The Late Great Internet

CO-ASIS&T Annual Meeting

Featuring Debora Shaw
President-Elect, American Society for Information Science
Associate Dean, School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University

Dinner Program

It is easy to be overwhelmed by statistics on the growth of the Internet and commercialization of cyberspace; graphs of exponential growth confirm our impressions of living in a revolutionary age. Recently, however, contrarian opinions have emerged, notably the Nielsen/Commercenet study claiming Internet use is considerably less than ‘net proponents suggest.

Is the ‘net overrated? Is it being swamped by the web crawlers designed to make searching better? Is it really an Edsel running on New Coke? And what are the implications and unintended consequences for information professionals? Come hear Debora (“Ralf”) Shaw, the incoming President of the American Society for Information Science, address these and other ponderables of the information age.