"Embracing a Culture of Connectivity"

A couple of observations from this discussion/video:

• John Palfrey (who was a keynote speaker at the NETSL conference I attended this year) mentioned that there is a digital divide, not only in terms of patrons' ability to access technology, but the skills necessary to use that technology ... This is a perfect place for librarians (especially those who work at public libraries) to step in and provide the education - for free! - on how to use social networking tools and the like
• Danah Boyd talked about how "being a participant is absolutely essential to being part of the social world", while providing a - very old? - quote from a teenager to accentuate the point ("You have to be on MySpace because everyone is on it!") ... This reminded me of a quote from Tibor Koltay's article: "People like to be where other people are." In other words, users want to be where the action is, so that they can share and exchange ideas with as many people (both friends and strangers) as possible; it's why the previously-mentioned MySpace is pretty much dead at this point, because everyone moved to Facebook! Why hang around in that social space anymore, when it's no longer actually "social"?
• Her discussion of imagined and invisible audiences was also intriguing ... Just think of the students in this class, for example; as long as our blog posts and Twitter feeds aren't labelled as "private", then anyone in the world could be reading these things. Not only that, but what about future users, ten or twenty or however many years into the future? What will they think of the ideas and discussions being brought up here?
• "I don't think Facebook is violating privacy, I think it's letting people choose how they wanna define privacy" ... No, Facebook has been pretty much called out on having horrible privacy settings that have exposed information that users mistakenly thought was being shared only with their friends; sadly, I don't think it simply boils down to educating people on how privacy works with Facebook ... All I'm saying is that the more Zuckerberg (and his advertisers) know about Facebook users, the more money they can make off of them.