Virtually Libraries

So I’ve gotten my computer back from the shop (with the typical delay, of course) and lo and behold, it runs infinitely faster than it previously did. My upgrades include a new Pentium dual core CPU, a new motherboard to house it (my previous motherboard wouldn’t support it), and a new graphics card. This last item was what I really needed in order to run Second Life properly, and instead of getting the one on the minimum requirements list, I opted for the one that SL recommended – an Nvidia GeoForce 9500. The upgrades were ultimately quite pricey, but ultimately necessary if I wanted to do much other than word processing and general web-surfing down the line. As I mentioned before, however, the process of upgrading definitely makes me wonder about the application of the technology en masse, as many of the patrons that we cater to in the public library sphere come in to use the internet ostensibly because they don’t even have a computer with internet access at home, let alone a top of the line machine that can run a sophisticated program like SL.

The first thing I did on setting the computer back up was log into my Scottt Marshdevil account to make sure that the upgrades that I chose were sufficient enough to properly access the SL environment. And yes indeed, they certainly did the trick – the program loaded immediately, and I was shocked to see the quality of the graphics as they rendered on my monitor. The controls, once choppy, became fluid and responsive, and for the first time I could maneuver throughout the initial Help Island that SL places you on at the beginning of the ‘game.’ Even in the first few moments of wandering around, it was at once apparent that SL offered a world of affordances once the initial technological frustrations had been overcome. My fog of apprehension lifted at once.

I had previously printed off and read the Help guide, which was much more practical than my first fumblings with the controls. Unlike many online tools, SL is not self-explanatory and cannot really be learned through the trial-and-error method – if you don’t avail yourself of the Help Menu (F1), then you’ll likely be immediately confused as to how to work the game. This said, there were many on Help Island who were stuck right off the bat, and I can see why they separate this space from the larger gaming environment; with the amount of new users logging in for the first time here, one could see how their random placement on the other privately owned Islands would be frustrating for the long-time users of the game.

As soon as I changed clothes – a process that, in order not to look like everyone else, involves ‘dying‘ fabrics and tweaking lengths – I began exploring the environment. I found that it was impossible to do this in isolation, and I was constantly approached by new users asking questions. If there was ever a need for an information specialist in any environment, it’s here. It was difficult to remember that I knew essentially nothing of the tools and techniques of the game, as I immediately fell into a helping hand role for those learning how to put on pants for the first time. In the land of the blind…

Regardless, the people I was meeting were from all over the world – what caught me off guard was how easily English came to them, making me feel embarrassed about being so monolingual. What I found on the Island to combat this, however, astounded me. SL has provided what is essentially a Babel fish – you can put on (wear) a free translator in order to be able to communicate with others. Though I couldn’t figure out how to unlock it from its box – I’m still learning here – the application seems amazing, as SL demonstrated to me that it collapses not only geographical boundaries but linguistic boundaries as well. I’m really looking forward to using this tool and seeing how effective it is. I couldn’t help but wonder if something like this couldn’t be ported out to the ‘real’ world for library services in general – having a translation program for patrons at the information desk would resolve many of the issues that I’ve noticed are endemic to public reference environments.

Flying is an interesting experience, but moreso for expediency than anything else. The landscapes are massive, and the maps that they provide in the information screens, from what I can tell, are practically useless – learning the environment that you’re in, much like in the real world, is definitely a hands-on experience. I wanted to get more involved and alter my appearance, build a house and the like, but I realized that this would be more of an investment than I was counting on. Much of what’s offered in SL costs money, and real money too, that you have to upload to the environment which, from what I can tell, translates into the SL currency Lindens. While I didn’t go so far as to do this myself (at least, not yet), I did a bit of research and found that “Several online resources allow residents to convert Linden Dollars into US Dollars and vice-versa. Rates fluctuate based on supply and demand, but over the last few years they have remained fairly stable at approximately 250 Linden Dollars (L$) to the US Dollar.” (http://secondlife.com/whatis/currency.php). This comes from the SL website, an environment that’s actually external to the gaming environment, so I’m assuming that the information is current.

While I was surprised that the SL website was only externally accessible while playing the game, it did allow for an interesting observation – SL has its own browser through which you can access the outside web while playing in the environment. This means that you can Twitter, blog, check your RSS feeds and stay connected through any number of other ways all while being in the larger, SL world. It’s a thoughtful addition, and one that’s quite practical considering how isolating SL is in comparison to the rest of the web. While I noted in my last blog that SL actively forces you to establish contacts that you otherwise wouldn’t, truly offering the experience of a Second Life, this was all the more evident once I was actually playing the game. Unlike FaceBook or other SNS utilities, you couldn’t search for someone (as far as I could tell) based on their real name or their email – you need to either know their SL pseudonym (the last name of which, again, they choose for you) or arrange to meet up with them outside of the SL environment. As a result, I now have two friends attached to my account, one of whom I actually spent some time with exploring the environment and learning in tandem with.

