Social Media and Web Communication

On the LIBR55m discussion board Dean posted a very interesting talk from Danah Boyd about Flow theory and information. Flow in a nutshell refers to a certain state of mind when a person is so absorbed in a skilled activity that they feel a different state ofconnection with the world. Think of a gardener carefully sowing seeds, a musician getting absorbed in a performance or an athlete enduring the length of a marathon.

I studied Flow last year in an information behaviour class with Heather O’Brien and found it very interesting. I reflected on the kinds of activities that bring about a sense of flow for me personally, from playing guitar to building things out of lego when I was young, to learning new ideas in my current studies. I feel that Joseph Campbell’s lesson to ‘follow our bliss’ plays a big role in bringing about states of flow. I also agree with Danah that it is a very delicate state of mind that can easily be disrupted. Unfortunately that has been the case for me this term at school and I’ve noticed a big difference in how well I’ve been able to do. I’ve been reflecting on why and why not I felt I was in a state of flow, and looking for ways to encourage it more for next term.

What hobbies or activities put you in a state of flow? Do you often find yourselves feeling flow while you’re at work? What about using social media? Is the search for information something that engages you this way as well? I think it does for me.

Danah certainly wasn’t feeling it during her presentation, as she later blogged about. Having watched it online, I think she was way too hard on herself about her delivery. She had a lot of great ideas, and she described them quite well aside from being a bit nervous (as if I’d be any less).

For her talk the conference organizers experimented with bringing the “back channel” to the front by letting the audience engage in a live twitter feed during her talk. This struck me as a bad idea right from the start, especially since her talk focused on the importance of attention, the priority of information and what kinds of information stimulate people the most.

Has anyone met a person who can truly attend to a lecture while also posting on and reading Twitter? I think someone should have raised their hand and said “I think this will be extremely distracting,” but for the sake of experimentation they tried it.

It seems almost too convenient that the “debacle” proved to be a perfect foil for Danah’s discussion of flow. Neither she nor her audience could enter that state because the two information streams were in a state of turbulence, badly conflicting with each other and dividing the attention of the audience while making the speaker feel uneasy.

Without the twitter stream I found the talk to be a completely different experience, one that I understood and quite enjoyed. This is worth keeping in mind! As we surf the web the quality of our reading experience will be a lot better if we carefully avoid other distractions and focus on the most important meanings.

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I’ve been using Mozilla Prism on Dan‘s recommendation for a few months now. Essentially it allows you to  run web applications as if they were desktop applications. It shows first hand that many of the specialized applications that reside on the web don’t really require browsers to facilitate all their functions.

With Prism:

• You can make direct shortcuts to websites on your desktop, dock, start menu, quick launch, etc.

• The sites are viewed in their own windows that can minimize to your notification area.

• Navigation keys, tool and button bars and menus can be enabled or disabled, depending what functions you need. For example, navigations keys are useful in Twitter so you can refresh with F5, but less useful in Google Calendar and other applications where pressing the “back” button can confuse the system.

• You can move and size the apps any way you want without affecting the look of other pages you’re browsing. For example, I shrank Facebook to hide the right panel after it started telling me to poke my friends! I can just slide the scrollbar over to see new invitations.  I also did this with Twitter, which has a more useful right-side panel, but is still not something I need all the time. This is a simple but very useful feature for me.

Incidentally, Zimbra, one of the aggregators we’ve looked at in LIBR559M, uses Prism to deliver web content. A good example of how open source software allows us to build robust applications.

So far I’m running Google Reader, Gmail, Google Calendar, Facebook and Twitter through Prism and they all work very well. I especially like the way links in the various Prism windows all open as new tabs in a single (and fully funtional) Firefox window. Aggregators like Netvibes and Pageflakes also work in Prism, which could become especially useful for those who use those aggregators extensively.

It’s interesting that while aggregators make social media apps simple by combining different platforms and adding more functionality, Prism is able to make social media apps simple by keeping them separate and giving users a more minimalistic experience. I think both of these approaches have their benefits!

If you’re interested in using Prism you can download the extension for Firefox (which gives you an easy menu option to create apps), or the standalone version of the program at http://prism.mozilla.com/

And Thanks Dan for teaching me about this great application!

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The Tyee’s blog The Hook released an interesting article on the dilemma of regulating campaign ads in social media. What rules will political parties need to follow when they campaign on twitter and Facebook? What ethical issues will arise when they work with online ad agencies? This is quite the kettle of fish!

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Here’s an earlier internet mapping project from the fantastic web comic xkcd.

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For a fun and creative project, Kevin Kelly asked people to draw maps of the internet on a normal piece of paper. He set up a flickr page to show the results of what people imagined. As there is no definitive map of what the internet “looks” like, this is an entirely imaginative exercise, and a great way to look at the diverse range of ideas people can envision.

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“I tend to read the newspaper with scissors,” my mom remarked just now as we talked about the benefits of reading through the paper to see what’s happening in the community.

My parents are pros when it comes to reading the paper, but I realize that I’m very much an internet kid. I read an article in the paper and find that I miss the reader commentary at the bottom. I get cynical about the corporate ownership of much of Canada’s news media by Canwest. I feel like social media can give me my news and keep me in touch with the community because it’s created and shared collaboratively.

But somehow whenever I talk to my parents, who live on Vancouver island, they seem to know more about what’s happening in Vancouver than I do. As troubled as the news industry is, we rely on the paper as a common ground for information and community involvement. For my mom, the benefit of finding something new and spontaneous in the paper often outweighs the ability to point and click through websites of her own choosing.

