Alchemical Thoughts

I have been seeing a good number of items online on FB, social networks, and social networking literacy. A lot has to do with how to handle the public and private aspects of these online tools and knowing where to draw the line. Personally, the issue of how much to present of myself online is something I always think about. These is a sampling of some things I have seen recently:

• Alex Golub writes on "The Flaws of Facebook" for Inside Higher Ed. While mostly geared to campus faculty, the article has a thing or two to say to academic librarians as well.
• The Irascible Professor has a guest post by Felice Prager on "Social Networking for Dummies." This one is more tongue-in-cheek, but it is worth a read.
• From the AllFacebook blog, "10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know." FB is notorious for making it difficult for users to set privacy parameters, often making it hard to find just where exactly one goes to set particular privacy limits. This list should help. 
• danah boyd announced that she finally finished her dissertation. The topic: "Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Network Publics" (warning, big PDF file). This is certainly worth a look for librarians. Do read her post, which gives some highlights and provides the abstract, then feel free to look over the document itself. 
• Fred Stutzman points to an article out of portal:Libraries and the Academy on "Academic Libraries, Facebook, MySpace and Student Outreach." I am not linking to the article itself, since it is on Project Muse and likely requires subscription, but for academic librarians, they need to be reading it. It is on my pile of articles to read soon. In the same post, he also points to another article on virtual reference.
• David Spark, writing for Mashable, has an article on "12 Great Tales of Defriending." I include it on this list because sometimes, when it comes to social networks, you have the face the possibility of having to purge your friends' list for a variety of reasons. The article has a humourous tone, but it does consider serious issues. 
• Kate Sheehan, writing for ALA TechSource blog, has a piece on "Making Friends" that deals with friending on social networks. 
• Scientific American magazine has an article asking "Do Social Networks Bring the End of Privacy?"  The article was published in August 2008, and the author is Daniel J. Solove. 

To some who say that librarians may be obsolete some day, as long as there is a need to teach a little social networking literacy and common sense to the younger generations, we'll still have some work.

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