among business leaders,
after Bill Gates and Peter Drucker by Accenture, the management consultancy
firm says that in an overstated stress on the power of knowledge in the future
society,
“ today
in the fast changing, affluent nations, despite all inequalities of income and
wealth, the coming struggle for power will increasingly turn into a struggle
over the distribution of and access to knowledge. This is why we understand how
and to whom knowledge flows, we can neither protect ourselves against the abuse
of power nor create the better, more democratic society that tomorrow’s
technologies promise. The control of knowledge is the crux of tomorrow’s
worldwide struggle for power in every human institution” (Toffler 1991)
Herbert Marshall McLuhan a
Canadian philosopher of communication theory and a public intellectual known
for coining the expressions the “medium
is the message” and the “global village”, and for predicting
the “World Wide Web” almost thirty years before it
was invented noted and wrote that
“the visual, individualistic
print culture would soon be brought to an end by what he called
"electronic interdependence": when electronic media replace visual
culture with aural/oral culture.”
In explaining his idea McLuhan say “Instead of tending towards a
vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain,
exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone
outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall
at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of
tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.”
In his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
(1964), McLuhan famously argued that in the modern world "we live
mythically and integrally ... but continue to think in the old, fragmented
space and time patterns of the pre-electric age
McLuhan's insight was that a medium affects the society
in which it plays a role not by the content delivered over the medium, but by
the characteristics of the medium itself. McLuhan pointed to the light bulb as
a clear demonstration of this concept. A light bulb does not have content in
the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a
medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create
spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He
describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that
"a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence." More controversially, he postulated that content had
little effect on society.
With this kind of world known and respected people on the
front it would be easy to see the future of our societies and the trend that
would be worth to think about having in mind the notion of “nothing last like
change”. The factors that will affect our success is determined by how
proactive we act to the changes in cognizance of the future technologies and
probabilities as well as opportunities. Learning from the old story of the race
of the hare and the tortoise, it would be good to note that steady and
persistence is as good as virtue but what is more worth is rethinking of
strategy.
As society has begun to value information more
highly, the so-called information industry has developed. This industry
encompasses publishers, software developers, on-line information services, and
other businesses that package and sell information products for a profit. It
provides both an opportunity and a challenge to libraries.
Library, traditionally, collection of books
used for reading or study, or the building or room in which such a collection
is kept. Library institutions are part of our social life and have a big role
to play in achieving what Alvin was talking about in his post-industrial era “the
information age”. From their historical beginnings as places to keep the
business, legal, historical, and religious records of a civilization,
libraries have
emerged since the middle of the 20th century as a far-reaching body of
information resources and services that do not even require a building. Rapid
developments in computers, telecommunications, and other technologies have made
it possible to store and retrieve information in many different forms and from
any place with a computer and a telephone connection. The terms digital
library and virtual library have begun to be used to refer to the vast
collections of information to which people gain access over the Internet,
cable television, or some other type of remote electronic connection.
With the advent of internet in the 1960’s and later the
World Wide Web, the mode through which information can be accessed has taken
unprecedented stride to the level of creating information overload also known as”
infobesity” or “infoxication” as predicted by Alvin
Toffler in his book Future Shock,
and later noted by Bertram Gross, in his book The Managing of
Organizations. Speier et al. (1999) as a situation where “Information overload occurs when
the amount of input to a system exceeds its processing capacity.” This can
lead to “information anxiety,” which is the gap between the information we
understand and the information that we think that we must understand. To solve
this problem, a number of solutions have been proposed and key among them are:
ü
Focusing
on quality of information rather that quantity.
ü
Spend
less time on information that is nice to know and more on what we need to know.
ü
Learning
how to create better information ”infogineering” which is be direct in what you
ask people to get short precise answer.
This mix brings on the
notion of the expanding role of libraries to the society by integrating web 2.0
in their infrastructure if they have to remain relevant and of help to society
they serve.
In her article in January 1999, "Fragmented
Future", Darcy DiNucci, a consultant on electronic information design wrote
“The
first glimmerings of Web 2.0 are beginning to appear, and we are just starting
to see how that embryo might develop. The Web will be understood not as
screenfuls of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through
which interactivity happens. It will [...] appear on your computer screen,
[...] on your TV set [...] your car dashboard [...] your cell phone [...]
hand-held game machines [...] maybe even your microwave oven.”
Since then, Web 2.0 have developed a lot and many
functionalities that may help in making libraries more useful and help the
society in accessing the information in a more healthy way. This includes features like:
Folksonomy which is free
classification of information that allows users to collectively classify and
find information through functions like Tagging.
This will help in reducing the information overload as groups can qualitatively
review materials with regard to their objectives and information need and
consume them correctively.
Rich User
Experience through dynamic content generation that is responsive to
user input would help in filtering out the amount of search results for
specified information.
User
Participation where information flows two ways between site owner
and site user by means of evaluation, review, and commenting. Site users add
content for others to see and hence adding value to the information for future
users.
Software as a service where Web 2.0 sites
developed API
to allow automated usage, such as by an app
or mashup hence increasing
integration with other applications for data sharing. It will also help in
ensuring in managing the information for easier retrieval in the future.
Long tail-
services offered on demand basis; profit is realized through monthly service
subscriptions more than one-time purchases of goods over the network.
With web 2.0, libraries can benefit
by Wikis,
blogs, prodcasts and file sharing as a way of offering value added services to
their clientele and by so doing making themselves appealing and remaining relevant
while on the same time tackling the problem of information overload within the
society. Failure to assimilate technology will leave the would be user shun
them in times of need and in the long run will be archival centers for
published materials as the users get more attached to the internet source for
their information.
