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. This is very much a reflection of my own personality though, as I am an outwardly friendly but fairly shy person, who is slow to trust and even slower to share information. What I like best about Facebook is the ability it affords me to keep in touch with my friends who are now scattered across the globe and for the ease it affords in planning group events. Even in keeping in touch with many of those far-flung friends though I still tend not to turn first to social media, but rather to my favourite form of keeping in touch – writing letters.

Although I am not an avid user of social media I am fascinated by it, and by the way in which people use it to interact, express their identities, and exchange information. It has become a remarkably powerful tool in our world. I remember being an undergraduate student in the UK and watching as the Kony 2012 wave swept across the social media world, and marveling at how quickly information, even misinformation can spread. I also remember recently sitting tensely with a friend during the attacks on Paris, glued to our phones and watching as one by one her friends in France marked themselves as being safe and out of danger on Facebook. It struck me at the time how normal it seemed to turn to Facebook in the event of a crisis to make contact with people in different countries. I also am excited by the potential social media affords for new methods of creative production. One of my favourite uses of social media to date was the Lizzie Bennett Diaries which, to those of you unfamiliar with the show (I hesitate to call it a show but I’m unsure of a better term to define it), was a modern retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in vlog format beginning in April 2012 and running until March 2013, which not only told the story through 100 episodes posted to YouTube, but also posted additional episodes from other character’s perspectives simultaneously on two other YouTube channels, and maintained Twitter and Tumblr accounts for all the main characters of the show, which updated in real time with the timeline of the show to keep up with events. It was a remarkable piece of immersive storytelling told over multiple social media platforms, and I have yet to see anything else that can quite compare to it.

I have twice used social media in a professional capacity. During my tenure as the Aquatic Coordinator of the public pool I worked at I created and maintained our Facebook page and Twitter account for two years, using Hootsuite to do so. Similarly, I took over maintenance of the Facebook page of the library I worked at during my co-op and revitalized it to be a tool the library could use to raise patron interest and awareness about library events and the collection. One of the most important things I learned during my time curating these two pages was that while statistics are wonderful, you can’t judge the impact of your posts based on the number of users who see them. An illustration of this is the fact that several of the followers of our pool page were roommates of one of our guards from the UK, and the fact that one of our followers of the library page was a library in Spain. Having been through these two experiences, I am really looking forward to learning more about how other libraries are using social media and ideas on ways to best utilize and identify which types of social media will serve your patron population.