We’re at a coffee shop in Raleigh, visiting the family for the holidays. It’s been great catching up with everyone. While visiting some family, I found out that a 14-year-old cousin of mine uses MySpace. I’m pretty familiar with Friendster, Orkut, and Facebook, but I have yet to learn about how people use MySpace. My cousin walked me through his site and told me a little about it. For example, he doesn’t have an IM account, he does all his instant messaging through MySpace. He didn’t need an email account because MySpace could handle that, too. (He finally got a separate email account because his girlfriend asked him to.)
People like my cousin will be college students in four years. If they’re used to operating within a social sphere like MySpace, they’re used to only communicating electronically with people using the same service. Should the library have a profile in MySpace so that librarians can communicate with MySpace only users? Should we provide reference services through MySpace? Should we put a lot of operational information on MySpace? I think we should. If the only people in the average techy 14-year-old’s universe exist in MySpace, then we should be there.
Now, there’s also a chance that these future students will “grow up” and get email accounts, IM accounts, and use other internet portals. For this reason I don’t think we need to put all our eggs in the MySpace basket. I do think, however, that there’s enough research indicating that students are beginning to see email as a formal communication method for adults only that we need to think about their reality. It’s not about MySpace or IM, but about meeting the users in their universe. And if MySpace is one of those places, that’s where we need to be.
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