The Small World (After All) of Libraries & Social Media

While reading a 2007 piece by Broidy about her experiences with bringing a more subjective, critical view of information into the LIS instructional setting,  my mind snagged on this particular paragraph: “[We] wanted the students to understand and grapple with two opposing perspectives on what shifts in modes of communication and the transfer of information actually mean …  Sampaio and Aragon divide the theoretical universe between modern and postmostmodern, arguing that the modernist perspective posits that new information technologies are merely extensions of traditional print and speech media and as such do not require any alteration in how we think about or analyze them. McLuhan was right then; he’s right now. The opposing postmodern view is that the Internet, with all its potentials and pitfalls, represents entirely new modes of communication and opens the door to hitherto unforeseen forms of social interaction.”

While this observation was really just a side-note in the larger structure of Broidy’s essay, the idea took a hold of me with that startling strength that only totally novel ideas can really muster up at this point during summer school. In Libr559, as in other courses I’ve taken that focus solely or tangentially on the internet, I tend to have the bright, excited, unthinking passion of a zealot. I myself have experienced the internet as a world of creativity, boundlessness, instant gratification, insight, connection, and epiphany; this world of text and imagery and sound distilled down to pure jolts of sensation and then re-connected to form complex semantic patterns; the ability to communicate through an ever-evolving pastiche of post-modern disassembled pop-culture; the ability to leave your fingerprints, however dim, on the world of information and education and entertainment and cultural significance; all of it charms me deeply. I don’t hesitate to point out how much the internet has meant to me, individually. Since I turned sixteen and discovered the internet in earnest, I’ve never been able to say, in any earnestness, that I want to go back to a different time or era, because this cusp of weird, thrilling, fast-moving creativity feels exactly right to me.

All that being said, I have blind spots. I pretend the internet is a whole-new-world, rife with potential for social change; I pretend we all have the ability and, equally as importantly, the URGE to become new people, to transcend gender or ethnicity or socioeconomic strata or physical appearance or or or … you get the idea. I ignore my own implicit privilege: my access to computers, my access to an internet connection, my free time to learn and use new technologies. I also ignore the limitations of the medium itself. Connection, collaboration, and connectivity have all been pushed to the forefront by the digital world, but after all, we are still communicating via text primarily, and less predominantly, via image, sound, video. Is the online world really a whole new frontier or just a continuation of an ongoing trend, still vulnerable to all the biases and burdens of our preexisting world, only made perhaps more dangerous by the implicit opinion of individuals such as myself who overlook gaps in usage and assume, too naively, too insularly, that everyone has equal opportunities online. Our pre-existing comfort with the mediums that converge together on the internet is a benefit in many ways, but it’s important to recognize the limitations that the internet brings along with its burgeoning potential for a democratic landscape.

Watching David Gauntlett’s presentation (above) reminded me of my introduction to Clay Shirky back in January, and the idea of an “entertainment” paradigm shift … going from passive absorbers of television shows to active, hands-on creators and participators (even if it takes us a few decades to stop confusedly crawling around with our hands full of PlayDoh and actually put our creativity to use). The shift from soaking up entertainment to altering it, changing it, being involved with it … the whole shift reminds me of nothing so strongly as fanfiction.

Now according to the Wikipedia article I just posted, fanfiction is nothing too new, dating back to the days of Homer, the Knights of the Round Table, or the Ramayana. And the 1960’s apparently saw their fair share of Star Trek fanfiction, being produced, we might assume, by the milk-white bespectacled basement-dwellers that Don Draper and his cronies wouldn’t have looked at twice. Or, more accurately, by the mild-mannered secretaries typing out letters all day-long: even back in the repressed 60’s, the days of housewives and garter belts, a good 73-90% of fanfiction producers were — you guessed it — women. Personally, I find the idea of 1960’s ladies producing Star Trek fanfiction almost too adorable and poignant to bear. And already, perhaps, the germs of what makes fanfiction so potent are creeping into this blog-post, the advanced escapism and even empowerment offered by taking other lives into your own hands, by changing the course of what happens inside that glowing box in your living room.

Any writer, any artist, will share with you the strange, almost embarrassing, almost mystical process of creation. At its best, it really is one of the most powerful and exciting experiences an individual will ever know. Whether or not the finished product is “good” matters very little during the actual head-rush of creating. The problem is right after the product is finished (or the first draft, at least). In 1959 Marcel Duchamp said these fateful words in Texas, of all places: “All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”  Although I’m sure there are exceptions to this, for most creative types, I’d argue that our work can’t exist successfully in a vacuum. Why capture it in a tangible form AT ALL if not to transmit it to other minds? This is a drawback to creating our own work: the difficulty and sheer luck of being published and, once published, becoming popular enough to draw a large audience … the act of creating original work is daunting, a pursuit for the brave and solitary and dogged.

