my artifacts from libr559m

August 19th, 2011 • 1 comment library, tech
Tags: courses, dean giustini, hashtags, libr559m, libresistance, mashup, social media, storify, wiki

I made stuff in my social media course with Dean Giustini these past six weeks. If I actually tallied up the word count I bet it would be more than I’ve written for school than I’ve done for a long time.

Here are those words:

• A definition of hashtags (with @abedejesus)
• Making a Mashup Friendly Library (with @abedejesus @fongolia @jenn_pappas & @ktubc)
• The Library Resistance, a library advocacy aggregation portal (with @abedejesus @fongolia @jenn_pappas & @ktubc)
• A pile of blog posts

I suppose I posted in the private discussion forums for the class a bit too. And my Storify account has a bunch of archived Twitterstreams and blogposts from my classmates which I collected.

Yeah. That was kind of a busy six weeks. I’m pretty much done now though. I’ll add the rest of the blog posts to the appropriate Storify pages as they get published and that’ll be that.

what i learned on my summer non-vacation

August 19th, 2011 • 5 comments library, tech
Tags: boingboing, dean giustini, drupal, evangelist, glogging, google reader, klout, libr559m, libresistance, lurker, participation, producer, self-reflection, social media, storify, twitter

In our presentation for libr559m, which our group did on (my) Thursday, Dean asked us what we’d learned that we hadn’t known before in creating our project. At the time I mentioned the technical stuff about working with Drupal. Afterwards I was asking myself how much of this course was just me performing. I mean, I grew familiar with a bunch of tools over the course of the past 6 weeks, but I had some pretty firm social media habits coming into the course, so it’s not like I’ve now discovered Google Reader and nothing will be the same again. (Glogging isn’t really for me.)

I think the biggest thing I learned (apart from generally being impressed by my study buddy’s insight and principles, but that’s not really the domain of the class) was how relatively painless it can be to work with people across so many timezones. I didn’t feel disconnected from the class even though we didn’t share a hemisphere. That in itself is an experience that’s useful.

Another question Dean asked at the end of our presentation was whether I ever feel information overload. I assume this is because I’ve been pretty visible in my quasi-prolific use of these tools (though if you check the Storified summations of the class you’ll see a lot of other people posting more than me on Twitter). I think that’s where my performing this class kind of comes in. Normally I’m more of a lurker. I use these tools but for my own benefit, to suck things into my own head. I was trying to take the opportunity of doing a class in social media to work on being a more active producer in this sphere. If you take your classes as a means of developing yourself professionally, well, if I’m going to be paid to be on Twitter someday my employers would want to see some results, not just that I’m full of neat tales from BoingBoing. I think I’ve got a better handle on being a visible social media producer now. For what it’s worth, my Klout score jumped quite a bit since the course began.

I think I’m negotiating a good balance between being a social media user (which I was) and an evangelist (which I won’t ever be). Finding some middle space there seems like a good result, and a good use of three of my precious credit hours for the degree.

immersed in abstraction

August 19th, 2011 • 5 comments books, library, tech
Tags: abstract, baseball, big ideas, comics, grand theft auto, immersion, language, libr559m, library, neal stephenson, robert jordan, scott mccloud, second life, sf, snow crash, social media, story, text, twitter, videogames, wheel of time

I’ve tried before and I’ll probably try again, but I can’t get immersed in Second Life. It’s the lack of story there. You make yourself look how you want (or find you’re unable to) and then you stand around listening to music or whatever. A few years ago on my second attempt to get into it I signed up to go to a reading of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Snow Crash is a novel about the kind of immersive second world SL is trying to be, but it all feels so clunky, so much more about just being in SL than about what’s going on.

I guess it comes down to my gripes about content in the social mediasphere. I find myself agreeing with the lack of Big Ideas in social media (though one of my classmates noted that some of the thinkers quoted in that article are also on Twitter).

Scott McCloud in his talking about comics has a bit about how characters are drawn and how that affects us as readers. A very detailed drawing gives us information about that specific person, whereas a more abstract drawing lets the reader put more of herself into it, to fill in more of the gaps. Immersive environments like Second Life are mixing those up. The more detailed your avatar can be the more the gaps between what’s happening to it and to you become visible.

I remember back in the ’90s my first time playing a MUSH. It was based on Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time. I went in expecting to have slots to fill in and skills to work on so I could become whatever kind of character it was possible for me to be in that world. The fact that I could be a Thief-Taker, just by saying I was and acting like I was, was so astounding to me I was immediately intimidated by the freedom. I still feel that way now when I’m staring at a blank page to fill with text. Anything at all can go there. You don’t have to fit into CPU cycles when you’re dealing with text. Your immersion is based on skills with language that humans have been working on for thousands of years.

That’s why I can get immersed in the flow of information on Twitter. It’s text. I’m a text person. Doing photos and screencasts using avatars and all of that doesn’t excite me. I don’t feel I’m part of a world I’m not helping to create in my mind. I love the old text-based computer games, even though the limits were very apparent. You had to learn the rules so you knew that “Take Boat” wasn’t the kind of language it wanted. Working within limitations becomes immersive once you’ve really taken it up.

Now this isn’t to say I don’t get immersed in videogames. Once it gets out of the way and I’m taking part in telling a story, I’m there. I played Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas not for the random gratuitous violence (yes, you’d go off on a five-star wanted rampage every once in a while but that wasn’t the point), but because it was a classic gangster story. That’s what I want out of any environment, really. Hell, I love the stories embedded in the numbers in baseball boxscores. That’s what I need for immersion, characters instead of customizable avatars.