What took me quite a while to figure out (which probably shouldn’t have) was learning how to leave the initial Help Island. You do this through clicking on pictures that are scattered around this first space, saving them as locations, and then clicking on ‘teleport’ to jump to their location – before you do this, you can’t leave the starting point. It’s a good technique, actually, in that it ensures that no one who hasn’t mastered the basic skills can leave the environment and interact with more experienced users who would potentially become frustrated by the incessant questions that abound on Help Island. Once I learned how, I immediately left to some nameless hub and was able to type in the location of where I really wanted to god – Cybrary City, one of the Islands that acts as a collective of libraries, academic, public and otherwise in SL. I mention ‘one of,’ as since interest in SL has grown substantially since its inception, Cybrary City 2, HealthInfoIsland and a number of other Islands have sprouted up in order to accommodate the interest that information institutions have expressed in developing SL spaces. What’s kind of disappointing, however, is that you seem to need to know the name of the location that you want to go to in advance – you can’t simply explore based on random interests like you can on the web. Without knowing the actual name of the Island for typing into your location field, you’re left with the teleporting cards that you picked up at the beginning of the game or chatting with random users (who are really everywhere, even at the late 3am hour that I was on) to find where it is that you’re looking for.

Going to Cybrary City was a bit of an eye opener for me, and I was instantly impressed. I found it difficult to navigate at first, as it’s not fully clear which institutions occupy the space – you really have to wander around to find out what’s available. Doing so, I saw an interesting public forum space, complete with seating and something like a lectern, along with advertisements posted around it calling for SL users to participate in book talks and reading clubs; I’ve resolved myself to go back to one of these, if only to see how practically they can be run. Wandering further, I found my first library: McMaster University Library. I knew of this one from earlier research, but it was interesting to see how the space actually functioned as a usable information environment. Entering the building, I saw that there was no one manning the reference desk (again, this was at 3am, my typical computer time), but hours were plainly advertised and it felt like a welcome space for a patron to approach a librarian for help accessing resources, both in SL as well as in the physical environment of the library itself.

And this is what is perhaps most important about SL as a space for learning and information assistance: the apprehension that one feels in the ‘real’ world on approaching a librarian, or anyone for that matter, dissipates in this environment for some reason. As one can overhear conversations by simply being within 20m or so, I was unintentionally eavesdropping on many conversations while I was in SL – hearing some of these, I found that users had no qualms at all about approaching one another for random inquiries and introductions. This, I think, is largely because of the equal footing that everyone shares on entering the game: it is not self explanatory, forcing interaction, and because you can’t access outside friends, it demands openness if you want to participate at all. As everyone first experiences the game this way, it engenders a sense of sharing and engagement with others that I personally wasn’t expecting for my first go around. This mindset translates nicely into the library environment, wherein while we expect people to be forthcoming about their information needs, they rarely are.

There were also ‘computer terminals’ at the SL McMaster space, and these were available for twenty-four hour access for SL newbies – the terminals offered advice on how to play the game and the nuances of the controls (it’s likely that this is the dominant line of questioning that the reference desk encounters, but it would be interesting to conduct a study as to how many inquiries posed are actually library resource related). Ads for upcoming events were scattered throughout the building, as well as all over the Island in general, and it was difficult to leave the space after having encountered so many interesting opportunities on even just the one Island.

I’m looking forward to using Second Life more, and I’ll very likely be posting a part three to this blog – perhaps with some errata, as I’m not entirely confident about the accuracy regarding a lot of my assumptions regarding the space as I’ve noted them above. My apologies if any of my observations about SL are dubious; again, I’m still learning and the system doesn’t make it easy to assert with any real conviction what the limitations of the space actually are. What I can say with certainty, however, is that SL has the potential to be a very important tool for libraries in general; even the design of the program as a whole facilitates the kind of learning that is difficult to engender in a real-world setting. I was quite pleased by my experience there, and I’ll definitely be going back soon. In the meantime, if anyone reading this (especially classmates) has a Second Life account and wouldn’t mind adding noob Scottt Marshdevil, I’d certainly welcome the invite. And my apologies for rattling on so much here – I didn’t realize that my enthusiasm for Second Life was of the 2000+ word variety when I sat down to write this. Despite this admission, expect more to come!

