Blogs: Sources of Social Knowledge
This past week we’ve read posts and articles which have discussed the many varieties of blogs and how they fit into the landscape of social networking. David Weinberger mentions in his article, Libraries in the Age of Social Knowledge, that successful social networking sites provide social objects, items that the group can share, talk about and build relationships around. Blogs can be included in the discussion of social knowledge even though they tend to be written by one person because they still offer the social functionality of comment fields. The social object Weinberger refers to in this article is knowledge. Yes, we could start a totally new discussion on whether people are sharing information or knowledge, but for the sake of this post I will refer to the social objects being shared as knowledge.
Weinberger goes on to say that libraries have many virtues but treating books as social objects is not one of them. A library book is passed from one person to another, in serial fashion, intact. You are penalized for making the book your own by, say, highlighting passages or writing in the margins, no matter how smart your annotations are…Because libraries have been physical spaces, this has made perfect sense. Your book mark-up, no matter how smart, distracts others. Your jabbering away in one of the library’s reading room disturbs other. That’s just how space and matter work.
How can libraries compete or even keep up with the social exchange of knowledge? Should we even compare our printed materials to blogs and other knowledge sharing tools? I don’t think we have a choice. Libraries will have to continually examine their role in the exchange of knowledge if we are to remain relevant in this digitized, networked world.
Weinberger ends on a very positive and encouraging note when he asserts: As works of knowledge become more and more social, we will still need humans staying one step ahead, guiding us with greater wisdom than the works themselves can muster. Those are our librarians.
