Social Media and Libraries

As someone who marvels at the intricate evolution of ideas within our culture, or what Professor Dawkins refers to as "memes," I find current debates in libraries and society as a whole regarding social media intriguing. How much time should we really spend with this technology? Is there a way to do it where you can actually increase visibility in the community, or is it simply a matter of keeping up with the times?

These are important questions, because the success of a trend is impossibly hard to predict. The only surefire way to talk confidently about a trend is in retrospect. Trends almost always are safe, hesitant steps out from the branch of ideas that preceded it: rarely is a trend a whole new tree. I remember panning the Nintendo Wii as soon as the details were announced. A remote control for a controller? Motion control? Didn't they try this with the horrible flop that was the Power Glove? The Wii was such a radical departure from the slow evolution of the video game console that I feared it would be ridiculed and ignored, yet it was an immediate and unmitigated success.

I had much the same attitude towards Twitter when it first launched. I am now on Twitter (all my recent Twitter posts are there on the right side, in all their glory and inside-jocularity), but it's still hard to get the exact sense of what we're supposed to do with this thing. It's a tool with no instruction booklet. And a recent post I read regarding the actual use of Twitter seems to echo that problem. Twitter is seen as a titan in social media, yet only 8% of the people use it. Does that mean we shouldn't bother, or does it mean we can reach part of that 8% to make them excited about libraries?

The obvious upswing regarding integrating social media into libraries is that almost all of it is free. I recently wrote a paper regarding library catalogs and cited a wonderful example of integrating social media using Library Thing as an extremely cheap way to use already extant sources of metadata that easily relate to library patrons. But is there a risk?

Yes. Time is valuable to library staff. Assigning a librarian to tweet and type up Facebook updates might be a casual lunch-time frivolity now, but what if social media starts becoming more of a force in our lives? I believe we are on the precipice of combining the escapism and instant gratification of Massively Multiplayer Online Games with the idea of social media. Second Life and Facebook games are but the tip of the iceberg of the coming age of an almost total online presence. Companies will be there: should libraries be there, too?

It has been posited that this type of total online presence will also spill into the real world, where game concepts like scoring points and completing tasks will be assigned to real world, daily tasks. This mentality has already taken hold to some effect in my generation, where we commonly refer to daily events as either "fail" or "win."

The risk is coming off like, for lack of a more tasteful word, a trendhumper. Five years down the line, someone will write in an academic journal about the disastrous program you implemented, because you took innovation too far from logic and decency. Somehow, you have to have that vision, and make sure you always discern how exactly people will use this tool effectively, instead of getting blinded by flashy bits.