Exactly how I feel!

***like!***

My notes from the first ten minutes:

1) I like the term ”social operating system” via the subtitle of Rainie’s upcoming book.

2) It was interesting to hear Rainie’s count of three revolutions: ”Revolution number one on our watch” was the dawn of broadband access and what Scott McNealy called the Participation Age. Says Rainie: ”Broadband was a huge part of … how they became content creators. Now 2/3 of adults and 3/4 of teenagers contribute content.”

Revolution number two was all things mobile, affecting ”People’s sense of time, sense of place, and sense of presence with other people.” He mentions now 85% of American adults have cell phones and 57% connect to the Internet through a mobile device (when including laptops).

The third revolution has been social networking. The one thing Rainie said with which I disagree: ”Librarians and journalists have been the leading practitioners of social networking.” I cringed while thinking of all the journalists I have seen dragged online, kicking and cursing, and how many are still resisting social media. If you were to assert which professionals have been the leading practitioners of social networking, you would, for an obvious example credit technologists before journalists, librarians’ place in the race aside.

I liked thinking of librarians and journalists as nodes in people’s social networks, as ”friends” in the modern sense, v. passive communications as Densmore noted had been the case traditionally. I hear a lot of angst over being friends with people you’re covering, the lack of professional distance in reporting. I also hear concern over the need to be entertaining to be popular on Twitter and the like. The proximate and personal nature of social networking present several such professional challenges to journalism.

Thanks @densmore for the video and @postcaroline for posting it here. Hey, librarians are some of the greatest friends of Open Science, too :) BG