Monday, December 31, 2007

Socializing Goes From Hanging Out to Social Networking

Socializing isn’t about spending time with friends you made in person anymore. Now it’s about viewing the web pages of friends, real and virtual, and sending them comments. Those social networking sites that make it possible for users to have personalized web pages and have also become centers of socializing as well. When people are too busy to plan and coordinate time to spend together, they can visit each other’s pages and leave little messages or cute graphics. Friends aren’t limited by distance anymore.

My sense of the people writing these articles on Social Networking is that they probably don’t use these sites themselves. The explanations tend to focus on the dangers of online social networking, possible benefits that outweigh the dangers, and the statistics of users and user activities. Really, the articles are dry and boring stuff that don’t really explain much on why social networking is so appealing (or why anyone would want to sign up for one in the first place).

Should the Library jump on the bandwagon? I’m not so sure. Teens might appreciate the fact that the Library is willing to communicate with them on their own turf, but if our social networking is not up to their standards, I’m not sure if they’ll feel more enticed to use the Library services. The Library needs to change with the times and we need to keep up with what our customers know. We are supposed to be custodians of knowledge, right?

2 comments:

Tracy said...

Have to agree with you there about the boring articles . . . people who don't use social networking sites talking about it

Cindy Hart said...

We should most likely ask our teens if they library should be on MySpace. The real question maybe do our teens want us there.