Endlessly Debating the Future of the Information Profession/al

The Future is a very old topic

Sometimes it seems like there’s a closed loop.  It feels like (and probably is) fifteen years I’ve been surveying meetings, events, and electronic discourses of all kinds framed in terms of (infer my groan) ‘the future of the information professional’.

It’s one of those red flag subjects on a conference that makes me want to take the programme nowhere near anyone capable of authorising attendance in case they start wondering what on earth we’re doing. Because often you can almost see the invisible words ‘and do we have one’ as the subtitle. If we don’t believe in ourselves why should anyone from any other sphere?

Sometimes things have been debated so often, so endlessly, so without any obvious form of one-answer-strikes-all-down answer that the mere phrase can drain positivity out of most people.

'The End is Nigh' is predicted fairly regularly

The end was going to be ‘the paperless office’ (no laughing at the back), then it was going to be the prevalence of end-user searching of sophisticated electronic products themselves without mediation required (debate continues, but it’s created lots of work in other ways to support end-user ability to do so and the products themselves)… All of that before we even get into the economic climate of recent years or more recent debates on what that means for us as a profession.

Change and influence

When it comes down to it what we all do is evolve as we ourselves and our environments change to ensure that our services are still tailored to meet user need (whoever our user communities may be).

Often this happens fairly seamlessly in tiny changes that maybe aren’t all that noticeable, sometimes in more obvious major transitions and changes.  Mostly we choose the changes, sometimes other circumstances externally choose them for us.

The future is what we create from conditions that are often already (not always, I know) existing, it’s, at best, our chosen purposeful response to them.

True - we don’t individually have control over lots of factors that may impact, but we can influence and / or control some.

Hardy perennials

Debating ‘The Future of the Information Professional’ doesn’t help though.  It’s such a non-specific vague subject how would we even know if someone had the one-line answer. And would it be an answer that applied to everyone equally in any type of information job? Probably not.

I don’t garden. But if it was a flower, as a subject, it would be a very hardy perennial. The question has been asked on a semi-permanent basis from way back before I came into the profession.  I know, I've read bits of it in passing. Very often in terms of gloom. I'm not saying it's not important, or that it's not an interesting conversation (or can be), or that I haven't gone to lots of things on the subject in my time myself... 

It's just that sometimes it appears to be one endless looping discussion going nowhere. It's one topic, there are many others to choose from too that are easier to define and thus easier to find paths for.

So perhaps we should just get on with things instead.