This is where fanfiction comes in. Fanfiction draws on a preexisting audience, a collective excitement and understanding of the characters, a desire to see them re-interpreted and moving past the necessarily limited boundaries of their complicated production in the “real world” (i.e., the limits on lone authors, TV and movie production, etc.). Shirky and Gauntlett more or less cast television as the ultimate generator of passivity, and in some cases this may well be true. But in other cases — those women in the 1960’s plucking Spock and Kirk from the flat borders of their television screens and breathing life into them — television is only the barest beginning, the framework within which individual creativity can burgeon and thrive.

The internet  has obviously turned fanfiction from a cult oddity into an activity so widespread that even published authors still engage in it. I’m a member of a community that merges PostSecret anonymous confessions with the world of fandom, and every week there’s sure to be at least a few secrets from successful people, even authors, who admit to using fanfiction as a creative release they enjoy above any other form of creativity. Fanfiction is the “grey literature” of the entertainment industry and the fictional world … and the reactions from authors have ranged from positive and encouraging to downright dismissive or lawsuit-happy. I find the negative reactions slightly outdated; at least for now, fanfiction is not publishable or mass-produced, and doesn’t exactly earn money for the creators (it’s more a labor of love, although undoubtedly some “big name fans” have managed to turn their fanfiction into a lucrative calling). The authors still retain legal rights over their creations — it’s ludicrous to think that J.K. Rowling is suffering in any way from the mind-boggling mountain of Harry Potter fanfiction that exists on the web — but in the fluid grey free-for-all world of the internet, fanfiction runs rampant, proving that we are a creator culture when it comes to fictional narratives … proving, really, the sheer joy of breaking our favorite characters out of their untouchable boxes.

How many monkeys at how many typewriters?

The internet (I’d argue) was built on collaboration. So was librarianship: a gathering and sharing of free and accessible knowledge. The two together would theoretically become a perfect breeding ground for collaboration, thriving and vibrant. Still, there are flaws in this utopia. The internet may have been built on collaboration, but it’s also come to serve the purpose of providing an individual platform: who wants somebody else encroaching on their fifteen minutes? Even social media has a sense of one-sidedness to it … unlike in the fluid pattern of conversation, which moves from person to person, social media requires a solitary act of saying something and then letting it stand, either gathering awkward silence like dust or else drawing opinions to itself bit by bit. The sustained “stand alone” quality of interactions online places a slight but important focus on individuality, I think. The hierarchy of online conversations is more fixed and visible than the transitory, unstructured quality of in-person interactions, too: vying for “likes,” for more responses, for more followers and friends, or for more controversy in some cases.

Librarianship, too, although it is a service-based profession for the most part, has an element of aloofness and privacy to it, with librarians as the guardians of knowledge, speaking their secret tongue and wielding power over the success of your research paper, working in austere dusty privacy to create the codes and standards that will organize this vast knowledge network, physical and intangible alike. The image of the stern-lipped librarian with her constant, imperious quest for silence is outmoded, but has a kernel of truth, and personally, I think plenty of librarians still enjoy that sense of secrecy, power, and individuality. Anecdotally, all my MLIS professors so far have required some element of collaboration: but anecdotally, too, they all apologize profusely for “forcing” it on us.

I would hold that collaboration in its best form, however, doesn’t submerge individuality or erase it, so much as connect one individual mind to another. The only analogy I can think of is a slightly improbable one, but I keep visualizing water being poured from one glass to another. With positive and intelligent collaboration, the catch is that the water level stays the same for both glasses: they can only add to each other, not take away, and at the end of the day each glass still remains separate and distinct. Ideas left on their own are necessary and thrilling, and the individual spark of creation is something I’ll always cherish. But it takes courage to expose your idea, to allow it to take on a life of its own. Maybe I still have a (sort of) decent analogy left in me, after all: as with most aspects of life, you, as a thinker, have the choice between safety and growth. Do you refuse to expose your idea to strangers’ curious gazes, refuse to let it collect thumbprints, forbid it from eating dirt or taking public transportation, force it to wear a safety helmet at all times, and therefore wind up with a sense of safety but also with an idea that has a fragile immune system and cries at the sight of strangers? Or do you let your idea run wild, learning how to evaluate praise and rejection, learning how to stand up for itself and make itself known, how to be diplomatic, how to choose its battles, and as a result wind up independent, unexpected, and bold, influenced by the ideas of other minds?

