Watch the video and identify five (5) examples of ‘shifts’ or trends that can have an impact on how individuals behave as a digital citizens. Then outline (in around 400 words) how you believe these behaviours can impact on the need for, and development of, information policy in organisations to address these behaviours. You may wish to explore these from either a user/customer perspective or employee/employer perspective, or a combination of both, and you may wish to consider this task within the specific context of your own library and/or organisation, or you can address this task in general terms.
YouTube URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbcMPGyPr8k
This is a very interesting and inspiring video. It shows how the entire world is changing with the fast innovation of various technologies. There are many “shifts” and trends towards a digital world, but I would like to mention five of them here.
-The mobile phone contains much more functions than ever before.
-People express their opinions and share their moments on the social network sites (SNSs) more frequently than before.
-Virtual meeting are more and more popular in both work environment and private life.
-People use cloud database to save data as it can reduce the risk of computer breakdown. However, they have to tackle with the security issues of the online environment.
-As it is mentioned in this video, some new jobs that are even not existed ten years ago, are popular in the current information society, such as data scientist, big data architect, transformation manager et al. That means, people are learning new things fast to adapt the evolving technologies.
It can be seen that people have changed many of their behaviours to adapt the digital world. I would like to hight the privacy and ethical issues here. When people take the benefit of the convenient side, they also have to sacrifice their privacy to some extent. The internet browsers, such as Google, collect a lot of information from all our searching activities. In addition, the more information we share on a public blog, the more private data will be collected by other entities.
Although many information professionals, such as librarians, would like to protect their patrons, they still unintentionally contribute to the “surveillance capitalism” from the third-party tracking cookies (Marino, 2021, p. 129). If it is hard to avoid, the information professionals should consider how to build up their information policies to reduce the hazard.
The information policies should address to the internal employees and the external users. For internal employees, it needs to include explicit guidelines about the responsibilities of different departments, including the frequency of updating the security set up, the responsible person who should monitor the ethical issues etc. There are many existing templates that a policy constructor could explore and learn from. For example, professionals could search “information policy of academic libraries” to collect ideas.
For external users, the policies should not only address their obligations, but also inform them with the security alerts. It is important to notify them what information the institution will collect, and how it will be used and protected. Patrons could consider both of the benefits and the risks before they start to use. Therefore, it is important to include a comprehensive policy to instruct the online activities.
Reference:
Marino, B. (2021). Privacy concerns and the prevalence of third-party tracking cookies on ARL library homepages. Reference Services Review, 49(2), 115-131. https://doi.org/10.1108/RSR-03-2021-0009
Esteves, J. (2021, January 17). Did you know 2021 [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbcMPGyPr8k