Librarians in 2.0 - Selling the Soap??

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?

Privacy in 2.0--Imperiled or Reformatted?

Alas, this (http://www.jasoneiseman.com/blog/?p=210 ) is as close I could get to Aaron's "privacy is not an option" post on walkingpaper, and as I'm not particularly fond of wrestling repeatedly with my browser Task manager, it will have to suffice.

The notion of privacy concession as a coin of the Web 2.0 realm troubles me. The blithe assertion that Web 2.0 users must pay (by relinquishing some privacy) in order to "play" in the world of social sites chills me. I want to believe that participation need not be orchestrated by the basest commercial needs of the site provider/sponsors.

We've seen this crusade before, in textile towns, mining communities, chemical plant environs. Tap into the bounty, live better...just leave a few inalienable rights at the door. After all, they don't spend well at the local Wiggly Piggly.

But why backslide unnecessarily? The environmental movement has demonstrated, in some degree at least, that industry can be molded by human concerns. People, especially those who've lived deep enough to recognize the contours of power and vulnerability, need not bend unquestioningly to efforts of industry to refashion humans. A healthy alternative to the "privacy is not an option" slogan might be "mandatory privacy relinquishment is not an option." Or how about "Reformat networks, not people."

Privacy 2.0: A Paramount Concern

We're invited to consider the role and value of privacy for those who navigate within a Web 2.0 world, and especially for those who would cast libraries within that world. Whether we act as navigational guides or content providers, library staffers must grapple (perhaps even more intently than the customers we serve) with the often chimeric notion of privacy. Most of us have a rather coarse sense of privacy--we know it when we've got it, and we know it when it's gone.

To get a fuller, more useful sense of the Big P--privacy, that is--there are questions worth asking. What is it? Where is it? What is it good for? How much can I spare? How much do I need? Can I get it back if I give it up?

A strong Library 2.0 program might address the notion of privacy right from the git-go. A careful consideration of privacy deserves equal marquee space with a review of the habits of the successful mature learner. Privacy assessment is intrinsic to the process of self-directed learning within a Web 2.0 milieu.