Comments on Quest 8

I looked at all of the social networking sites in the Discovery Exercise - bebo, friendster, Linkedin, facebook, and myspace.com. Myspace.com and bebo won the day as being the easiest to nagivate through, but perhaps only because the others required a login to do more than minimal searching.

I wouldn't consider creating an account on any of them, at least not at this point in my life. My life is full enough without monitoring one of these accounts. Maybe I'm just too old. Besides, it gives me the creeps to think of people viewing my profile and I don't know anything about them. It's like being in a house at night with the windows open and the lights on, so that everyone can see in, but you can't see out. If I did sign up, my space would definitely be private.

There are plenty of problems in these social networking sites. The first and foremost is that people can be whatever they want to be, and can (and do) hide behind a false profile. It is naive if people think that all of the users are over 14 (13? whatever the minimum age is). It is also disturbing to me to see the "friends" of the members of MySpace. Friends? How trivializing to the real meaning of "friends."

As for libraries using MySpace, I know that many have created profiles, thinking it is a perfect way to relate to teens. I simply don't believe that any teens go to the library or even to the library's website because they discovered a MySpace page from the library. It is ludicrous to me that a library's profile shows as male or female, age 15 (or whatever).

Here at CCPL, if the decision has been made to use MySpace profiles, blogs, etc. to reach out to teens, why not have it promoted at our official web site? Links at least to the blogs would be nice.

I know that I sound old fashioned. But just because new trends such as social networking exist, does that mean they're appropriate for library use? I'm not convinced.