As journalists, we sometimes wonder how we managed to do our jobs before the internet came along.
We’re now used to sending emails to colleagues around the country and using search engines and online directories to find people’s contact information.
With all this, we tend to easily forget how things were just 10 years ago, when the phone book was still a major searching tool. But enough about us and our journalism nostalgia.
We want to know how the web has transformed YOUR job. How would you compare your day-to-day work to what it was in the pre-internet era? Are you finding it has made your job easier, lonelier, or perhaps just plain crazier? Or maybe you have the type of job that hasn’t been affected at all by the Internet?
Whether you’re a teacher, hairstylist, veterinarian, mechanic, carpenter or whatever, we’re eager to hear your stories.
Leave us a comment or send us an email about how the internet has changed your job and we’ll try to incorporate as many of them as possible in the show.
[Original image by mike52ad]
I'm a computer system administrator and I think before the internet age my job would have been much harder to do, although the general list of the tasks I do would have remained the same.
I work on corporate systems on a day-to-day basis, and use the internet primarily as a tool to find answers to my problems. The big advantage of having internet is that someone out there is bound to have come up against a similar problem and so it cuts down on my troubleshooting time.
Of course, due to the nature of my job I am inevitably doing work directly related to the internet like managing websites, which would not have existed pre-internet.
I'm a librarian in a special library. What I do hasn't changed much but how is much better since the Internet. I can provide faster and more equitable service to clients whether they're in the building or in another city. I can search and update the catalogue of my library's collection more efficiently. Print indexes have been replaced by databases that can be searched (and results provided to clients) much more accurately and efficiently. We can share resources and metadata with libraries around the world at a speed that would have been unthinkable pre-internet (copies of articles from UK in under 24 hrs!). Our intranet site provides clients with a portal to services, databases and resources so they can help themselves even if library staff aren't available. The internet has taken a lot of the drudgery out of my job. I wouldn't go back to card catalogues for ANYTHING.
Just the other day, we were talking around the office about paper record-keeping techniques. It's funny, I have a lot of nostalgia for card catalogues. Interesting that someone who actually worked with them doesn't have the same warm fuzzies!
I'm a health researcher and 20 years ago I probably would have had to use those card catalogues to locate relevant journal articles for my research… believe it or not I have nostalgia for the things of that era, when desks were made purposefully large so that you could lay paper all over them, and the narrow wooden or steel drawer chests that housed the catalogues I find particularly fascinating. I haunt craigslist for an old school-library wooden card catalogue chest for use in my home! I think it would make a wicked place to keep sewing notions or jewellery.
I'm a city engineer, and finding reference material for pipeflows or other calculations would have been in 1000's of pages of textbooks, now with resources such as Google Books, websites or professional forums, the answer is just minutes away, even out in the field on a web-enabled smartphone. Communications and revisions of designs happens rapidly in real time, photos of technical issues can be sent to consultants or authorities from cell phones.
Overall things have sped up, which is generally productive, but it has it's downside with the need to make decisions without as much time to ponder and research. I think it makes it easier to make decisions, but these decisions happen more rapidly.
Before the Internet I did IT support for computers that were in smaller networks, including UUCP and Fidonet. Before that … well … I had a 300 baud modem on my first Commodore Vic 20 and can't really remember much from my childhood before computers.
Most of my current job is writing stuff that goes on the Web. So my job didn't exist before the Internet. And when I graduated from university in 1990, there was an Internet, but no Web yet, so I would have had no way to get a degree directly related to what I ended up doing for a living. (My actual degree is in Marine Biology.)
I recall what the former President of UBC, David Strangway, told me around that time. He graduated from university in the '50s, and his main job before going into academic administration was as head of geophysics for the NASA Apollo program — he was in charge of the moon rocks. One of the coolest jobs in the world, but when he was in university no one imagined that we'd go to the Moon that soon, so he too could not have studied to be a moon rock specialist.
No matter what your training, you need to be prepared for your career(s) to be something different.
I am an electrician. Before the internet the tools and materials available to me were just what local suppliers stocked. Phone, fax and paper mail were heavily used. A paper code book and a paper map book were at hand.
