More on Dan Ariely
I’ve been to more than a few ACRL President’s Programs. These programs take place at the ALA Annual Conference. Many of them I really do not remember. But one that I remember well is the 2008 program at which Dan Ariely was the speaker. Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University, and the presentation was based on his book Predictably Irrational. I enjoyed the presentation so much that I wrote a post about it. Since then I’ve taken note of Ariely who seems to be showing up all over the place these days. Since the ACRL program I’ve found myself enjoying most of what Ariely has to say, and it’s a good reminder about how irrational we humans can be when it comes to decision making. So I was pleased to come across his blog and promptly subscribed. You may want to as well.
Does Access To Social Networks Lead To Greater Narcissism – Not Us
So Generation Me – that’s our current crop of traditional 18-22 year olds – finally admits that it is most narcissistic generation of all times. Maybe this news doesn’t surprise you. This news comes from a survey of 1,068 students concerning their use of social networks by the organization YPulse. The study reports that 92% of the respondents said they used MySpace or Facebook regularly. Two-thirds said their generation was more self-promoting, narcissistic, overconfident and attention-seeking than others.
So if using social networks leads to more self-promoting, and narcissistic and attention-seeking behavior, how come I haven’t seen any evidence of that among our profession. After all, we are pretty heavy users of all of these social netwwork technologies. I guess we just must be immune to that sort of thing, being humble librarian types and all that sort of thing. Nope, no evidence of greater narcissism here.
More On The Real-Time Web
If you enjoyed my post on Real-Time Libraries and would like to explore the Real-Time Web concept in more detail, take a look at series of articles on the Real-Time Web published at ReadWriteWeb. At the time of this writing only parts one and two are available, but you can keep an eye open for part three to come soon. Interesting that the author says there is no one definition for the Real-Time Web and that there is even still some question of what to call the trend, but he identifies five characteristics of the Real-Time Web:
1. is a new form of communication,
2. creates a new body of content,
3. is real time,
4. is public and has an explicit social graph associated with it,
5. carries an implicit model of federation.
This is worthwhile reading, and offers more insight into how the academic library should be re-imagining itself for the Real-Time Web.