Facebook

Always get a bit of a feeling that Facebook is more of a gimmick to throw advertizing and silly little games with a field mine of click-on spam junk at you than an efficient way for social networking, but that's what's there, right? The screen is very loaded with lots of information, lots of it irrelevant, and I don't find it especially user-friendly. My dumb brain doesn't compute it all very well, say. I REALLY enjoyed that commoncraft little video. Now that's my kind of little presentation: To the point, No flafla, straight on it.

I found it sad that our own OPL fan club generated only 4 comments on its wall. One is to decry the lack of French on our Facebook page, while we claim to be the biggest bilingual library in North America. Eh. He is right, I fear.

For the rest, I think that although we should be there, I think the potential for this is a bit lower than you'd think. Public Libraries remain, and must remain, a place to go with our biological entities in whole. They should be a welcoming for the whole person, not just our braincells. Although the web allows reaching a bit further and wider, a physical library cares for the whole of use, not just our information need. We meet people, we touches thing, we get out and socialize a bit, we share with real human people. We also get to see how messy it is, and we get a feel of who is left out of the electronic world because it's to hard to access, economically or intellectually.

Internet networks are important, but as long as we are made of living cells, it is not enough. And they are out of reach to a lot of people too.