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Black Friday’s move to midnight or earlier (may have been largely driven by Millennial shoppers, who, unlike their older peers, are quite comfortable shopping in the wee hours of the morning. With their in-store shopping out of the way,... Read the rest of this post

In case you need yet another social network to keep up with (Microsoft has just launched Socl. We think this one’s gonna go a lot like Google+, though with fewer people signing up for accounts because it’s the cool thing to do. Can you... Read the rest of this post

Ever since DC Comics launched the ‘New 52′ — a renumbering of its first issues along with same day digital downloads (its sales have transformed! “Justice League” has already sold 200,000 copies compared to 46,000 in the old... Read the rest of this post

Happy Birthday, Nicktoons! (Twenty years ago, Nickelodeon debuted “Doug,” “Rugrats,” and “Ren & Stimpy” – the very first Nicktoons, which revolutionized children’s TV! Thankfully “Doug” is currently part of the network’s... Read the rest of this post

There is no question that social media is important to Millennials — as Joseph Kressler of the Intelligence Group noted at the Youth Mega Mashup last week, one Millennial woman recently told him, “I am what I share.” Social media defines... Read the rest of this post

“Why would anyone do that?”
“How does anyone have the time?”

The above are questions I hear regularly when talking with librarians about ways that technology is being used by teens, and by adults too. Most recently these are questions I hear when talking about check-in services. For some librarians the idea of checking-in to a location with FourSquare, Gowalla, or Scvngr, or using a site like GetGlue to “check-in” to let others know about current reading or viewing, seems totally off-the-wall.

As I think more and more about the questions I regularly hear, and how some librarians think about the way teens use technology, I realize again how important it is to separate one’s own experience and way of doing things from the development of library services teens need. For example, I’d suggest that it doesn’t really matter whether or not a librarian understands why teens like to text with each other when sitting beside one another in the library. Or, a librarian doesn’t really have to understand why people like to earn virtual badges on FourSquare or virtual stickers on GetGlue. Librarians also don’t need to understand how people find the time to participate in a variety of social media activities. Understanding the why and how can definitely be helpful, but the first thing a librarian needs to do is simply accept that people like to do these things and that it’s not the librarian’s job to judge the activities and behaviors based on personal experiences and personal likes and dislikes. It is the librarian’s job to find out how these activities can fit into library programs and services, in this case for teens, successfully.

What if every time a librarian found out about a new way that technology is being used the initial reaction always was, “That is really interesting, I’m not sure if anyone in the community is using this technology, and I don’t really get why anyone would, but I’m going to find out who is using it, learn some more about why, and then figure out how to integrate it into what we do so we can do what we do even better.” That reaction isn’t one of judgement. It’s a reaction that is focused on teens – the library user – and not on the librarian’s likes, dislikes, interests, and so on.

Anytime there is something new or a change in the way things are done there is the danger of jumping to judgments because of lack of understanding. Instead of making judgments about teens and Facebook, teens and Foursquare, teens and texting, librarians have to look at the new with an open-mind and I’d even say with a healthy dose of positive curiosity. (This isn’t required just when it comes to technology of course, it is required with books too – street lit, manga, graphic novels, cellphone novels, etc. All of these require the same open-mind as new technologies require.)

One way to get started being positively curious about technology use in your community is to check to see if your library is listed in FourSquare, or Gowalla, or Scvngr. (If it is and library staff are not aware of that, that means community members have been checking-in to the library and have added the site to the location-based software’s database all on their