blogmarch

Questions from this first part of class have to do with wondering how libraries and librarians fit into all of this.

Here are the things that appeal to me about Web 2.0 :

• I love the wisdom of the crowd idea.  Open, decentralized participation makes it feel like the possibilities for collaborative exploration are endless.  I do believe, as Michael said in class, that when you are working with the collective intelligence, you get so many answers and ideas that one of them is bound to resonate.
• I love, love, love the Long Tail idea of the sum of esoteric interests being greater than the sum of interest in the hits.  Social networks have shown just how interesting and odd most people’s tastes can be if they are given limitless access.
• There is nothing better than having infinite information available at your fingertips.   I find that I will look things up on Wikipedia at the drop of a hat.  It used to be I would put questions on my to do list and never get around to them.  Now, when my six year old asks me about tornadoes, we can look up information,  immediately go to YouTube to see live footage of tornadoes, which leads us to live footage of tsunamis, which brings us to surfers in Hawaii.  Which brings me to…
• Serendipity.  There is no serendipity like the kind that happens when you share information with like-minded people.  Social software makes anyone with any particular taste, hobby, fetish, or interest able to find others with that same predilection.  And the nature of unlimited, clickable links to other kind-of-related/kind-of-not-related material that cohorts are interested in makes the serendipity factor of social networks huge.

Here are the things that cause me concern about Web 2.0:

• The Continuous Partial Attention referred to in the Social Machines article by Wade Roush.  C.P.A is a “state of mental blurriness thought to be induced when information is constantly pouring in from multiple sources.”  I have noticed a few recent articles mentioning how to manage huge amounts of information , much of it having to do with devising some sort of categorization system– “read now,” “read later, if there is time,” and “discard without reading.”  It seems that people are recognizing this mental blurriness, as well as experiencing the inability to focus on any one subject for very long, and the stress that comes from feeling that there will never be enough time to read it all.  It is hard to determine what is good and important when there is no “down time” to process information.  Sometimes it all seems like amorphous data, it comes in, then goes out without very much processing, then the next bit of information comes in, etc.
• The same article mentions the fact that aggregators (and, I would add, other types of social software) allow us to filter out news and ideas that don’t mesh with our own ideas.  Janelle mentions something like this in her posting for this week.  I do wonder what happens when you surround yourself with people who are too much like you.  There can be serendipity from opposing views, too.
• I agree with Janelle, again, when she wonders about the reality of the “wisdom of the crowd” thing, saying that it seems more like mob mentality to her.  To me, even though I do find the value in colletive intelligence, I think that  the social web, which is still young, is full of lots of people pouring out a bunch of the inane, just because they can.
• The rudeness factor.  The newness may be to blame again, but I am astonished at texting one person while conversing with another, intimate phone conversations in crowds, two people sitting and having dinner together, both on the phone, “news reporters “Twittering” at a 3 year-old’s funeral, (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/13/colorado-newspaper-twitters-three-year-olds-funeral/) etc.  I think that somebody needs to come up with some sort of continuous computing etiquette.  The Social Machines article mentions the idea that a constant information stream draws attention away from the here and now.   I think this ties in to the rudeness factor.

The Buckland article asks what happens to the idea of “value” with digitization and access to huge amounts of information?   This is where librarians come in, or where I would like to come in.  Buckland goes on to say that the “privileging of the better” remains a significant and needed service, and that while all information should be accessible, maybe it shouldn’t be equally accessible.   While it neccessarily implies “judgement” and making choices about what is useful, helpful and good, this might be the ways libraries can help (or continue to help) in tempering some of the overstressed, muddled confusion that comes with limitless information.  We have always been the gatekeepers of information, and this may be a necessary role now more than ever.  People need to know how important this part of the librarian’s job description is.

I would also like to see the Library 2.0 concept of user participation and input in this process.  In an effort to be hip and current, libraries seem to have focused on making users friends.  This is good, but I think it could also be great to tap into them as other kinds of  resources.  There is some of this going on–user book reviews and lists appear on many library websites.  As I mentioned in class, I think we could go further with this–patrons could do online reference wikis, they could form their own Long Tail and have book, movie and music swapping services,  create their own subject guides….

Looking forward to more….