2007/07/24

A spam by any other name...

We’ve lost the critical faculty. It’s as if, upon realizing our ability to pass along information, we lose our filtering capability, and feel that everything we come across must be passed on. Yesterday's - Bellingham Herald had an opinion piece by Leonard Pitts about the final Harry Potter book and the near impossibility of avoiding knowledge of how it ends. (I couldn't find a stable link, so you need to check the archive for 7/22/07.) Well maybe it was two days ago, because today's edition carefully pointed out, in it's front page story about current Rowling readers, that there were no "spoilers."

This leads me back to earlier concerns about blogging "just because we can." Is it bragging and ego unbridled? A lack of manners? Somebody give me a positive spin here, please. We may need to know what blogs are, to be more in touch with our patrons, but we should be very careful we do not encourage them to use blogging and all the other Library 2.0 tools for the wrong reasons.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If I understand you're concern, I think blogs are one additional venue where we once again see that some people are very good at critical thinking, i.e., the filter well, while others just pass on any tidbit they run across. Nothing different than any other means of communication we humans use. The reason I rely on blogs so heavily in keeping up with what's happening in my areas of interest, is that the blogs I follow are written by people who filter really well. There is so much information out there, that I need some mechanism to alert to the truly useful bits. And blogs are doing that for me very well.