Liberal Education Today

Notes on NFAIS conference presentation by Lee Rainie, Founding Director, The Pew Internet and American Life Project: "Communication and Information Behavior in the New Information Order". He begins by describing increased personal visibility due to being liveblogged.

Building blocks of the digital order: material is increasingly digitized. Increasing ownership of portable devices increases access to, and production of, digital information. n Growing broadband penetration expands users' digital work, becoming central to communication. Storage and processing are getting cheaper.

Based on these blocks, life changes; Rainie used a rubric of words starting with "v-". Increasing volume of content has led to the emergence of the long tail. The velocity of learning information has increased; citing Howard Rheingold's Smartmobs (2002). "You find out stuff more quickly than your parents did." The number of venues for intersecting with people and information increass; time- and place-shifting occurs, along with multitasking. One side effect of this is continuous partial attention, leading to vigilance for incoming content.

Personalization increases (the daily me). Groups focus their intake ("the daily us"). But variety also increases, against echo chamber worries. Social networks increasingly mediate information and practical knowledge. The internet increasingly plays a personal role in people's lives ("Dr. Google, Pastor Yahoo").

On privacy worries: an implicit attitude that publishing personal content will have no negative results.

Politics: citizen media has created a Fifth Estate (William Dutton, Oxford).

Social networks are more visible, being reified and shared through social software.

Rainie describes a user typology, based on users' hardware, practices, and attitudes.
Upper half of users:
-Omnivores - 8% of the population, usually male, early 20s, content creators.
-Connectors - 7%, more often female, communicators.
-Lackluster veterans - 8%, timestressed.
-Productivity enhancers - 8%, focused on work and office.
-Mobile centrics - 10%, focused on cell phones, less likely to have broadband at home, more likely to be African-American and Latino.
-Connected but hassled - 10%, tolerate devices for work and social expectations.
50% of population:
-Inexperienced experimenters - 8%
-Light but satisfied - 15%, connect only to connect with people they care about, don't use much
-Indifferents - 11%, proudly won't buy into current levels of connectivity
-Off the Network - 15%, resist the internet, prefer old media.

Question: are younger people expanding their identity diversification online? Answer: it's been this way for a while. One-third of teenagers have pretended to be someone else. Media and politicians are fascinated by identity experimentation, but researchers find dangerous cases to be rare.