Online Social Networks

My thoughts upon looking at some of the library Facebook and MySpace accounts in the social software case studies was similar to that of Meredith Farkas – what exactly is the objective here? Looking at the message board of the Hennepin County Library Facebook account, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of activity, and what’s there is mainly technical back and forth between librarians or inaugural congratulatory posts. There don’t seem to be a lot of posts on the Public Library of Charlotte & Meckldenburg County Library account either, but this account is more of a portal, providing a useful RSS feed to upcoming programs. While I can see the value of having this one additional avenue for marketing the library and its services, these Facebook accounts do not really provide anything that the library’s website doesn’t already offer.  The Ann Arbor MySpace page at first seems pretty neat – with interesting content and layout. However, looking at the description of the library as “male, 50 years old” or the list of the library’s activities (“playing with our new website features…”) I can’t help but think that communicating with an institution is a lot less fun than communicating with an individual.

As for all of the security issues discussed in this week’s articles, I agree with Danah Boyd that a lot of those security issues existed before MySpace and Facebook, and am reminded of one of our articles from way back in the first week which talked about media literacy in general being an essential component of modern curriculums. It’s pretty hard to monitor what young people see, so while it continues to be important to pay attention to what is going on sites like MySpace and Facebook and make them as safe as possible, educating young people to think critically might go even further in helping to protect them. To stop them from using it through something like the Deleting Online Predators Act would not only most likely be ineffective, but also take away a pretty fun world for young people. I know one young student who writes a serial story on Facebook, periodically posting chapters for his network of friends. Of course, I didn’t think too much about copyright issues in posting your creative work to Facebook, but I was impressed that the site was creating a venue for that kind of creative activity. How to deal with the huge loss in productivity from students and everyone else wiling away hours on Facebook, I will leave to human resources.