We're asked to consider the role of libraries (and librarians) vis a vis the privacy concerns raised by many Web 2.0 products. While we may each have personal curiosities, comfort levels and hot buttons that govern our individual participation, our trademark professional values demand that we try to be alert to some of the mind-numbing effects produced by the euphoria of engagement in that segment of Web 2.0 that is so craftily dubbed social networking.
To begin, we can watch the language, and its co-opted connotations. Friends, buddies--warm fuzzy terms indeed. But do these really share the same meanings online and face-to-face? We can help our customers begin to practice a healthy degree of discrimination and discernment. We can scrutinize the competing notions of trust: radical and rendered full blown at the outset, or traditional and accrued incrementally based on evolving experience.
To continue, we can carefully consider our mission. Is it to serve the masses or the few? Is it to engage the youthful cybernauts, that privileged demographic charging headlong toward the frontiers of online interaction with full packs of expensive electronic gear? Are we trying to tweak their course, or join it? One option presumes we will be heeded; the other that we will be funded.
We might ask whether (or to what extent) Web 2.0 is a generational phenomenon, a blazing comet that will light, but leave the our sky. How many flags do we want to plant under its (perhaps transitory) aura? Whom are we not seeing when our noses are pointed toward 2.0? What will we all do when the light dims?
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