Politics on the interwebs

Salon.com features a minute-by-minute account of the scintillating debate between Democratic hopefuls...with questions from YouTube. Hilarious!!

In which I complete my own assignment

I asked folks doing the RSS module of our Learning 2.0 experiment to reflect on how this model of information delivery might impact libraries. I'm going to take a few lines to reflect on that very question myself.

I think our patrons are demanding that services be delivered to them, whether it be news via RSS, books shipped to their local branch or instruction conveyed through a web tutorial. I really liked the analogy made in the little video that I linked to the RSS module - RSS is like Netflix; instead of going to your local video store & picking from what they have, you tell the service what you want & it's delivered. On the one hand, this model is great: the consumer determines what they want/need and then has myriad options for configuring how it gets to them. For example, I love the fact that I can not only have New York Times stories constantly flowing to my aggregator, but I can specify that I only want stories that deal with Europe. Or hip librarians. Or whatever.

But there's also something disturbingly insular about this mode of information delivery, as well. I think it restricts the amount of "information encountering" that one might experience - that sort of serendipitous stumbling upon an interesting counterpoint or seemingly random fact from a different discipline or subject area. From a liberal arts education point of view, that's a loss. There's also a loss of community when everyone simply stays parked behind their computers & has everything delivered (this goes beyond the library, obviously and extends into the world of commerce & civic participation. You don't even want to get me started on voting by mail...). Are we destined to become a society of isolated, narrowly informed hermits? Or is that what we've already become?

In any case, I'm not giving up my Netflix membership.

Facebook + librarians = ???

I just read an interesting post about librarians in Facebook at User's Lib. From a small, informal poll done on Facebook, it turns out that a majority of students prefer interacting with librarians face-to-face, rather than via Facebook.

This doesn't surprise me necessarily. To me, Facebook seems like students' domain...where they go to interact informally (ie, hook up & swap compromising photos of one another at parties). It seems hard for me to believe that a student would be IMing with some guy from her chem class and then SUDDENLY REALIZE that she should also contact a librarian about tracking down some scholarly articles.

That said, I did meet an int'l studies librarian at ALA who said that he gets a lot of interaction with students in his department via Facebook and feels like he is more "trusted" now that he has a presence there.

I can't seem to remember to check my Facebook account regularly...it seems outside of my normal everyday existence.

True confessions

So, I have to admit that I'm not the world's biggest fan of blogs. In fact, I've been known to question their value (in public) and wonder if so much of their current popularity isn't due to deft media hype. I know, I know...it's not very NexGen or 2.0 of me. But before you write me off as Michael Gorman with a nose ring, let me explain my apparent heresy.

I have absolutely no problem with blogs as a means of communication (and here's the part where I claim, "some of my best friends have blogs..."). But within the past two years, I feel like blogs and bloggers have been elevated by some commentators and experts to heights beyond their innate worth or purpose. We've all heard about how "citizen journalists" and their blogs will replace traditional media - obviously, creaky ol' news outlets can't compete with snappy, modern bloggers and the power of the Internets. But 9 times out of 10, when I read the work of one of these supposed rogue journalist-bloggers, I find that they are either basing their story on the work of an "old school" news outlet (NYT, Reuters, BBC, etc.) or simply re-transmitting a story from one of the aforementioned with some commentary. And that's fine, but it's not journalism and it raises some serious questions about how news blogs will survive if the prognosticators are correct and newspapers disappear in the next few years. Where will they get the raw materials for their stories??

In short, I think blogging technology is great and I'm happy to peruse my favorite sites every day (fed to me conveniently by my RSS reader...but that's another story in another blog), but I see it as a yet another tool in the ever-evolving world of communication technologies- not the final frontier.