This bookshelf courtesy Colin Thompson.
Hermione provides a nice overview of “The rise of the virtual bookshelf.”
Excerpt:
For anyone with even a moderate interest in books, snooping at other people’s bookshelves is one of life’s great pleasures. Like music collections, personal libraries offer tantalising encapsulations of character; a quick glance at an acquaintance’s bookshelves or a scroll through their iTunes provides juicy fodder for all sorts of assumptions and judgements. (The students I knew at university who crammed their shelves with reams of avante-garde theory were far too aware of this.)
When these projections of personality are done online, they are what Christine Rosen calls egocasting – “the thoroughly personalised and extremely narrow pursuit of one’s personal taste”. This follows the same principle as the radio site Lastfm, which is based on tracking down music similar to your existing tastes by finding people who like the same sounds as you.
As we purportedly experience Facebook fatigue and Myspace exhaustion, web forecasters predict that the next phase of social networking will be all about specialist sites like these. And where music goes, books will follow, as a wave of new book-related social networking sites promise to do for readers what Lastfm did for inquisitive listeners.
The latest on the scene is the UK-based site bookrabbit. This follows in the footsteps of America’s LibaryThing, which has just linked with Random House, and a host of competitors including goodreads, bibliophil, booksie, booktribes and shelfari.
I had not even realized there were so many virtual bibliophilic community sites now. I am on a few, but I favor Librarything to which I have belonged the longest. I am all in favor of more reading and the spread of literature. However, I also find half the activity on these sites to be doing neither. A true reading site would experience the sounds of silence, minds at work not networking, and people exploring their innerselves, not cybersocializing. The etrolling of mindless yet somehow pretentious twits in search of more “artistic” lays is so annoying it makes we want to unplug and go offline forever.
Egocasting, eh? Good term.
That’s the problem I find with all these types of sites though. A) The new/interest level lasts about five minutes. B) After you blurb a chunk of your life or opinions out for consumption, you find yourself basking in the eternal sunshine of the nonentity’s guilt. Like a a good little buddha, you should shave off your virtual hair and retire from want. I mean, after you admit (is this a surprise) that you’ve read Dostoevsky and discuss how amazingly introsdpective it was, so what? Did that change anything? Or did it waste time that was othewise better speant actually making the world a better place (which is Russian wrestling at its best, contrasting Fyodor with Leo Tolstoy, for sure).
Orhan Pamuk wrote in “Karsand Frankfurt” (collected in Other Colors):
The novel, like orchestral music and post-Renaissance painting, is in my opinion one of the cornerstones of European civilization; it is what makes Europe what it is, the means by which Europe has created and made visible its nature, if there is such a thing. I cannot think of Europe without novels. I am speaking now of the novel as a way of thinking, understanding, and imagining and also as a way of imagining oneself as someone else.
Imagine all the people….
And so we social network and try to meet ourselves through our virtual representations of actual fictional pages written by others, reviewed by strangers, collected like mirrors.
Talk about a Stranger in a Strange Land.
PS: Next time you think of socialnetworking, read how the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic just filed 22 counts because, “Facebook ‘violates privacy laws.'” Miss Social Engineering, I would like you to meet Mr. Police State. You two are so compatible!