final thoughts

Despite my often sardonic tone on these posts, this exercise has born more fun than painful. I'm just not entirely convinced of the applicability of many of these tools to the job of librarian, apart from the informational ones. A lot of this stuff is part of the tech-gimmick revolution, where our lives are made more complicated, not simpler, by digital technology that does little more than feed our narcissism, furnish distraction, make money for computer firms, and yet does not make us anymore interconnected than we were in Columbus' time, nor make us any wiser. And the terminology of this environment has, if you'll pardon the expression, an infantile quality to it: blog, mashup, tagging--a kind of kids version of Orwell's Newspeak. I do not distrust technology, I'm just suspicious of the motives behind the people who create it. "Oh, what brave new world that has such people in it . . . "