Just gave my age away with that title, if you haven't figured it out before! As could be expected from my generation, nothing I learned will have any major impact on my personal life. I do not intend to go home and see how many "friends" I've collected on MySpace. I love my life; the only problem is that no matter what I do, I still have only 24 hours a day to cram everything in. Social networking gives us all kinds of ways to suck up as much of that precious time as we'll allow. Somehow, I doubt when it comes time for me to die (something a person thinks about more and more as s/he ages), I will lament the fact that I did not spend more time online.
That said, I certainly don't want to be blind to changes coming our way. I definitely want to keep up enough with technology to know what people are talking about and to add to the conversation.
I learned new things from 2.0, but I also was pleasantly surprised to find out that I already knew quite a bit too. Reading Wired magazine has been a painless, enlightening, and entertaining way to bring myself face-to-face with the 21st century.
I still believe that being a physical place is one of the major advantages of the library, a place where anyone can gather, share, be listened to, and yes, have their hand held when needed.
This is a big offering in a real world where the online world promises much but delievers little, where there is too much information, where data is mistaken for knowledge and information for wisdom, where friends are people you have never met, and where narcissism abounds. The library's job is to separate the chaff from the wheat and be there for our patrons, whether it's introducing them to helpful and valuable online resources, or explaining how to use what they already know about. Myself, I intend to keep my eye on that itsy, bitsy, teenie, weenie, yellow polka dot bikini. As time goes on and we learn what is useful software versus what is fad, that bikini will start getting a teensy, weensy bit bigger every day.
Happycamper
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