Et Tu, YouTube

YouTube strength lies in its capacity to deliver experience that is immediate, genuine, and robust. If a piece is tentative, it doesn't belong on video, and is unlikely to be a YouTube fave. Library Dominoes did little for me; I just pitied the poor soul tasked with post-production clean-up.

It's not surprising that YouTube best bets tend to be transgressive. They aim, and succeed, at turning something on its ear. Topic and degree of trangressivity are subject to personal taste; let that be caveat and disclaimer for what follows.

A cursory search for literacy-related videos yielded a couple of gems:

• Read a Book - Get Crunk About Reading, by Dawiyd Moor, featuring music by Bomani D'Mite Armah

• Comedy Skit - Men on Books, submitted by Digital Overdrive

For an assortment of reasons, I won't link or embed, but each video is worth viewing for its library service implications. Each video promotes reading, albeit in an edgy, highly stylized manner.

Read a Book incorporates rapper D'Mite's raucous refrain along with profanity and racial epithet, all set to an unrelenting hip hop beat. The pace is purposeful; the message richly layered. The raw exhortation to literacy plays against a display of classic African American literature and historic African American leaders. The mix engages movement and provokes thought.

The Men on Books comedy skit features fictional gay book critics, from the television show In Living Color, who talk up (and down) popular and classic titles from their own highly vamped and often scatological perspective. The video's a tart example of the truism: same book, different reads.

A Left-Right Brainer

Who doesn't enjoy looking at photo albums? And who can resist an invitation to hunker down and watch a slide show of Uncle Seymour's latest junket? If a single picture is worth a thousand words, just imagine the value of countless pictures. The prospect boggles, and the brain stalls.

Therein lies the allure and vexation of Flickr: so many pictures, so many pictures! My goal was to find the picture that communicated more than words could express, yet I had to trust language to ford the visual stream. A bit bizarre, but oddly groovy, to feel the two brain hemispheres leaning on one another in a conceptual scavenger hunt.

I found my Flickr pic, an eloquent composition by rcrowley. It's entitled Map reading by bottle light, and for me it's a visual analogy for yearning, fortification, libraries and mediation. Check it out.

Now We're Talking!

Couldn't get enough of the folksonomy readings; tagging is cool! Building an intellectual community of expertise and interest is more genuine and exhilarating than approximating a network of emotional affinity. Del.icio.us is a handy tool, especially for nomadic library staff. A well compiled set of online bookmarks can function like a portable information kiosk. Bookmarking sites can help demonstrate the library's traditional strength--navigating and creating pathways through formidable stores of information--enacted on a dynamic Web 2.0 stage. Bookmarking sites can play to the customer's marketing soft spot; we're all tempted by the customized product--the responsive blend that validates our interests and satisfies our curiosity

Being There - MySpace Paradox

There is a deft bit of industry two-step called for in combining library service and marketing. Not surprisingly, the proficient and self-assured perform the choreography best. MySpace may be utilized by teens as a playground for practicing representation and tweaking response, but it is no place for faint or fumbling institutional posers. Libraries are not adolescents, and ought not don the trendy (but ill-fitting) garb of those whose legitimate developmental task it is to pose and parry.

It's unfortunate that "youth space" has gone virtual. In Platonic terms, adolescence is a time to exit the cave, to glimpse alone and with one's peers the awesome world without. It's a time to try to differentiate shadowed from genuine reality. Libraries have no place "fronting" in the MySpace developmental playground, but might stake a signpost to point the way toward genuine, non-mediated life experience. A link to the teen section of the library web page, which in turn provides information about events and volunteer opportunities, would suffice.

The amassing of "friends" should be eschewed; such social misrepresentation is a developmental disservice to young people. Libraries with vital, committed teen departments are far better served (and far better servants) in promoting face-to-face encounters and supporting non-virtual youth spaces. Let the teens buzz in their branded Murdochian cave, if they must, but let's help them transcend their shadow play, and discover and appreciate the tangible, transformative world of interaction with fully fleshed people and ideas.