danah boyd...

Maybe I should have read danah boyd's second article before diving into the 'Facebook is trending adult' statement. I can only base what I say on my impression of the site; the observation in an article in the NY Times Style section (usually about 1-2 years behind actual social trends); and the attitude of Rutgers students writing in the Daily Targum. That last audience, at least in the arts pages, dismisses Facebook and promotes MySpace. However, given the band-focus of MySpace boyd notes in the first article, and perhaps the fringe element she discusses in the second, there could be an explanation for that. And perhaps it's just cool for college kids to call Facebook 'lame'... I also wonder what boyd would make of the presence of Barack Obama on MySpace. Did this election (in which some teens were able to vote) have some impact on the allure of MySpace? For the record, I did not hear anything about Obama on Facebook.

So what do librarians take from all this? Allow teens access to both sites. Don't, as the armed services apparently did, try to draw some "good" vs. "bad" or "class" distinction from a social networking site. I don't think libraries are in the business of censorship in the first place, but librarians ought to be 'site-neutral' when discussing either SNS. It was kind of amazing, actually, to see this kind of 'good-site-vs.-bad-site' issue, anyway: sites are sites, and subject to the faults and virtues of their users and administrators. If you were to be a library that banned access to both sites, or refused to allow teens to access SNS, you'd hardly be serving your young adult population. You would actually be sending a clear message that the library wasn't for the likes of them - 'get off my lawn!', so to speak. So if you're concerned about predators, etc., on SNS, maybe it's better to have that message incorporated in a workshop about how to 'trick out' your page than to ban access outright.

Also, be prepared for 'NextGen' SNS, as well as the aging population of current SNS users. We are all different, wanting different things from different sites, and our ability to consume and digest the novel is only growing. We need to think beyond the current SNS - part of the point of the first article, actually - and adapt to what happens next. While it was cool to see some of what we've used in class brought on board in Facebook - video, microblogging, chat - that is only going to expand. So, we need to keep reading, keep learning, keep moving slightly ahead of the users - or we'll still be stuck on the 2009 version of Friendster in a decade.