Deposit, me, blog

Like quite a few people I know, in both a real and a facebook way, I have recently gotten into facebook, and what a bizarre experience it is. As someone who only blows their own trumpet very quietly, facebook appeals to my exhibitionist streak by providing me a vehicle for controlling how much gets out there, without me having to look people in the eye whilst I’m doing it. But it also makes me a little uneasy, mixing my professional colleagues with people I’ve known since pre-school, people I’ve met twice with people who have seen me throw-up. Then there’s the whole minefield of who to ‘(be)friend’, from the promiscuity of everyone you’ve ever met to the self-assurance of waiting for them to come to you. A recent cnet news item talks about research showing that a worrying number of people will add friends without any real knowledge of who the request is from. I’ve yet to have a request declined, but I wonder what latent insecurities that would be unleashed if I did. There’s a more serious side to all of this, though, with reported cases of people having their degrees withheld, or losing their jobs, so one really does have to think before you post.

And as one friend asked, “what is it for, exactly?” … I really don’t know, it’s a multi-faceted serious waste of time. I use it mostly to find out what people are up to, and that can be pretty revealing in a pointless way … I find out people I am in awe of are eating curry, others ponder philosophical questions and others simply irritate. Me, I must confess that I use the status feature to give not-so-subtle hints about the state of my psyche on a given day. So, for me, it’s a kindov self-therapy and it’s easy to forget other people are paying attention, which is tricky when those people are your colleagues and you really should be working at the time.

I have similar feelings about blogging and all those other social networking sites like flickr, del.icio.us, slideshare and linkedin … how to you ‘rate’ your friends, how much do you shield behind ‘private’ or ‘friends’ options and how much do you let the random world see? why would a complete stranger want to see pictures of my family or view my paltry presentations? how much of this is some bizarre attempt to feel I belong? or a genuine attempt to manage my data online? or something else entirely.

LinkedIn, for example, seems like facebook for grown-ups, but it lacks the ability to send my friends a margarita or solve a jigsaw, so it’s kinda boring once you’ve looked at how many connections your friends have made. I regularly forget I’ ve got an account there, but when I do I still check out how many connections my fellow connections have made.

There are some ‘closed world’ accusations for facebook and I admit to having misgivings the adverts and worrying messages about use of personal data, but how that *really* differs to gmail’s targetted advertisements I’m not sure.

With my scholarly communications hat on, if facebook really is where the kids are at, then libraries, repositories and other scholarly comms resources need to be thinking how they can best get into facebook with them, rather than trying to get the kids out of facebook, but to do that in a way that is useful, rather than big brother-ish. Certainly this is something colleagues on the Repository Support Project have been thinking about.

So, having mused publicly on this, I still use facebook and various other ’social’ tools, for now at least – they intrigue the librarian in me and appeal to the geek. But this leaves me with the slightly unsavoury feeling that I’ve gone a step too far in writing this down, even if I do claim it’s merely to see what this blogging lark is all about.