The changing digital world

-->

Five Examples of shifts and how they impact on us as digital citizens

1. 

Newspaper circulation is down 7 million over the last 25 years.

But in the last 5 years, unique readers of online newspapers are up 30 million.

2.

abc, nbc and cbs get ten million unique visitors every month collectively and have been around collectively for 200 years.

Myspace, Youtube and Facebook get 250 million unique visitors every month, and didn’t exist 9 years ago (the video says 6, but it was made in 2009).

3.

95% of all music downloaded last year wasn’t paid for.

4.

93% of US adults own a mobile phone.

1/3 of them don’t feel safe using it for purchanses.

5.

In February 2008, John McCain raised 11 million dollars for his presidential campaign. 

Barack Obama attended no fundraisers, instead he used social media to raise 55 million dollars in that month.

Copyright Issues

I started thinking about copyright issues, and was interested to read in Dearney and Feather, that intellectual copyright exists both to protect the innovator, but also to encourage innovation.  When it is so easy to access newspapers and music and books and articles, are we going to lose our motivation to create unique works, to think our own thoughts?  When it is so easy to find out what other people think, when there is so much to read that has already been written, will we have time to think deeply enough to create new great things, or are we doomed to intellectual mediocrity now?  I’m thinking (in despair) of works like Fifty Shades of Grey - a badly written piece of fan fiction with a mass audience who are just lapping it up (if I can use the word lapping at this point without it seeming deliberately distasteful).

Policy needs to address issues of copyright, for all media platforms, words, music and photos/pictures.

Initially I was shocked by the claim that 95% of music downloaded wasn’t paid for.  Then I started thinking about how I got my own music in the 80’s – by borrowing and recording my own copy of friends tapes, which may or may not have been originals.  By recording music from the television or the radio.  The biggest difference is probably one of quality of recording.  The illegal mp3 is invariably going to be of higher quality than when you hoped the radio announcer wouldn’t talk too long over the beginning or end of your favourite track.

Digital Literacy

Social media has changed the way the world has until now operated.  The presidential campaign demonstrates that eloquently.  Those who refuse to engage in these technologies simply will not succeed over those who can harness them.  I know people who don’t use social media, who see it as irrelevant, who refuse to engage, some of them are only in their 30’s, and I wonder what will happen to them as the world keeps changing.  I’ve been dragged along in the wake of my husband, who is probably one of the worlds oldest digital natives, having grown up in a university environment with some of the earliest computers. I am constantly out of my depth, because he changes stuff all the time.

Mobile devices are where we are headed, and already the percentage of adults who have a phone is very very high.  I expect that as time goes on, and there are more adults who have grown up in this connected world, the ease with online purchasing will also increase.  It is going to become more and more essential that library websites have mobile versions, because this is how our users will be accessing our sites.

Online Safety

Online behavior will follow you in a way that the mistakes you made in high school don’t.  Helping students to realize that Facebook is not their diary, that online bullying is not acceptable, that posting photos of yourself in compromising situations is not good practice needs to be part of what we do.

There are so many ways you can put yourself online (youtbe, Facebook, MySpace etc), and there is a vulnerability in this.  The Jenkins whitepaper observed that young people often found that in putting content online for their friends, they sometimes attracted unwelcome attention from strangers.

When you can hide your identity, is there less restraint from behaving in an antisocial way?

Content Regulation

We must look at questions of responsibility for use, filters of content which may be inappropriate.  The internet is difficult to police, because of it’s vastness, and because it is an international entity, it allows access to unsavoury content, and whose responsibility is that? 

When there isn’t a set of ethical guidelines that contributors are expected to adhere to, how do we deal with that?