So as part of my upcoming project presentation, it looks like I’ll be enrolling and learning how to operate the immersive online environment of Second Life. I wrote an earlier blog for L500 on the use of Second Life to promote library services (which seems to have vanished from WordPress), however I’d never actually signed up for SL – this has been largely due to the fact that my computer can’t handle the minimum system requirements in order to operate the program properly. From the videos I’ve seen on YouTube introducing newbies to Second Life, this seems to be a common problem – if you don’t have a worthwhile graphics card and a proper CPU, then Second Life is relatively off limits. This issue makes its use in library interactions somewhat dubious, as transferring services here ostracizes anyone who doesn’t meet what seem to be relatively high standards, and does so in a way that other SNS programs (such as Twitter and Facebook) don’t. This said, the number of users is growing at a fantastic rate, and virtual SL spaces such as Cybrary City contain the online presence of many academic, public, special and government libraries.

With the computer system that I have, however, I was at least able to create an identity and log in; on the world of Second Life, I’m now known as Scottt Marshdevil, something similar enough to my real life name that I’ll be able to remember it (can’t get away from reality enough I guess). I can’t move more than a frame every few seconds, close windows I open, alter my appearance or see anything other than the most basic of shapes, but at least this is a start. I was, however, able to chat with another noob (who was from Nigeria, interestingly) and was immediately convinced of the potentials of this space in facilitating interaction on a global scale. Hopefully my ability to participate in this space and practice in SL will improve soon, though – I’m writing this on my coal-powered, 5-year-old laptop right now since I took my computer to the shop for upgrades, including a new graphics card and shiny new motherboard and CPU. This is why I’ve named this post ‘part one,’ as by part two I’m sure I’ll have been able to interact with the world a little bit better.

It certainly seems worthwhile, however, as looking at many of the YouTube posts dedicated to introducing SL to users, many of them come from MLIS students and involve libraries. Lists of libraries currently participating have been constructed, and with good reason – library consortia such as ALA and the California Library Association are staples of the environment, as well as specific islands operated by large information organizations such as the CDC.

Susan Smith has constructed a very useful list of affordances for libraries on Second Life, including social learning, affiliation, self determination, self efficacy, engagement to prior learning, simulation of real-world environments and cultural diversity. Beyond these, I can think of a few others: lack of reticence in approaching a reference librarian about an information need, accessibility for those who may not be able to make it into a branch, and the ability to access a vast number of institutions in a single setting.

Smith also, however, provides a list of disadvantages. These include my aforementioned issue of technological difficulties, the steep learning curve of Second Life participation, social pressures on new residents and “cognitive overload / distractions.” Overall, however, these problems seem to pale in comparison to the possibilities and potentials of Second Life as a learning environment and a site for libraries to access their patrons in a viable way. It also gets to what I’ve mentioned earlier in my blog, being the fact that libraries need to be competitive given the paradigm shift in information sharing and actively participate in an aggressive way if they are to remain useful and stay in the public consciousness – the increased visibility offered by SL is something that is potentially harder to achieve for strictly physical environments.

When I get my desktop computer back (which I’m told will be in a couple of days), I’ll be able to comment more on my own interactions in the spaces where the libraries seem to be corralled (Cybrary Cities One and Two) and report on my first steps into these forums – after I learn the basic interacting skills and figure out how to give my avatar a beard, however.

We watched a great video for class this week – Michael Wesch and the Future of Education. Thought that I would use my blog to comment on his ideas.

I think that Wesch is asking some interesting fundamental questions that attempt to understand the playing field a little bit in a deconstructivist kind of way – by asking about who likes school vs. who likes learning, what the relevance is of what you read, etc, he’s challenging some of the fundamental preconceptions that academia operates on. I like the idea of problematizing what we take to be inherent ‘truths’ in the education sector. Looking at learning and “acquiring information” from a ground-up level is a highly useful approach that, as he proves, needs to be done if we’re going to think of knowledge delivery as anything other than what it already is… without a shakeup of the template and challenging our expectations, we can’t really affect any change of any kind. That it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, that students are taking this template with them even into new and innovative environments, is actually kind of a scary prospect. I see this myself in my own online classroom that I facilitate at SFU, as students ask about the point system through which they’re going to earn their grade and move on instead of actively engaging and learning.

The statistics that he raised regarding information and infomatics were daunting, and even though we’ve encountered these before near the beginning of the semester (and elsewhere, throughout the program), it seemed to carry a special weight here – especially from the perspective of the information professional. What he’s talking about regarding taxonomies is interesting as well, and challenges a lot of what we’re doing regarding cataloguing and classification… RDA isn’t out yet, is it? I wonder how it’s going to reflect a lot of the ideals that Wesch is talking about here. 112.8 million blogs are incredibly difficult to keep track of, and if this is where the important information of our era is being produced, how are we to keep track of it? It’s pretty obvious that we should. The amount of videos uploaded to YouTube, again, is a little scary given our professional careers. When ‘experts’ are coming from basements and publishing in various forums (I love that quote that “no one is as smart as everyone”), where do we draw the line at cataloguing and classification?

