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September 2007: Where Are You?Internet Librarian
By Joseph Janes
American Libraries Columnist
Associate dean, Information School, University of Washington, Seattle
intlib@ischool.washington.edu
September 2007
Where Are You?
Your location doesn’t matter as much as your presence
I was breezing through the Oregon State Bar Bulletin the other day (my Entertainment Weekly hadn’t come yet) and ran across an interesting article. In typically legalistic fashion, it discussed a hypothetical lawyer licensed in New York who moves to the greener pastures of Oregon while continuing to represent New York clients with his New York firm using facilities (server, letterhead, etc.) exclusively based in New York. The question was whether the lawyer was practicing law “in Oregon.”
I’ll spare you the author’s jargony and highly technical analysis, but the answer, according to the Oregon state bar’s general counsel, is “indisputably” yes. Fascinating. I get it, of course: He’s “in” Oregon, but only in the strictest of geographical senses.
This puzzles me. Maybe I’m too used to the idea of location often being irrelevant. I’ve e-mailed and IMed with friends and coworkers from all over the world, and remotely answered my share of reference questions for the Internet Public Library. If I’m helping someone in Corvallis or Elmira or Nigeria, does it really matter that I’m in Seattle?
Sometimes, sure. There are questions that can be answered “better”—more effectively, efficiently, quickly, confidently, correctly—by local personnel or resources; however, if there ain’t no local personnel or resources, often it’s “better” that somebody, somewhere takes a crack at it, however naively or incompletely.
Slipper-y slope?
I’m writing this sitting in a Washington hotel lobby coffee shop at the ALA Annual Conference, surrounded by a record number of our esteemed colleagues busily shuttling from meetings to sessions to the exhibits to receptions to various other assignations. Even though the weather was surprisingly clement for D.C. in June, something was bubbling just under the surface. How much of what goes on at meetings like this could be conducted virtually by people in their bunny slippers?
Exhibit A: I was part of a panel that was recorded and podcasted; folks who listen to that recording will get the words that were spoken and some of the flavor of the session. However, with appropriate technological and logistical arrangements, they could have seen and participated in it live, much as distance education students in chat or web environments participate in class discussions. (And did the otherwise excellent divisional president’s program I attended really need a 10-minute set of speaker introductions?)
Exhibit B: What about Council sessions? Or even—gasp—Membership Meetings? What is the quorum for Membership—about 15 people now? These are obvious candidates for distributed participation. As the ever-estimable Karen Schneider has asked, why are we forcing people to fly, register, and stay in a hotel just to have a voice in the governance of the Association?
Good question. I don’t think that, say, Second Life avatars can yet have the fun that I had seeing old friends and making new ones in D.C.; however, in a world that is increasingly digitally participatory and decentralized, where you are might not be nearly as important or relevant as your presence through other means.
As we all know, this is happening everywhere; at this writing, we’re still a few days away from the first CNN/YouTube presidential debate, which may (or may not) transform the body politic as we know it; it certainly will if somebody asks a question while dancing in his underwear.
We’re getting accustomed to the idea of multiple identities online; now it seems we have to contend with multiple presences as well, and juggling those. The ability to simultaneously be here and there will challenge us to figure out how much to be where, and how to know when to switch how much of our focus. Our attention-starved world gets hungrier, and as it does we’ll have to discover and devise ways of doing justice to them all, if we can . . . but that’s another story.