Will the traditional professional groups (booksellers, editors, librarians, publishers, journalists, etc.) established many years ago stay the same while being more cyberspace-oriented and become cyberlibrarians, cyberpublishers, cyberjournalists, cyberbooksellers, etc.? Or will all these professional tasks be restructured into new professions? With the explosion of the Internet, some information specialists and others decided to move over to companies specialized in computing and the Internet.
Even if information specialists or journalists, for example, convince us they will always be useful, on a general scale the employment trends for the future are far from exciting. Will all the people working in the print media be able to get training and retraining in new technologies, or will they be violently hit by unemployment?
9.4. The Information Society
Jean-Paul, a French musician and writer, wrote in his e-mail of June 21, 1998:
"[…] surfing on the Web operates in rays (I have a centre of interest and I methodically click on all the links included in home pages) or in hops and jumps (from one click to another, as they appear). Of course, it is possible with the print medium. But the difference is striking. So the Internet didn't change my life, but my writing. You don't write the same way for a site as for a script, a play, etc."
He also notes that all the Internet functionalities could already be found in the first Macintosh, which revolutionized the relationship between the user and the information.
"It is not the Internet which changed the way I write, it is the first Mac that I discovered through the self-learning of Hypercard. I still remember how astonished I was during the month when I was learning about buttons, links, surfing by analogies, objects or images. The idea that a simple click on one area of the screen allowed me to open a range of piles of cards, and each card could offer new buttons and each button opened on to a new range, etc. In brief, the learning of everything on the Web that today seems really banal, for me it was a revelation (it seems Steve Jobs and his team had the same shock when they discovered the ancestor of the Mac in the laboratories of Rank Xerox).
Since then I write directly on the screen: I use the print medium only occasionally, to fix up a text, or to give somebody who is allergic to the screen a kind of photograph, something instantaneous, something approximate. It's only an approximation, because print forces us to have a linear relationship: the text is developing page after page (most of the time), whereas the technique of links allows another relationship to the time and the space of the imagination. And, for me, it is above all the opportunity to put into practice this reading/writing 'cycle', whereas leafing through a book gives only an idea - which is vague because the book is not conceived for that."
A very important factor too is the radical change between the book culture and the digital culture. Moving from one to the other as we are doing now deeply changes our relationship to knowledge, because we move from stable information to moving information. During the September 1996 meeting of the International Federation of Information Processing, Dale Spender explained this phenomenon in a very interesting lecture about Creativity and the Computer Education Industry:
"Throughout print culture, information has been contained in books - and this has helped to shape our notion of information. For the information in books stays the same - it endures.