« All sorts of fabulous news | Main | Stolen cheese pits Bloggies against Printies »
May 4, 2006
Two librarians talk about MySpace
A while back, after my post on how MySpace is like high school, my friend Jeanne (who is working on her library science degree in an archives program), sent me an interesting email:
Subject: if myspace is high school....
...maybe i realize now why i don't like hanging out there.
And it makes me wonder what that makes linkedin?
A happy hour sponsored by a networking club?
And I can't seem to find it now.. but there is a site out there that lists the top 50 or 100 people with the most contacts on linkedin (someone I was looking at had a link to the site to proudly point out where they were on the list).
...jeanne
I read the email, thought about it for a little while, and wrote back:
MySpace is really a high school nightmare. It started out as an online haven for musicians and artists, which was super keen. As the service grew, it was like a really cool club that the not-cool kids founded being invaded by immature cool kids who wrecked it. Just like high school.
The big difference b/t MySpace and LinkedIn is target audience and resulting culture. MySpace really is open to just about anyone, and doesn't really have so much of a focus on what the purpose is, other than "aggregate as many ppl as possible in your account." LinkedIn is designed to bring ppl together on a professional level, so it's way more focused on a more mature, adult group, and results in a more mature, adult culture of use.
However, the pitfall of social networking still boils down to numbers. In a world where the possession of more means so much, even just having more people on a list seems to carry social capital. So even on LinkedIn, you find people being proud of the big numbers of contacts and such. It somewhat an indicator of how unconcerned our society has become with quality, and how much more obsessed we are with quantity.
Wow. Perhaps I should post all this to my blog... ;)
Could I quote your email and such?
Incidentally, she said yes, so I'm posting it here. Suddenly remembering that I forgot something, I replied again:
Oh, hey, I forgot to include these:
MySpace growth continues amid criticism
Texas community college bans MySpace.com
To which she also replied:
Oh.. and the other thing I hate about myspace is the clutter factor. Too much stuff everywhere.. but then again I am right now listening to music from a new band whose lead singer went to my summer camp ( http://www.myspace.com/waitstillbaxter ) - so I obviously don't hate it that much - just prefer to listen to it than to look at it.
Jeanne
So what on earth prompted me to share this here? I'm not sure.
Partially, it's an inside look into a conversation about social networking between two librarians with technology backgrounds, and it might be interesting to other librarians to be a fly on the screen.
It also shows that, because different social networking sites have different personalities, per se, they breed different cultures. The same way that librarians evaluate information for authority and validity, the issue of culture type in online communities is a more prominent issue now than ever before, and something librarians should learn more about. It's interesting, because the typical librarian stereotype is a person behind a desk. In an age of increased focus on outreach and getting out from behind the desk, we need to go even further and get out from behind the desk on the internet, too.
And, in looking at MySpace on the surface, the basic profile page is really a simple layout. Easy on the eyes, easy to understand, mostly text, layout scales sufficiently when you change the font size, overall not too shabby. And some pages are customized in a way that may not be entirely ADA-compatible or perfectly useable, but still look classy. However, with so many members trying to dress up their online locker doors, basically hacking the formatting by adding a style sheet in one of the input fields (which is really designed to accomodate regular content), or using MySpace page generators to make the pages look "cool," the result is a whole lot of pages that just look awful. It seems, just looking at it, that useability is lost on the MySpace generation, much the way authoritativeness is no longer as important, and the Google eight ball is always right about anything you ask it in the first ten search results.
Luckily, all is not lost. While high school hangouts like MySpace and Facebook continue to be very popular, Flickr, LinkedIn, the sister sites 43 Places and 43 Things), and so many more, give the not-so-high-school crowd places to hang out online without feeling trapped in a John Hughes film. In the end, these sites represent different online cultural pockets that are changing the way that people communicate with each other, and has already started to change way that patrons will communicate with each other, and with librarians.
May 4, 2006 6:40 PM