I lead a charmed life. Most days, I bring my homemade lunch to work and eat at my desk while catching up on my professional reading. Yesterday, I was reading the October 15 issue of Information Week and an article caught my eye.

What follows is probably the biggest digression of my blogging career. Does anyone remember Sho's Lunch Server? This is an oldie but goodie. Sho Kuwamoto, a graduate student at Purdue, published his daily lunch menus on the Web back in the mid-1990's. This was probably one of the first whimsical sites that was popular with the Web-going crowd. Wonderfully, the dead link to his server survives as a link on an old lunch server page that still exists. Sho's lunches were varied and sounded delicious. This was a man who took his lunches seriously. I sometimes think of Sho's delightful meals when I eat my invariable salads while getting caught up in my reading.

Since I'm already digressing, I might as well take it a bit further. After Sho's site went down, I did some sleuthing (in the pre-Google days) and discovered that Sho went to work for Macromedia at some point after graduation. He was on the team that developed Dreamweaver 1.0. And wow, I just Googled him and found out that he's alive and well and has his own blog. I guess this should come as no surprise. Now I've learned that Sho was instrumental in developing Adobe Flex. If I were a really talented blogger, I'd write something inspirational about the role of early adoption, creativity and good lunches in the development of the Web.

As I was saying: I was reading Information Week and came upon an interesting article. I like reading trade magazines of this type because they give me a broad perspective on the use of technology in various sectors. This magazine leans heavily toward business, but also features other sectors such as government, education and entertainment.

One of the things that motivates me to support Library 2.0 is the notion of a library as an information environment, one that is integral to other information environments in society. We don't, and can't, exist in a vacuum. Students not only bring their information culture to us, but we, as their educators, employ our information culture to turn them out with skills that can position them to deal successfully with the professional world. As I've said before, 2.0 students stuck with 1.0 libraries is a very problematic scene. This is why I like reading technology trade journals so much: these journals help connect me to the information culture of professions outside of my own field. They're one of many tools I can use to help give me a context in which to think about libraries. Goodness knows we librarians talk to each other often enough.

The article in question is titled "Resistance is Futile Fatal." Yes, you read that right, strikeout and all. You can read it online. The article states, plainly enough, that "Today's social networking and digital content sites are shaping IT users' expectations and experiences for years to come....Businesses must take a longer-term view of these emerging applications and recognize that they're being driven by forces that are more likely to gain momentum than die out. Rather than fight the inevitable, business technology managers must start exploring ways to leverage the new digital content ecosystem to meet their companies' objectives."

Substitute "libraries" for "businesses" and this statement sounds familiar to those of us advocating for changes in the information culture of libraries. And did I see the word "must"? Dare to suggest in the library world that these changes are imperative and you need to duck for cover. I'll be interested in seeing what readers of Information Week think about this.

This article focuses on developing appropriate policies and infrastructure in the business world to deal with new media tools. It also provides a good overview of what's driving the "emerging media ecosystem." This was derived from a study by the organization Heavy Reading. The factors are familiar to most any of us who are watching the scene:

• Broadband penetration
• Online multimedia
• Social networking
• User-generated content
• Constant access, in particular from mobile devies

Our profession, as a whole, still hasn't taken much of this seriously. How routinely do we use social networking to practice our profession? How many of us have opened our Web spaces to accommodate user-generated content? How many have adjusted our Web sites to accommodate mobile devices?

I'm bringing all this up to make a point: as the information culture changes around us, the pressures for us to make wise use of this culture in our own practice will grow. Is resistance futile, or truly fatal? You tell me.