Of course, I say this with the assumption that collaboration is only one part of a librarian’s job, not a full-on replacement for individual efforts. I think collaboration is a natural extension of our willingness to share ideas, our recognition that an idea without exposure to other minds is only an idea in the most technical and solitary sense. Libraries and social media have overlap in that they both encourage individual intellectual efforts and welcome the contributions of private endeavors, but also encourage the infinite combinations and alterations and new forms that can occur when ideas are merged together collectively.

Our daughters' daughters will adore us!

Triggered by one of the discussion questions in Libr559 (“is there a participatory ‘gender divide’?”), I recently set out to explore questions of gender in the use of social media (both quality and quantity). It surprises me that I never considered gender through this lens before, since I think about feminist issues 50% of the day and engage with social media the other 50%: surely there would have been a head-on collision at some point? I’ve used social media as a platform for gender debates (oh, countless times!) but I’ve ignored it as an explicit vehicle for gender issues, in and of itself. All that, though, is about to change, ladies and gents … !

I didn’t find as much material on this topic as I thought it would, which makes me suspect I’m not the only overlooking the gender side of this zeitgeist (perhaps a commentary in and of itself?).  There is this Bloomberg Businessweek article from 2008, which goes pretty in-depth prophesying that women will continue to use social media more avidly than men, which will result in social media platforms geared right towards the fairer sex, and so the snowball will keep growing. The arguments presented here may be based on statistics in some part, but also seem to draw on the same winky, essentialist bon-mots that your aunt loves forwarding to your inbox. I.e., young men don’t enjoy social media as much because they’re playing video games, while women enjoy nothing more than being friendly and decorating their profiles with adorbs photos of baby animals. Another hypothesis is that young men use social networking socially only when it involves sex, which means that they typically stop using social networking once they’re married (or at least you HOPE they do, amirite, ladies? … ugh).

The following block of text is particularly revealing:

‘… We expect men to keep gravitating to transactional sites, such as those that make gaining access to news, sports, and financial information easier.

Women’s behavior online, on the other hand, is less transactional and more relationship-driven. They spend more time on social networks building relationships, communicating with friends, and making new friends. … And because they use social networks to be social, a dollar spent marketing to acquire a female user goes a lot further than on a male user.’

I advise taking this article with a grain of salt. It has some compelling points, but even those are hindered by a lack of awareness. For instance, the article does point out, in wide-eyed earnestness, that there aren’t many female execs behind the social media world, disproportionate to the high numbers of female users. Ya think?! In my feminism & librarianship course this summer, we’ve discussed how Melvil Dewey initially established the field as a female-intensive one because of certain “feminine” traits: i.e., sociability, gentility, organization, helpfulness. And, just as much, their presumed willingness to work without much pay. To this day, librarianship is haunted by a potent mix of being cast as a “feminine” profession and that very femininity being seen as less worthwhile than other professions. Librarians tend to receive lower pay than other careers with similar education requirements, for example, and the refrain of “You had to go to school for that?!” is a scourge on librarians everywhere.

My fear is that a similar mindset will take place here. Already, we are assuming that women are more likely to use social media because of their “friendlier” natures: they want to build networks while men want to gain access and perform transactions.  If social media and librarianship are both undervalued by society, due to their “feminine” qualities, then maybe their partnership will suffer the same downfalls: not being taken seriously, not receiving the same amount of funding, or perhaps seen as superfluous or embarrassing by male patrons, creating an inequality in patron use. Since libraries are intended to be democratic and accessible, it would be a disadvantage for everyone if male patrons excluded themselves from a growing aspect of library services.

But the cloud has – wait for it! – a silver lining. Perhaps social media as used in libraries is, ideally, a blend of all these activities, the “masculine” and the “feminine” : access to knowledge, practical transactions, and also creating a strong sense of community and trust. Social media is a merger of technology and community, a blend of “masculine” and “feminine.” Hopefully, by using social media effectively, the gender boundaries will begin to blur, to show the value in “feminine” aspects of social media as well as encouraging male patrons to participate regardless of gender. One of the beautiful things about an online environment is its sense of a new frontier, of reassembling our identities, and whether or not we want to take old gender binaries into this new world is an important question. Social media in libraries can’t answer the question on its own, but it can provide a safe, useful, respectful, and pragmatic environment for these skills to unfold (as a supplement to the more informal spaces on the web).

