Saturday, February 16, 2008

Social Networks, part 4 "Is MySpace Good for Society?"

Steven Cohen on Library Stuff links to an interesting post on the Freakonomics Blog at the New York Times. Author Steven Dubner brings together a panel of experts to discuss the impact of social networks. He asks:
Has social networking technology (blog-friendly phones, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) made us better or worse off as a society, either from an economic, psychological, or sociological perspective?
And there's a mixed bag of responses worth reading, but they all accept the powerful force that social networks have become. Sometimes it's hard to look at change as good or bad. It just is what it is, and you work with it.

But I still don't get Twitter.

2 comments:

Beth said...

Since you mentioned Twitter, I thought I would share AADL's new Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/aadl. Great example of how a library could use this tool.

Terry Dawson said...

Interesting Twitter example, though this type of use seems just like a quick alternative to blogging. Seems to be an RSS feed for calendar & web updates. I s'pose if there are enough people who prefer Twitter to feed aggregators there may be some market there.

If I'd ever met another human outside our profession who talked about feed readers or Twitter, I'd feel more drive. Just talking about feeds makes most folks eyes glaze over. But then, most of the people I know are old :) so I rely on the opinions of younger staff.