His thoughts on aggregation here made a lot of sense, and really seemed essential given the numbers he was firing out. He’s using a lot of the tools that we’ve been talking about, and seeing them in action really demonstrates their practicality – especially for someone like myself, as I’ve been feeling overwhelmed almost the minute that I turn on my monitor lately given all the new software that I’ve been introduced to over the last couple months.

That we’re teaching meaningful connections is interesting as well, given that he noted that information on any topic can now really be immediately recalled via a cell phone, making the idea of memorizing facts a little redundant if you have an iPhone or BlackBerry in your pocket. Really, then, the pedagogy that we’re moving into really does represent not what to learn, but how to learn – the only kind of teaching strategy for any field becomes that of lifelong learning in this respect. I love that he got into semantic meaning, as I was introduced to this through Derrida and Saussere – applied to the web, it takes on a whole other context of seeing meaning in liminal spaces instead of those that are already filled with information.

The idea of constructing the “Grand Narrative” to this end is a little scary though, in that analogies often obscure as much as they illuminate. His three points were definitely a call to arms for instructors, however. I don’t know about his quote that “there are no natives here” – I disagree, in that even though these sites have been created recently, people have adjusted very fast. It’s very easy to see a few overlords in the field of software, with everyone else playing catchup and trying to pick up the scraps or find new niche markets. There are certainly new products that are incredibly popular, though it’s definitely a highly competitive marketplace for these platforms for participation (as we saw in the O’Reilly article for this week).

The aggregator as a classroom site that Wesch developed was really impressive, and given its practicality I can see that this is likely the way that online teaching is going. Given even the class that we’re doing right now, LIBR 559, there are multiple portals where we have information that could be useful to our studies but that are hidden because of the distance of time. While the link bar at the side of vista amasses the avenues that we can access our resources, having a window that’s displaying the class learning modules, our prof’s nearly-hourly-updated Twitter feed, links to our classmates blogs, the course wiki, the discussion forums (among the other sites of our learning) can be understood as essential if one doesn’t want to miss out on the vast amount of information exchange that’s been offered in the course. Doing so would really create a completely immersive environment that would be incredibly beneficial to learning – though I have to admit that I’d be terrified of taking four courses a semester this way, as my mind would likely melt by week three. What he’s discussing seems perfect for a single class but, given how conversation-based what he’s suggesting is, I can see how schizophrenic it would feel if you were taking a number of courses in different fields.

I did feel a little awestruck just at the technology and implementation that Wesch described in the way he ran his class, and I’ve got to wonder if the form that the learning is taking in this environment would have the potential to overwhelm the content itself – this seems to work well for a social anthropology course, but I think it would have to be normalized and be at the level of transparency before it was widely applicable for a course in, say, biology or calculus. Again, as a newbie to this I’m probably just blinded by the capabilities of the tools themselves at this point, and I recognize the need to get institutionalized.

The visual hermeneutics were a big help here in at least showing me the import of what it was he was getting across, and it’s easy to see why he’s been labeled “the explainer.” The rhizomatic structure that he demonstrated, even in a smaller classroom, suggested a lot of potential in regards to shared learning. The idea of ‘multiple experts,’ all capitalizing on one another’s expertise, seems like a productive way of doing this (especially given Wesch’s admission that the students’ expertise would overreach his own at points) and a way of inspiring students to participate, even if they’re initially resisting. The projects that he ultimately came up with totally upended my expectations (especially as an instructor myself), but seemed useful, relevant and, most importantly, inspiring.

So I was lucky enough to attend a staff conference at Vancouver Public Library yesterday that focused on the use of social media to promote library services. Originally, it was just meant to be about Twitter, but it turns out that the library’s intentions are more reaching in scope than just the use of one tool. Over the course of the hour and a half, the head of IT informed us of the many different ways that VPL is trying to assert its presence on the web, with extended talks regarding FaceBook, YouTube and Twitter. She started off, however, discussing FourSquare: a program that allows you to identify where you are at any given moment so as to alert your friends. This program is already being used by businesses in order to promote their services – she noted that many pubs around the city will offer you a free drink if you identify that you’re at their location, whereas stores will offer you discounts on their merchandise. The director suggested that VPL offer something similar (whether this be gifts or greater loan periods) for people willing to advertise their presence and use of VPL.

This was really the underlying message of the talk, being advertisement and marketing. Searching VPL on Flickr, for example, yields hundreds of photos not posted by VPL itself (and, problematically, a host of photos representing the other common meaning of VPL:  “visible panty line”) – a recurring theme is that we often don’t have control over how our institutions are represented on social networking sites, so regardless of whether or not we have the time to get involved, the public is involving us already. Failing to acknowledge this and keep current with the library’s online image means that we aren’t responding to the way that we’re being referenced, whether this be in either a positive or negative light. More importantly, she implied that diverting funds to marketing on these sites would be more productive than traditional, paper-based marketing, especially since the public does the majority of the work for us here. She even noted one patron’s development of an application that you can use to search Amazon to find reviews of information resources that directly links to VPL’s database – again, this application was developed entirely at the patron’s expense, without even the knowledge of VPL that the patron was working on a tool to provide better access to the library’s collections.

