The Sociopath Network

“Too many tweets might make a twat."

D. Cameron

I’m not sure how many of my beloved readership saw ‘The Social Network’ about the creation, rise and battles of The Facebook? A cracking film and when I left I was certainly thinking ‘That was so obvious! Anyone, anyone at all, could have created Facebook! How come that fellow came up with it and I didn’t? He’s stolen my billions of dollars the rat!”

Although I must admit that’s a pretty common reaction from me at times. I came up with the idea for Big Brother and the TV show The Trench years before they were made but my Important Work meant I took them no further than the early stages.

But Facebook? So obvious, so clear. It may be turning into a nightmare of privacy violation , targeted advertising and jury wrecking now but it is still very useful if only to share photographs and invite people to events. I’m not on Twitter, still maintain a MySpace account (for some unknown reason) and even have a presence on Virb though I doubt anyone has heard of it.

At work I encourage the use of social media (Twitter and FB) as we need to be where the students are and we need to be moving out into the ever changing frontiers of the internet. We need to create library presences in new spaces so that if our students run into us there they know that what they will get from us will be as reliable as if they were in  training session on campus.

This raises all kinds of issues of tone, style, responsibility, etc, but on the whole I now think it’s better to crack on and delete later rather than wait until you have a perfect webpage and approach. By then no one cares and the students have moved on.

I’ll set up a Twitter account later this week and see what limited character wisdom occurs.