Thoughts on Social Media

I know I owe some posts about learning the things a new librarian learns. I do. It turns out, being a new librarian takes up enough time that blogging about it seems excessive. (Go figure.) That said, I did find the time to write an article for NMRT Footnotes about settling in in a new place—I stand by my suggestions, though, if I'd written it a few weeks later I might have done a better job of acknowledging how tough it can be. It's weird to be in a place—and now I mean "place" metaphorically—where you have some new friends you like a lot and are pretty certain you can rely on, but you still feel kind of like you shouldn't, because you're just not sure you've earned the social capital. And you miss your old friends but feel like it's a slight on your new friends to admit it, while talking about how much you like your new friends also feels like a slight on the old ones ... I'm moving way out of librarianship, here, but I imagine any readers who have moved long distances probably have a sense of what I'm getting at. (And any friends no doubt think I'm being silly. I don't think any one of them, new or old, doubts the high regard in which I hold them.) I addressed how to meet those friends, in the article, but not how to really end up integrated, completely, into your new home and social groups. It wouldn't have been that interesting—I'm pretty certain the only thing for it is time.

Which continues to pass. ("Time is marching on, and time is still marching on. You're older than you've ever been, and now you're even older....")

It doesn't help that I have two other blogs. The former is the Moving to Alaska blog, which I nominally share with Dale (he posted once), all about the trip up here and, well, all that stuff I was talking about in the first paragraph—becoming Alaskan, I guess. The second is very my-library-centric. I write it mostly for my coworkers. But if you were really interested in seeing what I'm up to, you'd be welcome to check those out. :D

Excuses aside, I have been thinking. I've composed a couple of blog posts in my head, some of them even about librarianship, but not followed through. I still owe a post about how I think scholarly communication will evolve—at least in the STEM fields—but I'm still rolling that one around.

The thing that brought me to the blog window today, though, was social media. A number of my coworkers seem interested in "this Web 2.0 thing," and I feel like most of them probably participate in some way or other. Some are on Facebook, a few have tried Twitter, nearly all of them read or write blogs... But the thing they lack—and the thing I keep trying to manage for myself—is a method for participating in multiple, but not all, of them sensibly, with as little repeat information as possible. For instance, if all of someone's tweets go to Facebook, why would I be their friend in both places? (Increasingly, the answer is, "I won't.") I continue to passionately hate the posting of piles of Twitter updates to a blog—it's not obviously inappropriate, I suppose, or nobody would do it, but I think it conflates the intended usage of each medium. Either I want to see what you're thinking as you think it—in which case, I will follow your tweets—or I want to see some [more or less] well thought out prose—in which case, I will follow your blog. If you do both well, I'll follow both. But it bugs me to see a bunch of outdated (by the time the harvester puts them on your blog) one- or two-sentence statements where I expect full paragraphs. Maybe I'm getting grumpy in my ... uh, not that old of age, actually. Either way, it's enough to make me unfollow your blog, if you are not in all other ways stunning. The same goes for those awful "feeds"—they may be useful in real time, though I personally just don't care that much about what any one person is doing online—but they are 100% pointless in a blog. If you want to archive that junk, open a blog just for it; don't torture your readers with that inanity, or you'll lose readers.

Wow, feeling a little ranty. Sorry.

I can't control what others do online, but I do have a measure of control of how I interact with it. If a blog becomes a Twitter/stream archive, or if its author is wrong all the time, I unfollow it. If a Twitter account doesn't have enough information or entertainment value, I eventually unfollow it. (I break this rule for friends. I have a couple of friends who post "I ate a sandwich" kinds of things, but I continue to follow them because I like them enough to overlook that.) Similarly, turnabout is fair play: unless you're awesome enough to be worth following with no reciprocation (I'm looking at you, Stephen Colbert), not following me back means, eventually, I'll stop following you.

I've taken to making groups in my Twitter readers, for keeping up with the people whose every tweet I feel like I should read, and I let the rest of it wash by, checking when I have time. I miss a lot—in all honesty, I feel like I'm kind of losing my grip on Twitter, not interacting with more than 10% or so of the people I follow—but I also still gain a fair bit of information, using it that way.

Facebook, I mostly catch up on 2-3 times a day. I try really hard not to send more than 2-3 Facebook updates a day, as well, because I don't want to be annoyingly "noisy" there, in the same way I might on Twitter. It's almost a Twitter "best of," for me.