The use of these tools, however, is still in its infancy for the institution itself. The director did note that VPL has one of the most active library Twitter accounts in North America (fourth, by her ranking), and that its FaceBook page has been developing at a good pace (currently with 800 fans), with side pages added for group discussions about the library’s services and events. Its YouTube account, however, hasn’t been much of a success given that there are only eleven videos at last count each with less than a hundred views. Despite this, there was definitely a concentration on using video both to promote the library and offer diversity in our teaching tools – she named several sites (jing being the best) for screencapture that we could use in order to show patrons how to access information via email. They may, as well, be instituting screencaps as demonstrations in a “how do I use this?” type of link on their website for the more challenging tools (namely databases) that VPL offers.

There were, however, some problems identified with using SNS’s, and while some of these were more obvious (ie issues of money and time to develop and implement them), there were others that I hadn’t considered. Some of the programs that seemed to have real value to them (like applications that would allow easy access to Twitter feeds from the reference desk) couldn’t be integrated into the library’s ILS due to technical reasons, and it’s often very difficult to develop workarounds for these. Moreover, the hierarchy of an organization as large as VPL plays a role in developing communication about policies and practices between branches that are taking their first steps into the SNS environment – there is currently no formal policy regarding how the library should be representing itself in these various mediums. And this is a problem, as the library is arguably more accountable for its actions than, say, a random user – copyright infringement and issues of privacy are quite significant, and the library has already gotten in trouble for posting video of its patrons using its services without thinking of the importance of consent. There are a lot of legalities surrounding the use of SNS’s when incorporated into business practices that seem to make them more far more problematic that when employed for personal use.

This said, the session was definitely a call to arms for the library to start creating content that can be posted online. While it’s not mandatory that the branches each set up Twitter and FaceBook accounts, it was strongly promoted as a direction which we should all be moving towards. We were also informed that we can (and should, perhaps) create innovative and interesting videos that we can then post to YouTube or other video sharing sites – that we can do this over the phone (as we were shown how to do) made the idea seem all the more realistic. Many in the audience seemed skeptical, however, and it was obvious that time constraints were a large factor in the apprehension displayed by the staff. Given that SNS use is now a mandate of VPL’s future direction for the library and its branches, it looks like it will be moving forward with a greater presence that capitalizes on the available technologies as they arise regardless of the challenges that it presents. As the director mentioned, VPL’s presence on social networking / media sites is going to happen anyway – we might as well get involved so that we use them to their full potential.

Reading Sinclair’s Commons 2.0: Library Spaces Designed for Collaborative Learning this week was inspiring – I’m very keen on the idea that form should mimic content, and this definitely seems to be the case in libraries as well. With all the talk of going 2.0 with library services and promoting interactivity and exchange with patrons, there seems to be comparatively little literature about going 2.0 with the library as a space itself in order to promote this same collaborative effort that the technology we’re promoting allows (though there does seem to have been a recent conference on the subject promoting its ideals). This doesn’t mean that these changes aren’t happening though.

Sinclair argues that there are five characteristics that a Commons 2.0 should exhibit; it should be open, free, comfortable, inspirational and practical. One can see why the argument has been posed, given the general stereotype of the library as being a place for quiet (or very quiet) introspection and individual scholarship. In promoting 2.0 qualities in the physical environments of our libraries (and classrooms?) we can dispell this myth and hopefully engender the kind of productive exchange that we see going on online. With library stats going down, Sinclair’s suggestions for more interactive and inspiring spaces seem to be not only useful but essential in providing best service in a changing sociocultural landscape.

His article got me thinking about UBC’s own Irving K. Barber centre in a new light as well. Though the library itself is set to the right of the main entrance, when thinking about the middle territory of the building as an extension of the library proper, it seemed to exhibit many of the qualities that Sinclair was extolling. With computer terminals set openly only a few metres from the cafeteria, the comfortable couches that are available on every floor, the accessibility to unused classrooms for study groups and the electrical sockets, well, everywhere for plugging in laptops to take advantage of UBC’s wireless (among other features), Barber really does seem to meet every criteria of Commons 2.0. What’s more, it’s incredibly effective as well. Just try finding a seat on any floor during peak school hours – they’re all occupied by individuals and groups capitalizing on the openness of the space. This also makes me wonder about the kinds of surveys that we conduct, in that when we question undergrads as to whether or not they actively use the library, if they consider use of the space just outside it as well in their answer. I’m curious if the statistics would go dramatically up if the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre was renamed the Irving K. Barber Library, and labeled as such on the front doors of the building.

