Remember when time zones mattered? When you had to schedule meetings during “working hours” and you had to dress professionally for those meetings? Now that we’re in an “always-on” world, the idea of what is normal has drastically changed. We’ve all had to learn new tools, accommodate our working lives to the vagaries of remote environments, forego in-person meetings, and cope with a radically uncertain future. Zoom has become a way of life. New concerns appear, such as whether your Zoom background is copyrighted.

For me, the switch from conferences in a physical location to virtual ones has had both pluses and minuses. I both miss and don’t miss the travel. When flights were on time and I got a seat upgrade, I was happy. Delayed or cancelled flights I can still live without. I do miss strolling around exhibit halls and working at the Information Today, Inc. or the AIIP booth. Random conversations with conference attendees I’ve never met before are much harder to pull off virtually. But the professional development opportunities have never been greater, or more affordable. Always-on learning, when conference attendees can go back at any time and view speakers they missed during scheduled sessions, is extraordinarily appealing.

Paradoxically, as our world has shrunk without travel and personal contact, it has also expanded. Only when conferences are virtual could someone in the U.K., on the same day, attend a conference running on U.S. Eastern time and one emanating from Germany with sessions on Central European time. This is not a hypothetical example; it really happened.

The always-on life we now lead can have some not so salubrious consequences. Doom scrolling, where people immerse themselves in a continual stream of news, much of it bad news, has become “a thing” during the pandemic. This affects the doom scrollers’ mental health and overall well-being. It’s a challenge for information professionals who are dedicated to combatting misinformation and disinformation. Isolation seems to have expanded people’s susceptibility to false narratives. Even information professionals can get sucked into spreading “fake news” when it correlates with their emotional response.

Scams and fraud took hold to a frightening degree when so many people were in lockdown mode. Donating to spurious causes, clicking on links that led to thieves cleaning out bank accounts, and investing in stocks that were bound to crash and burn are only a few of the rampant fraudulent activities. True, these existed prior to our always-on life, but they increased during the past year. Promoting financial literacy and money management fits perfectly into the librarian toolkit.

Information literacy took on new dimensions. It’s gone beyond understanding the nuances of effective online searching to incorporate evaluation skills and a multiplicity of formats. Sifting through research results, webpages, news items, photos, videos, social media, preprints, and statistics requires an unprecedented level of discernment. Bringing mindfulness and empathy to the task augments our ability to separate truth from fiction and identify the half-truths and almost correct information that threaten to overwhelm us. Particularly in an always-on world, information professionals must persevere in their pursuit of truth.