MySpace Rant

Okay, first confession: I really abhor the use of Internet sites for ranting. I hate that whole mentality that blogs and other online tools are the perfect opportunity to say to yourself ooh, here's my chance to say every mean thing I ever wanted to say but didn't because of societal taboos.. Well, politeness and proper grammar are two things I am always in favor of. And I like it when people use their "library voice" (which is not the same as a whispery church voice) online and everywhere.

So you will realize how badly MySpace has annoyed me that now I want to come to my friendly neighborhood blogger blog and rant about it.

You will recall that my sister invited me to be her friend on MySpace. So, big sister and generous soul that I am, I accepted and have made a very real attempt to make, if not a home, at least a quasi-comfy box there. I even went back and re-learned some basic HTML code so that my profile info would not look like word salad.

Did you catch that? MySpace, the reigning king/queen of Internet socializing sites, forces you to use HTML or CSS if you want to add any kind of formatting -- including line breaks (!!!) to your profile. That is so ridiculous!

Just for sheer entertainment value, I googled "Why MySpace Sucks" and found a DIGG article by that title, as well as some others. I don't agree with that rant -- it's really just a chance to bash the people who use MySpace. That's not my beef. I don't care if someone wants to write on their profile that they don't have much to talk about. That's fine by me.

What really annoys me about MySpace is not the people who join it, but the people who have made it, and have infused it with a proprietary nature that prohibits javascript and widgets and all the fun stuff that's out there to use to make your blog/site really interesting. After all, I thought one of the great fundamental values of Web 2.0 was interconnectivity: collaboration, sharing, communicating, creating. MySpace is set up to prohibit much of that -- or at least make it difficult enough that users might be tempted to purchase (for anywhere from $12 to $25) books that have been written about how to personalize your profile.

Also, I don't like how everything about MySpace seems to be about steering the user toward ads for music, movies and television shows. For me, clicking into MySpace music or videos is instantaneous information overload. I feel bombarded by ads, flashing icons and pictures of pretty, preening people. I get a headache just thinking about it. (Ooh, how old does this make me?)

So, without a doubt, I dislike MySpace.

But...

And you knew there was a "but" coming...

My sister wrote a short blog entry about the great day she had with my nephews. She doesn't often write letters or call - she's a busy mother of two young sons - but she'll blog. And I'm in heaven because I get a glimpse of her and my nephews. She wrote about holding 2 year old Tommy to watch jets fly low over the Northern Nevada plains, so close that she could almost see the pilot grinning back at her. It was sweet and honest and almost made me cry from missing them so much.

So, thank goodness for MySpace.

Done w/ Things... & MySpace calls

You might have read the blog below about MySpace. Let me sum it up: I don't like it, nor trust the minds behind it. Don't want to join the legions. Happy me, I think I can go on my way and ignore it.

Then I get an e-mail from one of my sisters who lives several states away and who I do not see or talk to nearly enough, and she's sending me a "friend" invitation to her MySpace site. I check it out, and discover that our other sister also has a page.

So... I ponder. I still don't like MySpace. I still don't trust the minds behind the curtain.

And after learning about all the fun new-fandango widgets and gizmos, I really, really, really don't like the limitations set in MySpace. Sure I can import my playlist and that's cool. But that's because MySpace wants to be the new music store to the world and so they are happy to have me suggest songs that my friends/family could purchase. On the other hand, I can't find a way to import the javascript for Library Thing into MySpace. I can make a tediously long URL and put that into my MySpace profile, but, as indicated, it's tedious and long and doesn't allow for the book covers. Where's the fun in that?

But I would love a way to spend more time connecting with my sisters. All I have to do is start my own page and sign up to be their "friend."

I feel myself being sucked in.

And this is why MySpace is so huge.

Thing 21: Beyond MySpace

This is what I really like about the concept of social networking sites. The Internet makes the world seem both smaller and larger: you can be a lonely geek in your little corner of the world, but via the Internet, find a whole bunch of similarly geeky folk to share with. That's an amazing thing, and very exciting. It takes the old idea of pen-pals and makes it much more immediate and exciting. You find others like yourself and discover the extraordinary breadth and diversity of people, places, cultures... that's so very cool.

