Tonight, I attended a lecture at the University of North Florida. It was part of their Distinguished Voices lecture series. Tonight’s lecture was by Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, about life in a connected society. I found out about it through the emails we get at work from the school’s PR people, and figured why not — it looked interesting. Near the start of the lecture, Rainie asked if anyone was live-blogging. Nobody raised their hand. Then he asked if anyone would blog afterward. I think five people raised their hands — I didn’t, even though I was fairly sure I would blog afterward. And here I am.
But anyway, the content. There was one slide showing the ways information flows — I think he called it the “ecology” of information. There was one describing things in the mid-1970s — fairly simple. Then there’s the one for today — arrows going all over the place. Very telling about the way things work these days. Another interesting stat was on the use of social networking sites. Something like 93 percent of teens or young adults (I forget which group) having profiles, while only 22 of adults do. A lot of the screenshots were taken from Facebook — while that may have just been an example, it does seem that Facebook is having a lot of growth these days. There was a good article in Newsweek about two months back, taking a look at the site from several angles. Another interesting stat was that 2/3rds of people with social networking profiles take steps to protect their information — based on everything that’s out there, you’d think it would be lower, that people are putting their information out there willy-nilly. And believe me, there are plenty of people who are doing that. But apparently, it’s not as much as you think.
Anyway, it was an hour and a half that was fairly well-spent. Even if I missed How I Met Your Mother, and the first five minutes of Heroes. But I can catch HIMYM another way (there you go, time-shifting, something mentioned during the lecture), and I’ll find out what happened during Heroes (the rest of the show was amazing).