Coordinator of the Librarians’ Index to the Internet.
kgs@bluehighways.com
Column for October 2001
In mid-summer, while relocating from New York to California, I temporarily became an (intentionally) unconnected American. While we could have planned our trip around libraries, copy centers, and similar places where people find Internet access when they are on the road, I chose to have a real vacation—and that meant no Internet, from sea to shining sea.
Prior to the trip, I spent many hours on the Internet intricately mapping and remapping our journey, locating motels and restaurants, soliciting input from friends, relatives, and travelers, and probing for road construction or other problems. When we backed out of the driveway, however, we entered an offline world where digital habits no longer apply.
What I noticed first was that all of our decisions had to be based on old information (at least as old as the first day of the journey). Spontaneity becomes risky. Had we been online as we drove, we might have known that our on-the-road decision to change our destination for our first real travel night was unwise, given that the locals were having, as they informed us, an “Eye-talian festival”; the town was so crowded we were referred to a crumbling motel in a forgotten stretch of the old National Road. As we huddled in our dolorous room scrounging dinner from leftovers in our picnic basket, I reflected that the Internet, in many ways, has made spontaneity an affordable luxury; at the very last minute we can reorder our plans (or create them from the ground up) based on new information.
Partly from need, and partly due to my interest in investigating the world of analog information, we stopped at many visitors’ centers provided by state agencies. The parallels to modern libraries were intriguing. In some states, travel information was a weather-beaten kiosk maintained none too well by a group of local volunteers; other states, such as Illinois and New Mexico, boasted sleek, well-staffed facilities where employees helped you locate lodging or worked with you to fine-tune your journey. It isn’t only that the quality of information was better; it was that I felt more welcomed, and I felt that providing information to me mattered. The parallels to librarianship need not be spelled out.
Another resource we used was the ad-hoc community created by the loose federation of whoever else happens to share your Cartesian coordinates at that point in time—the travelers and service providers at motels, gas stations, and roadside attractions, as well as local institutions. Some of the resources for good information—quite a bit of it offered unsolicited—included grocery store and motel desk clerks, museum docents, and in one case, tattooed bikers who, like us, were enjoying an evening dip in a Texas-shaped pool at a motel in Amarillo. (I’m convinced our information-sharing was motivated by mutual fascination.) These sundry sources provided some of the most important information we needed, such as the real scoop on where the best food was, or the quality of travel on the road immediately ahead of us.
These “information experiences” confirmed my belief in LBWA (Librarianship By Walking Around). As traffic to the desk permits, put down that copy of Booklist, get out of your chair and tour the area, asking, “Are you finding everything you needed?” If you serve customers electronically, you might consider e-mailing reminders of the services you provide and asking people if they have questions you can help answer. I guarantee you have patrons who have needs they have not shared with you—and that they will be thrilled if you approach them.
There is a vast difference between being intentionally unconnected and unintentionally underconnected, which is what I am now. As I wait for broadband services to be installed where I live, I am connecting with a 56k modem that barely hits 28.8 on the local ISP. This, too, changes my behavior. I don’t wait for your beautiful but heavyweight Web page to load; I go somewhere else or do without. With broadband at home, rather than wait my turn to read a section of the New York Times, I went upstairs and read it on the Web; with pokey dial-up, I walk to the corner and buy the Chronicle, mumbling under my breath.
Though we may be talking about a difference of seconds or minutes in terms of the difference in access, it makes all the difference in the world. Overall, with broadband, I felt that the Internet was faster than other types of information services (telephone, newspaper, books); with slow dial-up, I find that other than for e-mail or a quick peek at a search engine, the Internet is too slow to bother with. The local library’s fractional T1 connection is a relief; I will wait for my turn at a computer there longer than I will wait at home for a slow page to load, and I mourn the lack of night or weekend services. I wonder how strongly opinions in the “books versus Internet” debate are informed by the relative quality of connectivity.
I’m coming back through the rabbit hole, though. “So, you’re one of them,” remarked the UPS driver after several days of lugging computer boxes, DSL equipment, and other technical sundries up our stairs. He rolled his eyes and grinned, adding, “My daughter’s one too.” I can barely wait to be “one of them” again—but the journey through analog landscapes was worth the experience, if only to learn firsthand the texture of these interesting but difficult terrains.