Friday, January 5, 2007

My Space, Your Space, Our Space

My Space is quite a place. It develops both a feeling of individuality and of being part of a community. In this regard, it's similar to other online experiences, such as MMORPGs (massive multiplayer online role-playing games). I'm not certain I'd appreciate meeting up with a MRRL elf, an institutional rather than individual avatar, essentially waving a library flag at me. As a teen on My Space, however, would I view library spaces as "invasions" of a community of individuals? I'm not sure most teens care. The web is bursting with sites of all types, the difference between them and a page on My Space being arguable.

1 comment:

Robin said...

Perhaps as a sign of the coming death of MySpace, the average MySpace user is now in their 30's. While we market our library to teens (teen reading programs, movies/music that teens would like, etc.) we could be making a much more diverse offering! That being said, there are a lot of teens on MySpace still and hopefully they don't see us as an intrusion. The nice part is, though, that the teens don't have to add us as a friend or even visit us - it's purely voluntary on their part!!
I liked the comparison to MMORGs - that is soooooo true!!