Barber aside, Sinclair is really writing about being proactive in the way we see libraries and the services that we provide – his descriptions challenge long-held notions of what a library was, versus what it could (and should) be in order to promote the ideals of lifelong learning. That he suggests having visitors participate in the redesigning of these spaces is also highly useful, in that patrons whose input was used would likely take greater advantage of a space that matches their physical as well as information needs. The changes that we make have to go from being reactive to proactive.

The closing caveat to his argument is well founded though, in that redesign costs money. With libraries losing funding practically the world over, it’s easy to look at Sinclair’s ideas as idealism. This said, attempting a redesign that actually addresses the needs of the patron may be one of the key features of the library’s continued dominance (or even survival) as a resource centre – the question maybe becomes not “can we afford to?” but “can we afford not to?” Even being a graduate student I can admit that I’d rather access my online articles from a couch in a comfortable coffee shop than in an isolated cubicle tucked away in the stacks. And this is the rub: With more and more resources going online, we need to rope patrons in in less conventional (yet in the case of Commons 2.0, utterly reasonable) ways, and making the library an interactive and collaborative learning environment seems to be a highly practical means of doing so.

So I know that I started off this blog with the intention of submitting to the 2.0 Gods and signing up for as many social networking sites as would have me, and I did this with the ultimate goal of Facebook in mind (is it even worthwhile to sign up for MySpace anymore? Or have we collectively moved on from it?). Seeing the class topics this week, I’ve got my same old feelings of apprehension back again. I know that there are a lot of different restrictions that you can put on your profile on the various networking sites to restrict yourself from being hunted down, but these are deceptive – you’re still left with the problem of your name and identity being in the hands of the moderators and the marketers. When entering your information and personal media onto most of the options out there for social networks, you’re ceding your right to the data that you’re providing. Many claim that there’s nothing to this and that it’s not used for devious purposes, but the potential is definitely still there. I’m always amazed at the amount of spam email that my friends all get sent to their hotmail / gmail / yahoo accounts, and I think that it’s telling that I’m only very, very rarely subject to emails asking me to send money to Nigerian princes or sign up to receive more information about the most recent alternative to Viagra.

More important to me is that the information is stored somewhere, and stored indefinitely – last I checked, one can’t delete a Facebook account but only abandon the data and leave it in their servers. The idea of creating an indelible record of what might be momentary interests is problematic for me, and I’m reminded of the Phaedrus, where Plato calls the text an orphan that we send out into the world, that will outlive us and that will ultimately be (mis)interpreted as a representation of our actual intentions (hence writing as sacrifice). This is pertinent to the internet especially, given that we have very little control over who comes into contact with the information we choose to represent ourselves with. While a company itself may only use the information stored on its servers in specific ways, the changing political environment means that the data stored anywhere may be accessed and used by other authorities as well. The Patriot / Homeland Security acts entitle the NSA and government agencies to far greater access to information than ever before, and in Canada we have the Canadian Revenue Agency recently winning a Supreme Court case against eBay.com that forces them to provide the sales records for all Canadian powersellers so that they can impose taxation on the sale of online goods all the way back to 2004. Information that may be benign right now has the potential to be used later in a negative (or at least intrusive) way.

Albrechtslund’s essay (which we read in 559 this week) on participatory surveillance and the positive attributes of sharing information did little to dissuade me from my negative assumptions of social networking sites. The bulk of his work identified many problems with expressing oneself online, employing and dissecting the oft used analogies of Bentham’s Panopticon and Orwell’s 1984 in light of the file and information sharing that most of us do now.

A real panopticon, in Cuba

The concept of internalizing the outside gaze which ultimately controls your actions and dictates how you express yourself seems very fitting when applied to the online environment – there is a particular online decorum that I think we’ve internalized, much in the same way that we exhibit particular behaviours in particular physical spaces as well, behaviours that ultimately shape our actions even in our private moments.

His final section, however, that contained the bulk of his thesis and motivation for writing the piece (as one can tell from reading the conclusion), seemed to promote participatory surveillance as a sort of means to an end – as lots of good sharing is coming out of these social networking sites, maybe the fact that the information can be used negatively is ultimately worthwhile. There are obvious flaws to this line of thinking, although Albrechtslund does offer the caveat that checks and balances must be put in place so that we don’t fall prey to “privacy invasion and social sorting to fraud and identity theft” (though I wonder about the logic of this claim given that Albrechtslund himself noted the NSA’s completely legal use of online data for profiling and sorting). What I don’t quite follow is the apples-to-oranges nature of his position as he outlines the “positive aspects of (mutual) surveillance,” namely “empowering exhibitionism” and “sharing” which both seem just simply justify the negative attributes of surveillance because the tools allow the inherent reversal as well – everyone is watching, so you can be empowered through exposure and participation in the community, ultimately developing a stronger sense of self. In making this claim, he misrepresents the panopticon metaphor that he himself raised: if the gaze becomes internalized because we know we’re being watched (more importantly that we want to be watched), then this necessarily shapes the ways that we can to express ourselves and in fact removes subjectivity. What’s offered instead are simply channels for expression, predefined avenues through which one can exhibit one’s individuality – the most views on YouTube, for example, or the biggest crops on Farmville as indicators of self actualization are problematic to me. A reductive analysis, maybe, but I think it’s important to recognize that these are the ways that the majority of users employ the tools of the internet – through the avenues that they are allowed. It’s also significant to note that when one is performing online, one does so not to an vast audience of individuals but to a singular ‘everyone.’

