"the sound of a holy war?": on twopointopia
Roy Tennant analogises about the recent war of words triggered by a post from the Anonymous Librarian on twopointopians.
Tenant starts out his post on this topic by admitting to his tendency to stay out of the way of religious wars. Indeed, the fervour illustrated in both the comments on the AL’s post (all 52 of them) and all the counter-posts on other blogs does indeed smack of the kind of fervour that often springs up around religion. And the terminology? Cult. 2.0 gospel. Manifesto. Sacred. Mantra. There’s a thesis here in the language choices, alone, let alone in the play out of the us vs them polarisation.
Anyhoo, the real point of this post was to comment on what Tenant alludes to as Meredith Farkas’ voice of reason. I actually read Meredith’s post in response to the AL’s before I read the AL’s post, so I came to it with no real understanding of what inspired it. What resonated for me, then, wasn’t how well Meredith had responded to the whole thread, but just how well she articulated the fact that every service we implement, every Web2.0 initiative we embark on, must be informed by a need:
I have dealt with a lot of people who are like kids in a candy store when it comes to these technologies. Like someone who told me the other day that Flickr is the logical next thing libraries should have after a blog (never mind whether there’s a need for either of them or not, I suppose). I used to be one of those kids in a candy store. I remember when I came to Norwich over two years ago, eager to implement blogs, wikis, etc. And a lot of the initial things I tried to implement failed. Why? Because I put the tool before the need…
Hallelujah! I’m the first to want to play with shiny new stuff, but as I’ve said before, the need has got to come before the tool.
Library2.0 (or twopointopia) is about creating user-centred services, and, where appropriate, harnessing technology to help us do it. It’s not about the technology.
This is the most insightful blog post around Library2.0 I’ve read in a while. It should be mandatory reading for all Library/Learning2.0 programs. It’s certainly something I’ll be sharing with my colleagues, as we think about the services our users want from us and the tools available to us to deliver them.
