New Netiquette

These thoughts have been spinning around in my head—and not just mine; I admit, I'm probably repeating a few things I've read over the past six months, as well as adding my own spin—but have started to solidify into something almost blog-worthy.

Over the past few days I've been watching a mini-kerfuffle happening on LITA-L (arguably one of the more tech-savvy mailing lists in libraryland, which might be the source of my surprise), wherein a number of people wrote to the entire list to ask for Google Wave invites—and I won't pretend I didn't let out a tiny annoyed huff and eye-roll, myself, when I saw the flood of short "please give me Google Wave" messages—and a number more wrote back (with a new subject line!), expressing stern opinions about the decline of netiquette and the inappropriateness of sending "short 'me too'" messages out to a list. Then a number more replied to the stern ones, saying, in essence, "Use Gmail and get over it." Then that, too, got discussed, with the "use Gmail" mentality being boiled down, by the stern ones, to victim-blaming. I've seen this argument hashed out and rehashed on other, sometimes far less civil, mailing lists. And, I've found, my views on this subject have evolved from the stern to the, if you want to call it that, victim-blaming.

Now, like I said, I'm running the risk of repeating things others have already said, here. Looking back over my Reader feeds for the past few months, this is definitely one of the things that have affected my thinking on this. There are others. (Neal Stephenson may have had a bit of an effect, as well.) It's hard to say what all the influences in my thinking really are; I'm exposed to more information than I know what to do with, every single day. So, I hope, are you.

Which sort of brings me to my point. This isn't 1990, and to cling [and try to force others to cling] to the netiquette of 1990, in lieu of taking control of your own information influx, seems to me to be backwards-thinking. For the LITA-L list, specifically, people must know that the library field, the IT field, and the crossover between them are huge. Even if everyone follows all the old school rules of netiquette, sending only what's necessary to mailing lists, there's still so much there. And that's without Twitter and Facebook and RSS feeds and the like. Anyone who reads every message coming across every relevant list and RSS feed is clearly not getting any real work done.

What we need to be doing—and we, as librarians, should be helping to train our patrons/customers/users [that terminology is a fight for another blog post] to do—is intelligently filtering all of it, to get the very best of what's out there. There's no perfect system for doing this, yet, but we need to do what we can with the tools we have, even while keeping our eyes open for other tools. For a very easy start, nobody should be reading mailing list traffic without a mail client that supports threading. (Hint: pretty much all of them do, particularly since Gmail came on the scene. Odds are, you can have threading-by-subject in your email without ever giving over your private information to the Google Monster and without leaving your corporate Exchange server.) In this case, when a thread turns into a hundred "me toos," dump it. Easy.

Filtering in RSS readers, Facebook, and Twitter is harder. Certainly, Twitter is trying to help, with its new list functionality. And external tools like TweetDeck (and there are a million others, at this point, probably many I haven't heard of or looked at, hopefully some that do a more thorough job of filtering) can help you follow a conference (via hashtag), a set of users who consistently provide good information, or a particular word that interests you; you can even filter out any one word or phrase from the results. It's not perfect—you'll see junk, and you'll miss good stuff—but it's a start. Google Reader doesn't really seem to allow filtering, beyond which feeds you follow and what folders or tags you want to assign, but I feel fairly confident that it will, eventually, or some better tool will come along that does. I'll go a step further and say, actually, I'm fairly confident that there's already a tool that does this, though I admit I don't know what it is. Facebook is trying to intelligently filter for you, with its News Feed (instead of Live Feed), and it's doing a so-so job, at least for me; I still find that I see more of what interests me by following the Live Feed, turning off certain people, and skimming past anything that does not seem immediately useful, but the News Feed is not entirely useless, either.

This discussion goes beyond email, RSS, and social networking services, though: even if Google Wave supplants all of these, or if we all eventually end up only accessing the Internet through something like World of Warcraft or Second Life, instead of a browser, we're still facing a different information age than the one in which "netiquette" could save us all. As an information consumer in today's world, everyone has the responsibility to filter their own content; sometimes, yes, this means adding tools to their tools (here, I fight the meme urge). And, for the next few years, yeah, it's going to be patchy. We will all have to master the art of letting go; you will not see every message in your Twitter stream, either because you are a master filterer or because you have mastered the Zen necessary to read 20 messages here and 20 there, wherever you have time. Nor will you see every message on every mailing list, every post on every blog, etc. That's the world we live in.

What I'd like to see, instead of librarians arguing about netiquette, about listservs vs. fora, about blogs vs. Twitter, and the like, is librarians helping other librarians—and through them, all of the people we should all be helping—to get a handle on the tidal wave of information coming to all of us through all of these media every single day. Perhaps we should be building tools to do some of this filtering, even.

(If I hadn't exhausted myself, I would now be expanding this discussion to metasearch of libraries' collections and the sheer volume of material produced about pretty much every subject under the sun, nowadays. Thing is, if we can't all master this viewpoint for our own information needs, we're not going to implement it to help our users, are we?)