Now I research and order tools and materials online. Once found a great time-saving Bosch tool via their Singapore website before the Bosch distributor in my area knew the tool existed! I receive invoices from suppliers by email. Haven't used a fax in ages. Use email for most of my communications including all billing, aside from the rare customer who has no internet. When I do phone I sometimes use Gizmo on my N800 as it is cheaper than the cell phone. At my home office I use Vonage. Many new customers find me via my website. I locate new customer sites using Maemo Mapper on the N800 and estimate travel times with Google Maps. My next code 'book' purchase will be a PDF download from CSA. Recently, for the first time, I received payment for a job via PayPal.
The internet is as vital as any tool I have.
Speaking as a teenager, I can't say that I've had a job before the internet. However, I have read textbooks (particularly the grammar and writing ones) not more than two decades old and marveled at how much more tedious information-gathering used to be (as has been mentioned many times).
The real issue that I wonder about is how the jobs I am interested in will change over the next decade, and what new ones will arise.
I'm a union rep and before the internet my life was a series of face-to-face meetings interspersed with long drives to those meetings, conference calls and swearing fits re. fax machines. Now I can get a lot more work done between the still very necessary meetings. The people I work with gain self-confidence as they can deal with thin gs quickly but at the same time know that I am available electronically if needed. More gets done more quickly and by many more people than before.
The down side? I am often responding to e-mails at 0500 and ending my day in bed with a laptop watching TV and responding to another set of e-mails.
I'm a web/interactive multimedia developer, so I wouldn't have this job sans Internet. I was, however a bartender in the pre-tubes era, so I was still working in the "social media" milieu of sorts.
Ha! The tools change but the object remains the same.
In '94 I was a doorman at a hotel and assisted in helping bell staff use pda's at the time and inputted current information for addresses and phone #'s of businesses to relay to our guests inquiries. When the WWW hit I had to jump aboard and remember the GM pleading for me not to go but I said i had to see what this was all about. Was in a park w/ a very expensive P133 laptop and bought a cell phone connector and was trying to get on the web and called dial-up tech support and the question i got back was; " you are trying to do what?" Basically hotel industry for 10 years before the web.
I moved to Japan to teach English in the public school system in 1998. In southern Japan, which is actually quite rural, some of the schools didn't have computers (or there would be one or two to share), let alone the internet. By the time I left in 2002, my elementary school was wired for LAN and ASDN and was running workshops for all the staff on computer skills.
Being a crafty person and a graphic designer by training, I went back to the literal cut-and-paste method. I made a lot of flash cards by hand, photocopying images from books and pasting them onto cards before laminating. I even published an English magazine using the old methods of manually assembling pages before photocopying them.
In hindsight, I felt more viscerally connected to my projects than I do now — now, I work exclusively on the internet. It's hard to hold a website in your hand. However, I really do like working on the web.
This reminds me of what I was doing in 1992: making 'zines – I guess the 'spiritual' precursor to blogs – the old fashioned way, cutting and pasting with scissors and glue, stealing photos and pictures from magazines, laying out the text that was handwritten on small pieces of paper and arranging the images throughout the blocks of text, and then photocopying the whole thing on legal paper, double-sided with a staple in the middle at the fold.
I guess because I'm a blogger now (for fun and interest, not for work) I am technically doing what I did before the internet, just faster, prettier and far more popularly read! (My one zine had only two issues, with a popular run of 20 issues, total.)
i used to work in a comicbook store before the internet so finding out what the current prices of older comics was mostly reliant on an annual price guide. but now with the internet, you can find the average prices instantly. and for shoppers they can go on ebay and do price comparisons now. whereas before whatever we priced it at was what customers had to pay. also now, online shopping would have been an important part of the business to survive. so more mail order sales are probably a big part of the comic store business now.
Like the poster above, I'm a library employee. I work for the public library and I love the internet at my job! The speed of being able to search the catalogue on computers instead of rows of endless cards, the databases that people can access from home, even using google as a spellchecker instead of grabbing the dictionary. While I still think that reference books and books in general have tons of value, I don't deny that the internet has made answering questions so much easier.
Jan From Winnipeg