How Social Networking Tools Have Affected my Life and Work

My introduction to both Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 has usually come about through either my academic career or social aspects related to said career. First introduced to email as an undergraduate in the mid-1990s, I subsequently graduated to newsgroups, general web-surfing, and other 1.0 innovations. I started to hear talk of "blogs" around the time I graduated, but as I was unclear on the concept I chose to ignore them for the time being.

I was to do the same years later when I heard Facebook mentioned for the first time among graduate school classmates, then primarily as a time-wasting mechanism they used instead of doing homework. I signed up for an account only because my brother also had one, and then promptly forgot about it. It was not until a decade later that I started to use Facebook on purpose, at first to connect with friends and family, and then to other people who shared similar interests, even interests as simple as Facebook-based games. In so doing, it has helped me gain insight into the variety of different reasons people might connect via social networking sites, both with those they know and those they have never met.

If one accepts Chua and Goh's (2010) findings that academic libraries use Web 2.0 applications far more than public libraries, my experiences as an LIS student would seem to bear this out. I was introduced to RSS feeds via an introductory course assignment, designed to teach us how news aggregators worked. Although I initially used this only for class, I soon found it of interest for personal use in terms of keeping up with current events, both important and trivial ones. In addition to news aggregators, moreover, another course introduced me to Meebo, a Web 2.0 software that aggregated all of one's Instant Messaging accounts in one spot. Considering that I had amassed a number of accounts on various IM providers over the years, I also found this useful for daily life, although I am aware that it also has strong uses in an LIS setting, most notably for reference services (Chua & Goh, 2010).

Conversely, I used wikis - predominantly Wikipedia - on almost a daily basis, both as a launching point for academic and work references and to look up trivia for personal use. However, I almost never contributed to such sites, except to correct minor grammatical, punctuation, and spelling errors. It was not until I started doing group projects with other LIS students, some of whom lived on the other side of the country, that I began to see how user-created sites in this vein could have immediate practical collaborative use. This, in my opinion, illustrates the advantage Web 2.0 has over 1.0: it has a true affective and motivational impact on the learning process by encouraging creative collaboration among students (Hicks & Graber, 2010). I look forward to the opportunity of using Web 2.0 in general, but this tool in particular, in my future career as a librarian.

References

Chua, A. Y. K., & Goh, D. H. (2010). A study of web 2.0 applications in library websites. Library & Information Science Research 32(3), 203-211.

Hicks, A., & Graber, A. (2010). Shifting paradigms: Teaching, learning and web 2.0. Reference Services Review, 38(4), 621-633.