Recently, my capstone course exposed to the concept of Enterprise Social Networking (ESN). Right now I’m elbow-deep in helping a local organization set up what you might traditionally call an intranet, except that intranet looks like something between Facebook and LinkedIn.

The idea is to harness the power of social media for collaboration, as well as the ability to make information in your company more explicit — I’d like to type ‘organization’ but for the most part these tools are corporate. This promotional video for Slack, a more messenger-styled enterprise social network, gives a good idea of the appeal and the promises of this type of platform. Slack also has a free option so you could try it out for yourself in a team. A classmate set up a Slack team for our SLAIS cohort attending ALA annual last year and it was an interesting tool, long before I was aware of the larger-scale corporate applications.

Our community partner in the capstone course is hoping their ESN will replace emails and phone calls for things like issue tracking for IT and facilities maintenance, frequently asked questions, and often obscure internal information like who speaks what language (or even who works where). The biggest challenge is that a social platform like this requires everyone to participate for those goals to work. If someone doesn’t keep their profile current on the ESN, you’ll still need to call them to find out what office they’re based out of now.  So far we’ve gotten good advice with how to address this by requiring use of the ESN in common workflows and making some resources (like company policy) only accessible through the ESN. Weather or not it takes hold (we’ve talked to organizations who reported several “false starts”) remains to be seen. People still routinely complain about coworkers who won’t use email!

I’ve just realized I’ve played a game about all this! Redshirt emphasizes the “enterprise” in enterprise social media is a fun little spoof of Star Trek, cronyism, and facebook. Now that I’ve learned a lot more about social intranets, the phrase “proprietary social network” in the trailer fills me with a lot more dread.

I think I picked the game up on one of those crazy Steam or GOG sales where everything is $4.99 and there is a timer counting down.

In class, while we were discussing collaborating in social media spaces, I saw one of those pastel-hued motivational phrases on a classmate’s laptop and it really resonated with me.

Of course this was one of those moments where you misread something because you only see it in the periphery of your vision. I’d gotten the text right, but missed the content. It was Safari’s connection error screen:

I still think there’s something worth thinking about in that phrase, taken out of context as it was. Put into the context of collaboration through the internet, to me it was a welcome reminder that

We talk so frequently about being plugged in (and consequently having to unplug) from the internet, technology, or what have you but it’s still figurative. Physically connecting to the internet — literally being plugged in — remains in the domain of cyberpunk. Just like the cloud is just somebody else’s computer, social media is just… somebody else.

I mentioned previously that I contributed to the tumblr of the Out on the Shelves Library for a feature called #webcomic wednesdays, and that feature resulted in a couple of creators donating copies of their books. Essentially, a fellow volunteer and I reviewed webcomics with queer content as a sort of reader’s advisory service and if we knew the author’s social media accounts, we tagged them as a sort of “hey, we like your stuff” courtesy.

The first time one of them messaged us saying they were going to drop by and donate a print edition of their comic, we freaked out in fangirl confusion and joy. Or maybe that was just me. I did happen to be the volunteer librarian on duty the day it happened and made up a couple of library cards for the writer and illustrator of the comic, and even checked out a book to one of them (all summarized in this tumblr exchange). So of course I immediately posted afterwards on facebook that “today I learned the internet is real place and shook the hands of two people that live there.” Behind Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and the comments section are real places and real people and if anything its them we’re connected to, not “the internet.”

A longtime friend whom I had originally met through MySpace immediately chided me that we had hung out on multiple occasions when he “comes from the internet,” too. Which in this framework is, I suppose, a reminder that people we’re connected to though our social media use are often (though I would think, not always) connected to us.