The Boston Globe has an interesting piece on how Google is fueling the "collapse of inconvenience" and making it difficult for us to 'leave the past behind,' since everything documented electronically is made equally "present" by search engines like Google. Its ability to pull up information in seconds is making 411 nearly obsolete, and allowing blind-daters to make preemptive cancellations. But there is more at stake here than just spoiled dates or the availability of bad high school photos. I think studies of access must also take into account the effects of information access to the lives of individuals who because of Google, can lose jobs, lose face, or, in the extreme, have their lives endangered.

Currently, information normally inconvenient to find, like court documents, is now easily available, leading Sven Birkerts to predict that privacy will soon become a premium service available mostly to those with power and money. He likens it to "When pagers and high-end cellphones first came out, the only people who had them were top executives . . . It was a mark of their prestige - they were so important that they needed to be reachable wherever they went. Then the technology trickled down. Now the mark of prestige is the person nobody can reach."

This semester I am holding online office hours via AOL Instant Messenger, mainly for my online classes, and two students have complained that I am not "available enough," even though I am online at least three hours each week at scheduled times, and often more than that. I think students have high expectations for my online availability and instant email answering, expectations that are fueled by interfaces like Google. Has anyone else teaching online or with synchronous or asynchronous tools found a difference in student expectations for availability?