“Empowering exhibitionism” seems to be an acknowledgement that if one chooses to express oneself online through multiple channels, this is a form of identity creation and self expression and therefore the user becomes empowered through exhibitionism. Albrechtslund cites Koskela in noting that “by exhibiting their lives, people claim copyright to their own lives” – though this is not the case. The construction of an online presence, as shown by the beginning of Albrechtslund’s article, is subject to replicability. Personal information may be lifted, adapted, placed in new contexts and reft of its original meaning. If anything, the concept of copyrighting one’s own life by publishing on line is exactly the opposite of what Albrechtslund proposes – what we’re ultimately left with is the sacrifice of identity as a tradeoff for a stake in the participatory process. Albrechtslund’s own mention of the employee who lost his job because a friend shared his information online (who was also friends with his employer) speaks directly to this.

Maybe it’s difficult for me to wrap my head around the conflicting positions embedded in this essay, or maybe it’s that Albrechtslund was too good in his opening salvo wherein he defined the problems and sacrifice that the exhibition of one’s online presence presents. Maybe it’s too many episodes of “To Catch a Predator” under my belt, and knowledge of the really scary ways that social networking sites are used. I know that there are many, many positive attributes of these sites, but the minute I start employing theory with them, I get freaked out. This doesn’t mean that I’m not going to join Facebook (again, the ultimate hurdle for me) – it does suggest, however, that I might do so closer to the end of the semester.

Reading the articles for class this week and the discussions around 2.0 software and services got me thinking about the use of 2.0 as a suffix. While it’s used in the academy to represent anything that’s improved or facilitated by the use of social software (or, in the case of library services, denotes using such apparatuses to encourage participation in shaping library programs) and used in the industry to denote events that have been made possible via the use of this technology (see, for example, Lunch 2.0), it’s also often used out of context by a bevy of marketers in order to indicate anything that’s the next version of an older model. Even though 2.0 is now largely a signifier of inclusionary and connective practices that have been altered or are established through social software, I find it interesting that we use 2.0 (or 3.0, or 4.0) as a term to represent the changes that are taking place. Why not “the inclusionary web” or something else that indicates the changes that are occurring in a more easily identifiable / descriptive way? Why is our shorthand so often numeric?

I think that “2.0” and the numeric value system for improvements in technological apparatuses has been a trope for some time now, long before we started attaching it to things like “Web,” “Library,” “Love” or “Me”. I remember way back in the day when my parents got our family’s first computer, and it ran on DOS 3.1 or somesuch – the addition of digits were there to hallmark some incremental change in software, and when there was a major enough revision it would bump up to the next whole number. All it originally was was a way to delineate development in-house, in such a way that the user could easily identify an outdated product.

Album art for Garbage "2.0"

It was highly useful for this purpose, and then it got picked up by the media to denote any sort of change at all. One of my favorite early 90’s bands, Garbage, even named their second album 2.0.

The changes that are occurring with social software online are happening so fast and are so radical (in relation to the inclusionary paradigms that they promote) that I think we’re using the number system for it not only because we tend to enumerate everything, but also as a means of slowing it down so that it doesn’t seem so overwhelming and out of control. I also largely hear academics and theorists using the term 2.0 far more often than by anyone 20 or under in conversation, the youth who are actually designing many of the programs that are now changing the way we communicate, learn, earn a living and fall in love. Maybe it’s just me (and it definitely might be), but I see the grafting of labels as a means of containment, playing catch-up with the affordances we’re finding in our technologies and their effects on social movements.

I think it’s definitely arguable that the numeric value system has been employed out of tradition and is, in a way, a crutch. It’s a way of rationalizing and compartmentalizing progression in a way that can be easily understood. I think that there’s an innate desire for us to define things in numbers so that we can feel that we’re moving towards something bigger – thinking here of second edition books, second generation iPods, Playstation 2… 3. The number system allows us to interpret things as finished, placing historical caps on events or objects so that we can move onto the next logical step. We’re already seeing Web 3.0, where (from my understanding) the connectivity extends to nearly every piece of machinery that we have to create an even more interactive, humanistic web that’s based on openness – I’ve read lots of shifting definitions, however, and the only thing that seems to be certain that whatever Web 3.0 is going to represent, it will definitely be called Web 3.0.