I liked the look of Gather and Ning, and I also wandered around Bake Space for a while. I also played with google briefly and found Schmooze, a Jewish social network; Citizen Scientist for the layperson with a lot of curiosity, Maccaca, an online Digital Museum of Art for artists, and so much more.

So yes, I'll spend more time looking through these sites. I'd also like to find a way to let patrons know about these sites -- it seems that MySpace and Facebook get all the press, but they are so oppressively glitzy and teen oriented. It's nice to know that there are options for people who don't want that.

One note: I was watching a little bit of snowboarding on television yesterday, and between runs they were interviewing a couple of the "star" snowboarders. The interviews were not what I would have expected, instead they were right out of the MySpace "Coke or Pepsi?" survey. Sort of a media mashup. But it's alright for snowboarding, I guess, though I will be really scared if interviews start looking like this on the nightly news.

Thing 20 - MySpace & Facebook

Sometimes I think of MySpace and Facebook as black holes... I go near them and all sense of time and place is forgotten...

I haven't actually spent that much time on them. Don't have pages of my own and have zero inclination to start one, but I'm just totally fascinated by them all the same. It's the whole idea of "social networking" and how these sites are creating a paradigm shift in our definitions and perceptions of privacy, identity, place, community, association... even the definition of "friend" has undergone this strange transmutation. It's fascinating and perplexing.

In my professional capacity, I think of MySpace in two primary ways: first, to protect kids' right to go online and connect with their friends (however they define "friend.") Second, to learn as much as possible about these venues so that I can talk coherently with the parents who come in to the library and are concerned about their kids going online and therefore being exposed to the evils that may lurk in cyberspace. For them, I want to know enough about MySpace to be able to sit them down at the computer and give them tips on how to explore it as well as being able to suggest books that might help them parent in this new frontier.

I watched a PBS Frontline episode called Growing Up Online. It's available for viewing online, and I would highly recommend it to parents/teachers/library staff and other concerned folk. The program covers a lot of ground, from kids spending so much time online that they have more of a virtual life than a real one, to cyber-stalking and cyber-bullying.

I was struck by one of the parents in the program, a New Jersey mom who was incredibly concerned about some "bad man" stalking her daughters online. I don't want to minimize this concern in any way, but how is this worse than the greasy, doorway perverts who we grew up learning to avoid? (One note from the Frontline episode: the reporter said that in every case where a teen was stalked online the teen had been an active participant, at least initially... It stands to reason that it's much easier to block an inappropriate advance online than face to face with a real person.)

I think one thing that will be very interesting to watch unfold is what these online networking sites will mean for our evolving definitions of privacy. The little time I've spent bouncing around on MySpace shows me that people put the most unbelievably private info out there. And I'm not talking sexual things. I'm talking about cell phone numbers, place of birth, age, full name, etc. Everything but the social security number. (This while we hear more and more about identity thieves creating endless havoc for their victims.)

This should matter to us as library professionals because we (should) put a great deal of care and thought into issues around protecting privacy, not to mention media literacy, copyrights, etc. What does that mean for us as professionals to be zealously guarding patrons' privacy, then watch them put their entire life up on MySpace? I'm guessing that we haven't even begun to imagine how this will play out.

Then there is the whole issue of our privacy. We are out there in the public eye, and I have no doubt that there have already been several occasions, whether it be bored teens or bitter patrons, where individual staff get Googled. Not a bad thing if you lead a stereotypical librarian's life. But what if you don't? Is it safe to be Out in your blog if you identify where you work (okay, that might fit a certain librarian stereotype, still, I think you can get my point)? Then there's a whole gamut of choices and behaviors that fall into the category of "questionable taste." You have to wonder how many ways it could come back to haunt people. We all did stupid stuff as kids. Many of us do dumb things as grown-ups. But hopefully by now only a few people remember, and we can count on memories to fade and fugue with time, details to blur. The nature of people's memories allows a lot of room for compassion and forgiveness.