Every kind of document is made for a specific purpose. There are ways of reading the paper that I just never thought about. I’m going to start reading with scissors and see where it leads me.

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I thought I’d share an interesting commentary a close friend of mine sent me  Facebook.

The writer talks about starting university in 1985, and living in a dorm for the first time. He’s apparently a rather private person, which led him to reflect on how he perceives isolation in our society. What really stuck out to me were his thoughts on how social media has changed the way we interact with our local communities and how much has changed (or been lost) over such a short time.

I don’t think social media and the internet are to blame for the most negative comments he makes. I think there’s a lot more to do with our dwindling sense of community. After reading Kelly’s post about Bowling Alone I’m feeling more compelled to read that book. Its subject matter has been coming up in conversation a lot for me lately, with friends, family and colleagues.

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In the last post I discussed what I see as a need for libraries to internalize Web 2.0 applications into their own online systems. I was introduced to a few tools by Alicia that gave me a glimpse of some of the creative work being done in library 2.0: The Social OPAC, an ‘open source social discovery platform for bibliographic data’, Springshare LibGuides, in which libraries share knowledge and content online, and LibraryThing, an online book club that’s almost comparable to a Last.fm but for books!

In this post I’m relating those ideas to “Confronting the Challenges
of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century,” a white paper by Henry Jenkins, Katie Clinton, Ravi Purushotma, Alice Robison and Margaret Weigel, and published by the Macarthur Foundation.

As the tools mentioned above indicate, participatory culture has also reached libraries and allowed people throughout the world to contribute to library 2.0 projects. On the way to making these tools more widespread throughout library websites librarians can engage in the same participatory culture that has driven the success of library 2.0 and other online tools.

The Ubuntu community is a good example of how a geographically disperse group of individuals with varying levels of skill and participation can contribute to a greater project, often out of sheer curiosity and dedication (Jenkins refers to these skill- and knowledge-nurturing environments as “affinity spaces”).

The most important factors are communication and participation, which provide support and instruction to those who want to use the product but do not have the complete skill set to impliment or develop it by themselves. The key idea from Jenkins is that “not every member must contribute” for progress to be made. Or, to elaborate, not every member must contribute equal time, energy or skills.

Lately I have seen a few cases in which libraries initially plan their websites, but outsource the development to third parties. While this may prove cost-effective in the short term, I am concerned that the future of library websites will be compromised by a lack of community development and skill building within the libraries themselves, especially when young and emerging library staff lose the opportunity to engage with the systems directly.

The reason I think it is worthwhile for libraries to integrate 2.0 software more deeply within their online systems, rather than rely on third parties for both development and hosting, is because the library staff can take ownership and develop their websites in a comprehensive and continuous way while passing their knowledge on to their colleagues and patrons. This develops the online library world as an affinity space for librarians and patrons.

The tools mentioned above each have significant uses for libraries, and could be internalized to varying degrees directly into library websites. This is not to diminish their use as stand-alone applications, but rather to give patrons the opportunity to engage with these tools within their local context, with or without any previous awareness. A hands-on approach to social software could go miles to connect patrons directly with library 2.0 applications.

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This is part 1 of a 2 part series on library 2.0, interactivity and participation.

One of the librarians in the library 2.0 video Dean posted said: “I would like library education to be more exciting and interactive, but I don’t know how to build that.”

I think this may be the crux of the issue with library 2.0. These applications either have not yet been built, or are still quite rare. I think for library 2.0 to take off, the affordances of the library 2.0 apps should reflect the unique affordances of the libraries themselves. Libraries seem to currently favour using external 2.0 apps for communication, rather than internalizing 2.0 concepts within their own systems to extend their functionality.

I looked at book store websites like Chapters and Amazon for a comparison. Beyond using 2.0 apps to reach out to customers, they bring customers into the fold by giving them the ability to review and recommend books. Thus, a user looking to buy books benefits directly from the community in making his or her decision, then has the chance to offer information in response.

What are the main purposes of a library to the patrons and the community? What could we build to allow patrons to express their purposes online with library 2.0?

One idea I have is to give patrons a space on the library website to create resource packages and share them with others. This idea is really not that far from social bookmarking, but in this case the available collection is unique to the library and specialized, in the form of multimedia, and accessible in a physical as well as digital form. As with the book store sites, it’s not about how advanced or even original the functionality of the app is (the user review sections on Amazon basically look like a simple blog comment area), but rather the role it plays that makes it effective.

I thought of ways this idea could benefit patrons of each major type of library:

In an academic library professors could use this system to group their own publications with those of others who have shared interests or projects, and with items in the special collections. Students could assemble collections for group projects, and make a list of favourite publications which could accumulate over the course of their degree.

In a public library community organizations could let interested members of the public visit their space to learn more about their cause and to gain access to the same resources.

In a special library professionals could make items available to others within their organization for the purposes of projects or cases to work on. If the files are sensitive, privacy measures could be used to delegate list access only to certain people.

In a school library teachers could make reading lists at specific reading levels and invite students to browse. Students could then add to the list or make their own based on their school work. This would teach them about online research and how the library fits into the research process.

In all these examples the patron becomes a window into the library by creating a unique view of the collection, expanding on the existing catalogue. Have we seen much of this yet? Does this already exist, or is my imagination running away? I personally haven’t seen much so far. The concept behind this idea is participation and how it can span both patrons and library staff, which I will discuss in the second half of this post.

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