The New You - Self 2.0

I think that it’s valuable to attach numeric values to some things, but it’s also very limiting in a way. We tend to disparage first generation things or ideas once the second or third has come out. When we start attaching 2.0 to things like Love or the Self, we run the risk of disqualifying 1.0 concepts as archaic, or worse, redundant as we automatically assume that the original concepts are already embedded in the 2.0, “improved” model. Personally, I’m a big fan of 1.0 when applied to some of the abstract concepts that 2.0 is being grafted onto, and I’m reticent to see them go. For example: The idea that relationships that are facilitated by online dating sites that base your compatibility on a series of inputted statistics for a likely positive outcome is great in some ways, but what I’m concerned with is that it may, because of the terminology (and the excitement behind the technology), become privileged over earlier forms of connecting with others… What about that chance meeting in a coffee shop with someone you find you have nothing in common with, but who compels you nonetheless?

Even applied to technology and software, 2.0 can be a dangerous term because I think we inherently see it as a cutting point, a means of identifying what’s done and over with through retrospect. How much potential do we lose from 1.0 models once the focus has shifted to 2.0? Granted, like the readings state, 2.0 indicates involvement, training and a sense of obligation to improve through contribution, but what if some of the foundations of the way we approach our ideas and online social movements are fundamentally flawed? Not saying they are, of course, but the number system seems to suggest that there are negative associations with questioning the foundations of our paradigms, and to do so would be of as little value as nostalgia.

So I’m still not on Facebook, but I’ve signed up for Twitter and added the accounts of my classmates (haven’t checked to see if anyone else I know is on there yet). Coming from an English background, I’m a little perturbed by the 140 character limit. I’m not a grammar-police guy, but seeing the way that articles and pronouns are cut and verbs are shortened in order to save on space made me feel squeamish. I use text messaging on my cellphone a lot, but I normally write more than 140 characters on two or three slides to get across what I want to say. I’m sure I’ll get used to the new format of Twitter and the fact that it’s only really for brief, brief statements (or maybe terse extensions of blogs?), but for the time being I can’t help but wonder what its effect on language is going to be after a generation grows up with it.

Another thing about the Twitter sign-up – after only a few seconds of registering my account and beginning to add classmates, I had a couple of followers. I was excited at first, thinking that this whole time the internet was waiting for me to plug into the dominant social networking tools that are out there, but this wasn’t the case. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was profiled very quickly and internet-porn businesses had started marketing to me. I still have to learn how to block people or restrict access for those who want to follow my account, so for the time being I have some weird people watching for my Tweets. Amazing how pervasive the hunt for money is once something gets popular.

I don’t know how practical a tool I find it yet, but I think that’s because I’m still unfamiliar with the controls. Seeing “@so-and-so” meant nothing to me until I did a little digging, and the system that they have to follow chains of conversations is strange… I’ll probably edit this post once I’ve had more of a chance to play with the system.

While this isn’t the first blog that I’ve kept (there have been others for classes I’ve taken and taught), I’m going to try to make it representative of my first actual, legitimate commitment to getting involved in the realm of social media. Part of the reason that I opted to take the course in social software course offered by the MLIS program is my lack of involvement in the area to date and a recognition of the catching up that I need to do. I’ve avoided even the most common tools, thinking, perhaps, that they were fads and will ultimately vanish or morph into something entirely different. Now I’ve come to the point that even my parents are using sites like Facebook for keeping in touch with others, and some of my old friends have even tried to access them in order to get to me (“Where’s Scott’s Facebook account… I can’t find it? Can you tell him to add me?”).

Not being connected through Facebook, Twitter, etc. has now made me the ‘difficult one’ – when my friends are getting together and send out e-vites through their online networks, I still have to be phoned to be reminded that the party is, indeed, on Saturday at eight. More and more, involvement in social media and networking tools is taken as a given instead of an option, and a failure to realize this and create an appropriate avatar leaves you at the risk of potentially becoming anachronistic.

Entering into a career as a librarian has made me realize that I can’t be so… traditional? in the way that I choose to communicate with others. I’m very interested in public librarianship as a profession, and I’ve realized that in order to provide the best service possible, I need to develop the shared and continuously evolving aptitude of the online social forum – not having these skills might make having a degree in ‘Information Science’ feel a little hollow.

In response to this general lack, I’ve now set up a Flickr account (currently hosting a small yet entertaining collection of pictures of my pet bearded dragon) and I plan to fully integrate myself into the socio-digital environment by the end of the course, signing up to as many of the sites that I’m learning about as possible. This blog will be, among other things I’m sure, a chronicle of a social networking Luddite’s attempt at diving headfirst into the world of social media.