Being Aware of Social Media

This story has stayed in my head for over a year now: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122466430.   It is the story of Neanderthals, shimmery makeup, jewelry, and relationships. Anthropologists call tools like makeup “symbolic thinking.” In symbolic thinking, an intelligent entity uses a symbol to represent something else, and in the case of Neanderthals using makeup and jewelry, the symbols were employed in order to convey identity to a growing social network. Ornamentation was a way to communicate with other Neanderthals who are being pushed north as Homo sapiens advanced from the South.

I think about this same story when I hear about virtual worlds and avatars. Each person is trying to say something about himself/herself with an avatar. Personally, I always try to make my avatar look like an idealized version of myself…. A red bob…. And elf ears. If it is true, that avatars are an advanced version of symbolic thinking, and that this is an opportunity to interact socially with more people than was ever possible before, then libraries will be missing out if they fail to join this phenomenon. People are excited at the prospect of avatar creation because it fulfills a human need to communicate one’s identity with the world. Libraries and museums should seek to take advantage of this excitement. The difficulty will lie with balancing social interaction for fun with social interaction for knowledge sharing. In my discussion on second life, I discussed this dilemma: it is difficult to learn in an environment where people are there simply to talk and meet other people.

I’ve been really enjoying Symbaloo for several reasons.  I can take my bookmarks anywhere, I can access the information I want with less typing and mouse use, and I can organize my information in a way that makes sense to me.  So I started thinking that maybe Symbaloo would be an excellent homepage at libraries.  What better way to introduce patrons to social media and appeal to patrons who already use it?  The library could still have a webpage that the patron could access by clicking on the upper left button.  The left pane, in fact, could be reserved for library functions such as the library catalog, research depositories, databases, interlibrary loan, ask a librarian, common search engines, etc.  Whatever a library considered its core functions could have a button on Symbaloo.  The right pane could be reserved for social media that patrons might want or need to have at their fingertips.  The lower left pane could include important news sources, wikis, and blogs, and the lower right could provide community information. 

Symbaloo could also be used internally to promote learning and sharing.  For example, I found this mix for librarians already made http://www.symbaloo.com/mix/librarians.  In my current job, librarians are encouraged to view the “new book” shelves and keep up with current events, so why should digital reading material be any different?  Making a mix like this the default homepage for librarians would promote reading and learning.