Today I am reading an article in the New Yorker, where Adam Gopnik says, “As a technology, a book focuses our attention, isolates us from the myriad distractions that fill our everyday lives. A networked computer does precisely the opposite. It is designed to scatter our attention. . . . Knowing that the depth of our thought is tied directly to the intensity of our attentiveness, it’s hard not to conclude that as we adapt to the intellectual environment of the Net our thinking becomes shallower.”

“…at any given moment, our most complicated machine will be taken as a model of human intelligence, and whatever media kids favor will be identified as the cause of our stupidity.”

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The references to the traditional physical library- the stacks- reminds me that my role as a librarian has been revolutionized within the years of my personal career. If “the Internet is just a loud and unlimited library in which we now live (Gopnik)”- my role can be viewed as undefined and exciting (revolutionary) or irrelevent (dead). Being an optimist, a person of faith, an “ever-was” type thinker, I have no fear of irrelevence and remain hopeful. There is truth in all of Gopnik’s stated perspectives. The more things change, the more they stay the same. There is nothing new under the sun…yet the Internet has changed everything. We live in a world of opposites.