Item 22

OK, it's the luddite yet again. Has anyone ever considered that there is way too much "social networking" on computers and not enough face to face communication? I see the lack of in person communication skills on the Ref. desk. I couldn't open twitter to look at it, but I did look at the tumblr site. Reading those kinds of posts is to me like listening to sound bites in the news... very annoying little snippits that leave you waiting for the rest of the story, which may never come. I can see where these kinds of services could become addictive to some people who like to be always online texting, checking messages, etc. I've noticed that some of them tend to have short attention spans, and wonder if it's because they've learned to think in snippits.

This is not one of the new 2.0 features I'm likely to want to play with. Too time consuming and disruptive to keep track of, and too expensive if you're using a mobile phone, etc. for access. With apologies to Burt Bacharach and Hal David: Lord, we don't need another social networking site!