But when it's sent out to the Internet... it's really there. Forever. Any anyone can access it. The new NEA Today came today, and in it is an article called "The Whole World (wide web) Is Watching." The article gives several examples of teachers who were fired because their students or administrators discovered "inappropriate" content on their MySpace pages. In every case cited, the teachers had sexually explicit content on their pages. None of the examples involved interaction with students or minors. So the teachers were not blogging about things that were technically illegal. Still, they were fired.

The article goes on to say:

But what about free speech? Don't school employees have the right, on their own time, to blog about their private lives without fear of losing their jobs? Probably not... It's the general rule that school employees can be disciplined for off-duty conduct if the school district can show that the conduct had an adverse impact on the school or the teacher's ability to teach.

The article ends with the comment:

There's an old lawyer's adage that goes something like this: Never put in writing anything that you don't want read in open court or by your mother. Maybe it's time for an updated adage: Never put in electronic form anything that you wouldn't want viewed by a million people, including your colleagues, students, and supervisors - and your mother.

I don't think that these Internet social networking sites have made life more dangerous, although it is more overwhelming packed with options and opportunities for catastrophically stupid choices. I think there are some really, really good things about these sites (I'll get to that with Thing 21). It's just that it was safer to screw up when your friends were folks in your neighborhood, and you knew their secrets as much as they knew yours. But all of you could leave your neighborhood to go elsewhere and start over, making all new mistakes with all new people.

Now, you misstep online and it could follow you everywhere and for always. That's a really big paradigm shift. I'm not sure the ape side of our brains is up to processing the full ramifications of that.

Thing 4 - happy pics

Okay, easy enough to upload pictures onto Flickr. It makes me happy to think that if someone is looking to relocate to Royalton they might use Flickr and find that we have this bright, cheery library. (Of course, they might also see the library for Royalton, Vermont, but that's interesting, too.) I can see myself putting more pictures up to showcase library programs, FOL activities, etc.

However, I'm not sure how much I'd use Flickr for my personal photos. It just seems odd and strange to put my pictures out there in the public realm. My partner and I had dinner with a couple of friends on Friday, and we were talking about the generation gap around "public" and "private" information. We are all 40ish to 50ish, and we are all perplexed at how much personal information -- in the form of photos, profile interests, and more -- the avid Flickr'er's, Facebook'ers and MySpace'ers are willing to put on their pages. Put our pictures on the web... pictures of us, of our loved ones? You've got to be kidding! Is it safe? Is it secure? Is it appropriately modest social behavior?

So in that context, no thank you. However, to showcase the great little library that this small community is so proud of... well that's something I can get behind.

Also on Friday I had the opportunity to spend the day going back and forth between exploring the exhibits at the St. Paul Science Museum and spending time in the atrium reading over pages and pages of articles about Library 2.o, Web 2.0, etc. It was glorious. So nice to take a day to not just learn about some of this stuff but also to have time to actually think about it (and then go play with animation technology or look at dinosaur fossils).

One thing I found very interesting was an article about Beacon, a pesky little advertising program used by Facebook that keeps track of users' visits to certain web sites and then uses that information to target the first user's friends with very specific ads. One example: a little ad went out to a user's friends, and it said something like "Michelle gave Top Gun four stars" and linked to Blockbuster so that the friends could purchase the DVD.

The good news, according to the article, is that Beacon created quite the kerfuffle when it was released, and Facebook has made it easier to opt out.

The bad news, to my mind at least, is that advertising agencies and others are using their best and brightest minds to figure out how to plum the depths of a user's tags and preferences to keep track of the "virtual person" in order to sell the real person their stuff.

I guess that's the big irony/conundrum. There are some things about this Web 2.0 technology that are so transparent. It feels like a community of glass houses. At the same time, it is all so virtual, and the goals and tactics of the minds behind the technology can be obscured. Who is reading what I write (besides my friendly CMLE coach)? What technology is out there to figure out whether what I write is worth paying attention to? (I, for one, have doubts.)

Perhaps this is what is meant by the "radical trust" that kept coming up in the articles I read. I think I can give that trust to the person/family looking for information on the Royalton Public Library. And I'm happy to encourage and engage with her/him/them. I'll put happy pictures up on the web.

But would someone please tell me what's on the mind of the man behind the curtain?