Digital Consumers: Reshaping the Information Profession

Citation

Parry, F. (2009), "Digital Consumers: Reshaping the Information Profession", Online Information Review, Vol. 33 No. 2, pp. 386-387. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520910951285

This book is about digital consumers and the impact they are having on the publishing, media, marketing, commercial and information professions (or worlds). The authors have expertise in these areas and are mostly researchers who have worked with the University College London's CIBER (Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research) group.

The primary focus is on how digital consumers operate in the digital environment. Understanding how they operate is key to serving and interacting with them more effectively. The first chapter is on the digital information marketplace, and shows how publishing industries such as newspapers, television and music are changing – or being forced to change – by pressures from the digital consumer. The second chapter looks at e‐shopping and how online experiences and expectations help shape information provision and presentation by organisations. A key feature of the studies collected in this book is the impressive research undertaken by the authors. This is particularly the case in the chapters on the psychology of the digital information consumer and the information‐seeking behaviour of the digital consumer. I found the evidence gathered for the latter particularly interesting, although quite what we do with this evidence is another question altogether and one which is not really addressed here. The chapter on the Google generation is perhaps the best of all. Again very well researched, it debunks several myths about this far from homogenous group of young people, their information seeking skills and the analysis of their use of both Google and libraries.

The sharp‐eyed reader will have noted that I listed “information profession” at the end of the descriptions in the first paragraph. Indeed, the first two chapters barely mention the “information profession” of the book's subtitle at all. We have a clue about the way things are heading from the introduction, which talks about “disintermediation” and the rather withering comments about the usefulness of information professionals' “intellectual baggage [about] users and information seeking”. The third chapter, on the library in the digital age, goes further by saying that the “information community needs to return to what it is good at, ‘collection development’ leaving resource discovery to the search engines and internet providers”. This is reinforced in the chapter on the Google generation, which states that “information skills need to be developed during formative school years” rather than at university when it is possibly too late.

Pretty grim news, then, for many of us who still believe that the information professional has a key “mediation” role, not least in providing information literacy programmes to make information more accessible and comprehensible. The authors' views have been gaining some currency recently, both inside and outside the information profession, and deserve to be heard and debated. Some of the views, however, are rather provocative and seem designed to get under the skin of information professionals. The comment by Michael Moss, that “it is time for the information professions in the UK that lag behind their peers in North America, Australasia and even sub‐Saharan Africa to wake up to the realities of […] the second digital revolution”, is one of a number which should not go unchallenged.

The final chapter (“Where do we go from here?”) makes some suggestions which purport to offer a little light at the end of the tunnel for confused information professionals who are wondering what life has in store for them. Yet even this is tempered by the quirky aside that they narrowly avoided recommending “the last one out turn the lights out”. This is an interesting and thought‐provoking read, though at times a little pessimistic and less than kind or just to those who are working hard to forge new relationships with – or ways of assisting – the new digital consumers.