Convenience Trumps Quality: How Digital Natives Use Information by Derek Law, Web Fumsi (June 2008)
Information skills are changing as a result of the web and computers. Marc Perensky was the first to identify digital natives and digital immigrants. Derek Law considers the habits and practices of "digital natives" in handling information. Basically - "They want instant results and instant gratification because a fundamental tenet is that convenience trumps quality".
Note - "Web 2.0 can then be seen not as some new technology to which we must respond but as a manifestation of how digital natives manage their world."
But the implications for content first noticed by Perensky are the chilling ones.
"Increasingly, we can expect to work in a world shorn of its certainties and in which most information is in practice ephemeral. We already have a situation in which 44% of websites disappear within a year - and this applies as much to national libraries and museums as it does to bedsits in Clapham. It is a world in which much content is both user-created and image-based and where Wikipedia, not Britannica, will be the normal entry point to information and where information is therefore democratic rather than authoritative."
Posted by Gwen at September 11, 2008 03:38 PM