I’ve loved Natalie Wood since I first watched Miracle on 34th Street, but I never before realized that her final film also happened to the be the seminal “virtual reality” movie. (“Virtual reality movie” meaning a movie ABOUT virtual reality, not utilizing it directly: come on, let’s be serious, this was in 1983). The ideas about virtual reality contained within Brainstorm now seem strangely earthy and quaint … the quaintness, at least, is unsurprising for a movie that’s twenty-seven years old. Still, I’m fascinated by the intimacy of the virtual reality in Brainstorm. Rather than a whole new immersive world (a world experienced in as many different ways by its users as the actual world), the virtual reality in Brainstorm functions by recording the experiences of one single individual and then allowing other people to experience this very specific mindset (via an elaborated helmet).

The virtual reality in this world is far more familiar and particular than the concept of virtual reality that I know in 2010. This is less a desire to “enter a whole new world” than to “become somebody else” … and not to become an improved version of yourself, or, alternatively, to become a whole new construct, but to experience the very exact mindset of a pre-existing human being. Psychologically, this idea is both embarrassing and thrilling at once. Compared to the sleek futuristic vistas of virtual worlds I’ve grown up imagining, taking on the mindset of a specific stranger feels rooted in something primal. If the majority of our art and entertainment has been geared towards allowing us inside the brain of another person (even if it’s a fictional person), then the world of Brainstorm is one of wish-fulfillment made miraculously, if a little awkwardly, possible.

In the real world,  even today, a virtual reality machine like Brainstorm‘s would be dizzying with its implications: voyeurism or empathy? The movie was created before the advent of widespread personal internet access … seen through the new lens of Web 2.0, a dizzying landscape of connectivity that the creators of Brainstorm couldn’t have anticipated, the narrative takes on an interesting new symbolism. Although virtual reality continues to develop, Brainstorm isn’t focused on the concepts we currently connect with virtual reality (i.e., avatars). Instead, I see it as sharing another characteristic of modern-day social media, which is our ability to access another person’s interiority. Social media has made accessing the minds, experiences, and opinions of a million strangers easier than ever before. Our appetite for seeing into each others’ minds has been whetted (and I’d argue that even the naysayers are so casually accustomed to our atmosphere of constant sharing that they might be startled if it ended). But it’s hard to ignore that social media is also performative, self-selective, and self-policed: despite the symbolic similarities, saying that reading a Twitter is like entering someone else’s mind is too huge a leap to have much impact.

What I wonder about is whether or not this current trend of social media will form the evolving landscape of technology in other ways. Even if we’ve developed to the point of virtual reality worlds, I’m curious to know if we’ll be content until we have a system like the one in Brainstorm, where we can perfectly record our experiences and transfer them, unfiltered and raw and objective, to a new person? It still sounds as far-fetched now as in 1983, but I’d argue it also sounds just as thrilling and possibly has even more relevance to our collective mindset. Many social media users casually and humorously use terms like “stalking” or “voyeurism” to describe their social media activities, but these terms still reveal the underlying theme of desiring  an easy access to each others’ minds and lives. The criticisms against such easy access are numerous and well-known — that we’ve lost true connection in favor of quick, impersonal updates into one another’s lives — and I imagine that Brainstorm‘s device would level even more complaints.  This entire post is fanciful and highly theoretical (in case you hadn’t noticed), but even beyond practical engagement with social media tools, I love to consider the psychological, societal, and, yes, pop-cultural implications of a world inundated with social media.

I was born in the year of the rat under the ruling planet Mercury in Little Rock, Arkansas; I graduated from UALR with a bachelor’s degree in English and a minor in Film, and then worked for about nine months in the Central Arkansas Library System. I was just a lowly page, but I loved the job; I knocked elbows with the Dewey Decimal System and learned how to maintain a poker-face when patrons asked to be directed to awkward areas of the bookshelves. While I was sorting non-fiction titles, I was also applying to MFA programs, and eventually wound up in St. Louis, Missouri. While I was a graduate student, I also taught fiction-writing courses to undergraduates, which is about as amazing or strange as it sounds, depending on your mindset. In January 2010, I bought a ticket to Canada, to attend UBC’s SLAIS program. My plan is to return to St. Louis in the winter of 2011, to complete my practicum and professional experience and finish my MLIS from a distance (since I plan on returning to my Yankee roots and settling in the States).

I’m pretty flexible in terms of what I want to do with my MLIS degree, once I, you know, actually earn it. I like the intersection of librarianship and an online environment: I’m particularly attracted to the digital humanities, since that area is pretty much a blend of my previous interests and my slightly newer interest in librarianship. At the same time, I’m one of those library students who was attracted to the profession because of my “love of books,” so working more directly with the public and being able to build a collection, create a reader’s advisory, or work on literacy programs seems amazing, too. I feel a vague need to pick a particular area of specialization, but since I’m still a student, I’m giving myself a limbo in which to be generally excited by nearly everything. Hopefully, this will all collide to result in a usable resume at some point in the future.