I could do this in the Downside of 2.0 thread but I want to address a downside while also responding to several people.
I agree with Elizabeth when she writes:
What I hope will happen is that (we) social media users will be able to monitor ourselves and each other in a respectful fashion.
And I agree with Fiona when she writes:
Back home, when the self in real life is so heavily policed, the online world becomes a fantasy land for people to be the person they want to be and sometimes they overcompensate and at its worse, it’s nasty and mean-spirited, childish and resentful.
I wish Elizabeth’s thoughts become reality. I slightly disagree with Fiona in the sense that, at its worse, the anonymity of the internet allows the hidden under belly of some people to be shown.
An example, check out the comments on this article. Brutal and so full of racism, privilege denial, etc. But I find it instructive in one sense to know that my feelings about racism in Canada aren’t wrong: they are just hidden underneath the stereotypical Canadian veneer of politeness.
The downside to 2.0 and increased participation, learning what people really think about you.
So far, in Libr559m there has been two discussions which touch on related areas. One was on the use of 3rd party social media background checks by employers and another was on limiting the personal use of social media to adhere to professional standards. Laid out like this, it is easy to see how these are two sides of the same coin. This post by a classmate discusses this from the latter perspective.
I mentioned in my introduction that I maintain a blog discussing things about social justice. Obviously, from the Vista discussions, it is probably quite clear to everybody that this has been my approach to many of the discussions within the class. In many ways, I think it is incredibly important to remember. This will be discussed in greater detail when I finally finish my post on performance…
In the meantime, I’d like to point out that it is a privilege to be judged solely by your actions. It isn’t a privilege that many people share. I may not have mentioned before but I’m one of the 2010 recipients of the Association of Research Library’s Diversity scholarships, because people of colour are severely under-represented in the field of academic librarianship (less than 15% but I can’t find the ARL survey right now).
I *wish* I’d just have my professional career impacted by my possible social media activities, it would be quite a few steps ahead for me. But even if I maintained nothing but the most perfect professional decorum, I’d still have a much harder time getting equal opportunity. I could still find myself terminated for reasons unrelated to my job performance. And some of these reasons are even legal in Canada right now (see here, here, and here).
Of course, this is all to say, is this is all the same system. Unless you are involved in illegal activity anything you do in your personal life should not only have no bearing on your career but should also (from a justice perspective) not even be considered something that has to be held distinct. I recently say a Tyra Banks YouTube clip where a Subway worker was fired for doing porn. Porn and sandwiches have nothing to do with each other, but someone recognized the guy (who was trying to find non-sex related work). But the point is, is that there is nothing wrong with sex work (if freely chosen). There is also nothing wrong with coarse language, criticizing your employers, venting frustrations, sexting, etc.
Okay, so I just spent the entire morning trying to figure out some way to both aggregate my various online activities as well as publish them. Basically, I wanted to lifestream. Of course, when I started looking for how to do this, I didn’t know that lifestreaming is what I wanted.
Unfortunately, after trying many, many services: tumblr, soup.io, posterous, and jaiku, I found that none of them does what I need them to do. Or, rather, that a combination of them would serve my needs but not any one service.
Tumblr: Used to be able import RSS feeds but new users cannot (if you have an older account this is fine). So this cannot be used to lifestream anymore. Sigh. The reason this is a big problem for me is that this was the only service named here that allowed you to queue posts. This is a highly desired feature because I don’t want to spam my friends with links.
Soup: Was able to import many, many feeds but no post queue. Sigh. I also found the interface clunky and was unable to do any real searching.
Posterous: No auto-importing. And the main way to post was via email. Which is a good thing, I’ll grant you. But they don’t have a queue, which is the biggest problem for me. Otherwise, I might have switched.
Jaiku: I simply found it unusable.
Basically, the affordance I was looking for from a lifestreaming service was the ability to auto-import (key ingredient) and to have control over when (and how many) posts I put up a day, which I find important since the other key thing I wanted was the ability to auto-post to other sites.
The best solution suggested was to basically set up your own website… Something I’ve been thinking about doing for a while. And it might finally be time.
This is just gonna be a list of links to organize my hashtag research:
- Article on the origin of hashtags. Although this blog post seems to really be laying out the ground work for hashtags. — Apparently this is the guy who first proposed them!
- Very interesting article on the evolution and use of hashtags.
- Fun website that allows hashtag searching, you can see trends, and they have graphs!
- I found this wiki useful and full of good reading suggestions.
- A post about one of the early successes in using hashtags, something that demonstrated their use.
From my reading, this is how I understand the evolution of hashtags. They were first suggested as a means to aggregate tweets on certain topics or about certain things: thus, their initial use was to facilitate searching. As they became more popular, they evolved as a way to add humour or context to your tweet.
This is very interesting, since this is exactly what metadata is all about (at least in terms of facilitating searching and grouping of similarly themed information objects). However, where they are significantly differ is in terms of the social aspects. And the social aspects are not simply like tags or other types of folksonomy (which all seem to be just about searching), rather they also facilitate real time creation of information objects within a body of discourse. Very interesting. Particularly for their use in political organizing and protests.
I’m still not sure, exactly, what ‘affordance’ means. As noted on the course wiki and on Wikipedia it can be defined as:
An affordance is a quality of an object, or an environment, that allows an individual to perform an action.
But what does that even mean? It seems like extra fancy jargon for the utility that an object has. Of course, the extension of utility as a quality that can adhere to the environment (i.e., context of use) makes ‘affordance’ a broader term. Even more problematic is how disconnected the term is from what it is describing.
I prefer Norman’s refinement of the original idea because the original implies that affordances have some level of objective reality, which, if true, would imply that affordance does not depend on human perception. Norman’s definition, however, centres on the human agent: “action possibilities that are readily perceivable by an actor.”
This seems important to remember in the ever-shifting sands of social media. One our classmates has already pointed out the surprise they feel that blogs could be used for longer, more substantive sharing (as opposed to Twitter). Interestingly, this is exactly my perspective on blogs. Indeed, with my own blog, I’m actively considering discouraging comments and discussion. I also don’t often link to other blogs. Put in another light: blogging for me isn’t a social media at all. Its affordance lies in the ability to disseminate my thoughts about social justice.
So what would be the affordance of a social justice blog? Well, the key lies in a point in the class wiki: “Blogging can give you a sense of ownership and a platform for your opinions.” Blogging is relatively cheap and also relatively easy to do. It provides the perfect platform for people who are routinely and systematically excluded from popular media outlets. It allows for a pluralism and diversity of voices. The value is not in the social aspects (or at least not in the sense of socializing).
Here is my introduction posted up on the discussion board in Vista:
My name is Abraham de Jesus. I’m currently working as a Data Steward Intern at UPEI in Charlottetown (I’m working with Islandora — the repository software developed here).
After a year in library school and feeling like I <em>should</em> be involved in social media but having no real notion as to how I’d like to engage in it, I’ve finally jumped in (and I’m loving it!). One of the reasons for my slow adoption of many new media technologies is that I’m a big believe in critically engaging with technology.
Anyway, I blog on topics concerning social justice. I also have a tumblr for social justice reading recs. And you can find my twitter @abedejesus. And last, but not least, here is my UBC Blog for the course.
