Without contradicting the moral weight of social software post from last week, let’s take a moment to look at three stories from Arstechnica about MySpace and others: online video leads to teen arrests, shooting rampage avoided due to MySpace posting, and Google + Facebook + alcohol = trouble.

These are the stories we’ve come to expect: teen does or post the results of something [stupid|illegal|dangerous] in [MySpace|Facebook|some other online place] and gets caught. The point here is that the (meatspace) community’s existing means of enforcement worked, and perhaps worked better, in these new electronic forums.

Our youth’s new Wild West may have instead turned out to be an Orwellian nightmare that no kid can escape from.

It’s bad enough, anyway, that Nate Anderson had to give some advice to the young’ns:

What can you do to keep yourself out the crosshairs? The obvious first step is to internalize the idea that no section of the Internet is your private playground, and to keep your mouth shut in public forums about information you would rather the rest of the world did not know. Beyond that, though, it can be difficult to eliminate traces of stupidity online. Good luck getting Google to remove all links to that embarrassing office karaoke video that comes up first when you search your name. It ain’t gonna happen. The moral of the story is: don’t expect privacy on the Internet and you won’t be disappointed.

embarrassing, facebook, moral responsibility, myspace, online policing, playground, privacy, public forums, social internet, social software, youth

Danah Boyd posted recently at Many-to-Many about the future of social software. I’ve been more than a little bit gung ho on web 2.0 for a while, but I do like her caution:

If MySpace falters in the next 1-2 years, it will be because of this moral panic. Before all of you competitors get motivated to exacerbate the moral panic, think again. If the moral panic succeeds:

• Youth will lose (even more) freedom of speech. How far will the curtailment of the First Amendment go?
   
• All users will lose the safety and opportunities of pseudonymity, particularly around political speech and particularly internationally.
   
• Internet companies will be required to confirm the real life identity of all users. At their own cost.
   
• International growth on social communities will be massively curtailed because it is much harder to confirm non-US populations.
   
• Internet companies will lose the protections of common carrier which will have ramifications in all sorts of directions.
   
• Internet companies will see a massive increase in subpoenas and will be forced to turn over data on their users which will in turn destroy the trust relationship between companies and users.
   
• There will be a much greater barrier for new communities to form and for startups to build out new social environments.
   
• International companies will be far better positioned to create new social technologies because they won’t have to abide by American laws even if American citizens use their technology (assuming the servers are hosted outside of the US). Unless, of course, we decide to block sites on a nation-wide basis…

There’s stuff here that I wish I had more time to write about, more time to think about, but read the full story. I’ll get back to this in bits and pieces over time.

danah boyd, facebook, friendster, moral responsibility, myspace, responsible application development, responsible web design, social internet, social software, web 2.0

Anybody who questioned the Pew Internet and American Life report about how teens use the internet and how they expect conversations and interactivity from the online services they use might do well to take a look at this comment on my Chernobyl Tour story:

Student Looking for Info that your not give us
February 3rd, 2006 10:11

you people suck. We have to do a school report and you are not giving us any info on what happened to the people, and the environmetn, we need a story from someone and about someone who lived through this inccident.

Ignore the bad spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Ignore the personal criticism. Instead, think about enormous shift of worldviews that allows a reader to make that comment about a popular story on a top-ranked website. Yes, the internet really is conversational — even if some people may be bad conversationalists.

Now imagine instead that the comment was on a related post at a library’s reference blog. Kindly worded or not, that’s a reference question. It’s an opportunity to serve a patron who obviously isn’t being served by traditional library services, and it’s a huge argument for libraries to make sure they’re blogging this stuff and fully participating in the Google Economy. Afterall, the person who made that comment certainly didn’t search the library.

Keep reading: the language of your website, institutional blogging done right, and designing library services for today.

library, libraries, web 2.0, social web, social internet, blogs are conversations, blog, blogs, comments, blog comment, blog comments, teens, internet generation, reference blog, millennials, future libraries

Lichen pointed me to this Librarian’s Guide to Etiquette post about new technologies:

Keep up to date with new technologies that you can co-opt for library use. So what if no one will ever listen to the pod casts of your bibliographic instruction lectures, subscribe to the RSS feeds from your library’s blog, send your reference librarian instant messages, or view your library’s profile on facebook.com? At least you did your part to make all these cool technologies a little bit lamer.

Point taken, and it’s a reasonable caution. The same rush to embrace trends that has us putting coffee shops in our libraries might also push us into trying to setup shop in online forums like Facebook, but who’s to say we should go there? After all, people have been gathering in bars for years, but the we don’t see branches opening in Cheers or libraries offering Irish coffee in their new coffee shops.

But there is something to learn from these new technologies. I just saw numbers that suggested Facebook (an optional service) gets about the same usage by our students as our university portal (which students are required to use, even to check email). Match that with the growing number of stories I’ve been hearing of students using Facebook to collaborate on class projects, and we have to conclude that something interesting is happening.

I’m going to avoid the question of whether libraries should be trying to offer services inside Facebook, and instead ask the question of how well our existing services work for those using Facebook. If students are collaborating, they’re likely sharing URLs, but our OPACs and databases often aren’t bookmarkable, making it difficult to exchange links to those resources (and instructions like these don’t help either). And if somebody blogs about one of our items, our catalogs don’t support comments or trackbacks, making it a one-sided conversation. Facebook and other online services are important to our patrons, and we would do well to think about how information is exchanged using those technologies. We would do well to build services that interoperate with the internet that people are using.

social software, social internet, internet and society, internet and academia, facebook, myspace, library, libraries, future libraries, information behavior, durable links, academia

Jenny Levine alerted me to the Pew Internet & American Life Project report on teens as both content creators and consumers.

It turns out that teens, and teen girls especially, are highly active online IMing, sharing photos, blogging, reading and commenting on other’s blogs, and gaming. An especially strong trend in this group is the use of web technologies for collaboration. Interactivity, increasingly, is being defined by the teen’s ability to ask questions, comment, or contribute. Take a look at this quote, (found via this BBC report):

These teens would say that the companies that want to provide them entertainment and knowledge should think of their relationship with teens as one where they are in a conversational partnership, rather than in a strict producer-consumer, arms-length relationship.

Jenny calls this the “4Cs,” for conversation, community, commons, and collaboration. Clearly, services that allow those 4Cs are preferred over those that don’t. Competitively, where do you stand? How well have you embraced the 4Cs in your online services.

tags: 4cs, collaboration, commons, community, conversation, interactivity, internet, jenny levine, pew internet, pew internet & american life project, pew internet project, social internet, social software, social web, teenagers, teens, youth