Before reading this post you should consider this video clip from a talk by Michael Wesch, one of my favourite anthropologists, which also happens to be one of my favourite YouTube videos on remix culture.

The first time I saw this video I was an undergraduate student finishing my minor in Anthropology with a Monday evening class on Visual Ethnography. I remember sitting in class and coming to the end of the video and thinking “Wow. I have never thought about social media and remix culture that way before.” Continue reading →

Much of the discussion around information organizations’ use of social media revolves around the time and challenges involved with managing social media. I know that I have talked about the importance of recognizing the need for adequate time and knowledge previously, but I also would like to discuss the great potential for libraries using social media in small ways. A case in point is the Powell River Public Library’s “Tiny Story Contest”, which I learned about through a presentation at BCLA 2015.

The “Tiny Story Contest” was originally inspired by a short story collection by Lou Beach called 420 Characters. (You can, and should, read all of his stories on his website.) These stories were all originally published by Beach on Facebook as status updates – hence the length of the stories, 420 characters, which was the original maximum for status updates on Facebook. A librarian at Powell River came across the collection, read it, and from this inspiration a story-writing contest was born. Continue reading →

I was recently involved in a reader’s advisory workshop in which discussion of popular genre fiction came up. Presenters offered synopses of different genres for participants who might not know a great deal about them, and as I listened to the descriptions I was struck again by something which has for a long time bothered me: the stigmas that surround certain types of genre fiction.

In both my undergraduate experience as a creative writing major, and my graduate experience as a librarian, I have become very aware of the way in which popular genre fiction, in particular romance fiction, and what might be termed “pulp” science fiction and fantasy, are regarded as being lesser genres, read only by individuals who are less educated and enlightened than those who read literary fiction and non-fiction. As both an individual and a librarian this frustrates me greatly, because it means that patrons end up feeling discouraged and judged when their reading interests are treated as lesser or as somehow being shameful. Continue reading →

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about identity and social media, and social media as a performance space, and performative identity theories.

In her 2009 article “All the World Wide Web’s a stage”, Erika Pearson discusses social networking sites in terms of performance spaces, which include actors, a perceived audience, a front-stage (in which public performances are expected to occur) and a back stage (in which performances or interactions are expected to be private). The barriers between these areas, Pearson argues, begin to collapse when we begin talking about social media spaces in which actors can be divorced from their identifiable identity, and audiences may be invisible or unperceived or inattentive (2009). This argument has strongly reminded me of one of my favourite discussions of performative identity, which appropriately enough occurs in the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard (1967). Continue reading →

I was personally a late adopter of social media. Although I used MSN messenger and email to correspond with my friends, it took them over a year of determined insistence before I yielded and let them set me up with a Facebook account, long after everyone else had already adopted it. I only joined Instagram and Pintrest within the last two years, and I still haven’t been won over to joining Snapchat. I’ve had a Twitter account for ages, but I only use it to lurk and keep up to date with the witty repartee of my favourite authors. The only form of social media I actively engaged with early on was blogging – on both WordPress and Blogger –  but even that was a transitory pastime, as I used my blog as a travel journal to keep friends and family members updated while I was on exchange – and promptly stopped updating as soon as I returned home.

Currently, Facebook is the social media platform I use most actively, and there I am a fairly cautious user, only adding people I know and genuinely want to interact with as friends, having layers of filtering so that only the people I want to share information with receive that information, and most of the time setting up my account so that it is invisible to searches.  Having become even more aware about some of the privacy and copyrights issues surrounding information shared on Facebook and Instagram in particular through my classes at SLAIS I have become even more cautious a user of late. Continue reading →