Zits, paper, the Web, and the future of information services
October 8, 2006 information technology No CommentsThe “Zits” comic strip offers daily vignettes in the life of 15-year-old Jeremy Duncan, his friends, and his parents. Jeremy and his friends are, needless to say, cool and his parents are decidedly not. Parents are an unavoidable albeit frequently embarrassing necessity in every teen's life. The Sunday, October 8, 2006 strip shows Jeremy explaining to his mother, looking perplexed as she listens, how she can log on to the newspaper's Web site, navigate menus, and find a particular comic. Cell phone in hand, Jeremy tells his mom that he'll then text her reaction to one of his friends. Pointing to the newspaper lying on a table a few feet away, she responds, “Or, I could reach all the way over there and pick up the actual newspaper.” Jeremy dismisses this idea, telling her, “Well, yeah, if you want to be all old school about it.” [Note: the link to the comic in the San Francisco Chronicle will probably be good only today.]
This illustrates the twilight time we are regarding in media and generational uses of media. To Jeremy's mom the Web and text messaging are options that lie outside the realm of her habits of media consumption. To Jeremy they are simply a part of the way in which he and his peers converse among themselves and interact with the world at large.
I am rarely home in time to watch the network evening news shows. There was a time–for example, during the Watergate scandal more than thirty years ago–that I depended every day on Walter Cronkite to keep me informed. Nowadays when I see one of these shows, the clearest message is in the commercials; the demographic these shows appeal to is very interested in prescription drug remedies for sleep disorders and other health matters. If Jeremey Duncan watched one of these shows he would probably consider the commercials at best TMI, especially those with Bob Dole as spokesman (definitely not the gender-neutral spokesperson in this case). The format brought to its height by Walter Cronkite and Tom Brokaw is probably terminally ill, even though it has recently had a Katie Couric transfusion. Nonetheless, it has offered more information and a bit more context for interpreting and understanding information than CNN Headline News. Brevity, speed, snippets–these are in ascendacy.
What are the implications of this for librarians and the ways in which we provide information? IM reference services are well established. When will the teenagers school and public libraries serve and the college students academic libraries serve consider IMing “all old school?” There seems to be a generational divide regarding text messaging. Many young people prefer to text each other than to use the same device for a voice conversation. Older people, out of frugality (me) or because they lived decades communicating adequately without text messaging (me, too), or both, don't use this technology much if at all. How on those tiny cell phone screens can we provide information services that do justice to the information we now convey in IM exchanges by embedding URLs and providing a context for the patron to use that information?
