Lisa Nakamura has a lot to say about the website Goodreads in her article entitled: "Words with Friends": Socially Networked Reading with Goodreads. Despite the title of this post and the image to the right, I actually found her comments to be an interesting mixture of praise for the platform and concern about very real issues that arise from its use.
Goodreads as a platform is very interesting, to me. I suppose that the easiest way to describe it is "Like Facebook, but with less Face." Goodreads still suffers from a syndrome that we see in a lot of social media, which is the "me-centric" attitude that can easily grow there. When we are teenagers, we gain a concern that the entire world is paying attention to use and is super interested in finding our faults and beauty spots. I consider it a sport to go down to the mall and watch teenagers. If you watch carefully, you'll see that each of them is trying very hard to put on a particular display, and each of them is displaying so hard that few of them ever have the time to notice the displays being put on by their compatriots.
I think that most social networking platforms eventually lead to this inevitability, but with some more mature twists. It is still possible, however, to break down Goodreads users into some standard High School Movie character types.
