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.
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