Meanwhile, my Google Reader is assiduously sorted (though Future Feminist Librarian-Activist should go in "Libraries" half the time and "Social Issues" half the time—and would, if Reader had that kind of granularity in filtering); that is arguably where I'm the most heartless in unfollowing (blogs), because it's impossible to tell who is and is not following your blog; therefore, no hurt feelings. I'm only semi-heartless in unfollowing people who share with me—you have to post a whole lot of irrelevant stuff for me to unfollow you, there, given the ease of scrolling past boring stuff [and my uncertainty in telling whether it's possible to know who is following what you share]—but I'll do it, at need. (Given the number of lolcats I share, I don't feel like I'm justified in being overly judgmental about what others are sharing. ;))

But I'm not sure whether I have an overall "policy" about all of it. Or whether I need one, beyond wanting to be able to explain it, quickly and usefully, to others who want to manage their own social media floods. Frankly, I'm sure I'm not doing it as well as I could be, so I wonder if others have their own policies about all of it, or if everyone flies by the seats of their pants, the way I do. (My social media policy is as disjointed as this post, you could say...)

I'd love to compare notes on all of this, anyway. What do you folks do?

On balancing social networking tools and family

This isn't as library-related or engineering-related as I try to be, but it does address what I imagine is a fairly common problem. I'm curious about your thoughts.

I've been using social networking tools--and, here, I'm going to address mostly Facebook and Twitter--as catch-alls, adding friends, colleagues, and, increasingly, family, willy-nilly. I have a couple of privacy settings on my Facebook, keeping a few people from seeing my updates, though if they navigate to my page, they can still see it. (I'm fascinated that I could lock even my profile page away from the eyes of people I've friended. I find that really interesting.) I think I may have "all pictures of me" locked down, as well, though I always waffle on that one--the only embarrassment I expect ever to get, on that count, is that I'm wildly unphotogenic at times. I'm hardly a wild partier.

But my point is, up until now, it's worked. I have, at times, wished I had a locked-down Twitter account, where I could say some of the things I really don't want the whole world to see me say, to a select group of friends. But I don't, because, for the most part, I'm inclined to treat social network sites as inherently unstable and very hackable--if it goes up there, one way or the other, it'll be public, anyway. (E-mail and IM should also be treated that way--for reasons inherent to the technology--and to an extent, I kind of do.)

But I'm finding that social networking with my family isn't really working out the way I'd expected/hoped. I already self-censored, a little bit, because there are some professional colleagues I really respect on any given social networking site, and I don't want to offend or to seem "too weird," whatever that is. (Sometimes I still forget that it isn't just me and my college buddies, because I am not perfect, but I generally do an OK job of this, I think.)

However, I'm finding myself self-censoring--and, to my horror, censoring others by deleting their comments on my posts--more often, now that family members are there. Do I mind my high school-age cousin or Dale's college-age brother knowing I'm human and goofy? No, not really; I want them to know me well enough to trust me, to come to me with questions if they need to. But I'm finding I'm not really comfortable with the level of openness Facebook is forcing between, for instance, my mother and me. I've grown comfortable--as I think most of us do--with some distance, some lack of knowledge, about what is going on in our lives and our minds. Facebook wants to bridge that gap, but for a multitude of reasons, I'm just not sure that's a gap that should be bridged, in our or most other parent-child situations.

Also, I notice that some family members use these tools very differently than I do. They don't follow the same conventions. They don't even have the same definition of what constitutes "social networking." It could be a fascinating learning opportunity for me, if I could find the balance, and the distance, necessary to really observe them.

I guess when it was just two groups--friends and colleagues--I could balance the stack of dishes, or house of cards, or whatever metaphor best fits. But it seems to be crumbling, now that a third group has really come into the picture. I'm not sure whether the problem is "too many groups" or "one group is family," but I have definitely become aware that I've lost the balance I had maintained for so long.

Has anyone else had this experience? What did you do? I hate to scale back my involvement in these tools, or to lock out family (where I even can). But maybe therein lies the only answer--what do you think?

Twitter Howto

Last week SLA's Pittsburgh chapter had a "Reverse Mentoring" meeting, where library students showed professional librarians the Web 2.0 ropes, as it were. I was the designated Twitter person. We also had someone to cover blogging/RSS - Blogger and Google Reader, social networking sites - Facebook and LinkedIN, social tagging - del.icio.us and LibraryThing, collaborative workspaces - Google Docs and wikis, and a Kindle (not that that's very "Web 2.0," per se, but people were still really interested, and I feel like librarians should all get our hands on ebook readers if at all possible). It was very well-received, and I think everyone--including the presenters--learned a lot.

I thought I'd share my handout with you, in case you were curious about basic Twitterisms (e.g. retweeting, replying vs. direct messaging, hashtags) and applications (e.g. TweetDeck, TwitterGadget for Gmail, Digsby, and a couple you may not have heard of). There are a couple of links on there, to more information, as well.

I didn't talk as much about Twitter for job searching as I meant to, but overall, I think it went well.