This is, of course, good to know. Because if I’m like me, there might be more. And that’s why if I’m bringing a library into a space it’s to tell a story, and to help our users tell a story and imagine one. Not just about the library but about the community it’s a part of (be that physical or digital).

filled with flots and jets i am today

August 9th, 2011 • 3 comments library, tech
Tags: acarvin, aggregation, bumblebee, commencement speech, cross-pollination, curator, dorothy day, efficiency, flickr, flow, information, jessamyn west, journalism, kazuo ishiguro, libr559m, long loneliness, michael wesch, module 5, news, npr, personal, rss, social media, storify, tagging, twitter, video, writing

One of the things I love about an aggregated informational world is the idea that if you’ve got enough information flowing past you things will wash up on shore. In the Wesch video there’s a bit about how a person finds significance based on our relationships/contrast with other people. That flow of what you and other people care about is important for significance I guess. You see how people who make stuff you care about care about certain things and you learn what you feel about things.

Journalism is about working yourself up into a lather over something you previously felt nothing about. It is diametrically opposed to what you do as a novelist, which is to very slowly discover what you feel about things. – Kazuo Ishiguro

I feel like aggregating information aids in both of these acts. You need that flow to see what other people are getting into a lather about and sometimes you can get into that lather too. There’s something to be said for having a pile of information you’re barely reading until you see people talking about the same thing so many times and it just bubbles up seemingly everywhere. I love that, especially when news is breaking.

And then there are the people who do the librarian/journalist type aggregation themsleves like @acarvin the NPR journalist who’s become the go to retweeter for the revolutions in the Middle East. He’s being the human in the middle putting an eye on things (and sometimes he, like others, gets fooled).

I can see how these software bits and the fancy learning environments are good for bringing information together but man oh man do I ever like the idea of the infopro (ie the person not the tool) as aggregator supreme. In a much more modest way I’ve been trying to play that kind of role in this class, going through the twitterstream and putting the conversations into a more followable format on Storify. This is not the most efficient means of aggregation, I realize. That Wesch video is talking about automatically pulling in everything tagged anthropology on Flickr, but I’m sure a lot of those pictures are absolute shit. If we’re filters we’re filters sifting for treasure. And it’s not easy.

The other day Jessamyn West posted a commencement address I really enjoyed, which included this:

Some of what I do is go places that “my people” don’t go to, represent us, and then come back and tell my folks what I found there, whether it’s being a techie at a librarian conference, a librarian at the tech conference or a rural librarian at the big city meeting. The world needs people who stay and people who roam, cross-pollinate, bumblebee style.

Sometimes I was surprised that I’d be one of very few people in my communities speaking out cogently and clearly for my ideas, against filtering, against digital rights management, for copyright reform and open access, that sort of thing.

Dorothy Day who founded the Catholic Worker movement sometimes called this isolation of idealism the “long loneliness” and said it could only be solved by the love that comes with community. I feel that by sharing your ideas and ideals with others, you’re not as lonely.

I don’t know, this idea of streams of information merging with each other and being separated out is important and kind of beautiful. I don’t know about the wisdom of crowds but I do love cross-pollination and that’s something that works if you’re aggregating across different ideas.

creating flickering shadows in a cave

August 5th, 2011 • 2 comments tech
Tags: a moveable feast, art, blather, camtasia, creation, creativity, hemingway, jing, koha, libr559m, module 4, opac, prosentient, quantity, screencast, self-reflection, social media, tags, youtube

I find I have a block when it comes to thinking about the social-ness of creativity. I tend way more towards the “huddle in the dark and make things up and don’t show anyone until it’s ready” model of art making. Blogging and tweeting and the like doesn’t feel like it’s creation at all: it’s all just blather you do to keep from really working. (I blame reading Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast at a formative age.)

I realize I’m using terms like art to talk about 90-second library videos here, and that that’s kind of weird. I’m not going to apologize for it though.

So creating something like this little screencast about tagging in Koha using Jing feels more like my idea of creativity. I sat here on my bed in my room, downloaded the software, wrote a short script, pressed record and then uploaded it to the site. It felt like no one was involved and it was easy to pop up onto the web. It’s not encouraging you to tweet about it while you’re doing it, just the finished product. I like how it creates an unintelligible but relatively short URL to promote Tweeting and the like, but that’s as social as this process got.

Part of that is because Jing wants you to Go Pro so you can create mp4 files and presumably then you’d be able to upload your video to YouTube or something where people actually are, watching video. And it wasn’t the pure solitary artist experience either. For that I’d need the ability to actually edit the video, to sit here laboriously sweating over each frame (which I’ve used Camtasia for in the past and it lends itself well to that, but I wanted to try something new and simple for this little activity). This is social because it’s not prompting a lot of agonized self-reflection, just the “do something and get it out there” mentality.

I’m not sure that creates greatness but quantity has its own quality, I suppose.

social media is only a means of supporting creativity

August 1st, 2011 • 7 comments library, tech
Tags: arts council, clay shirky, connection, creation, funding, gilligan's island, kickstarter, libr559m, lolcats, module 4, molly crabapple, neil gaiman, network, school, social media, support, talent, tv, twitter

Following up on my last post, I’m not so sure that “web 2.0 itself implies creativity.” I mean, I get the Clay Shirky idea that making something is better than watching Gilligan’s island so making LOLcats is fine, but I think remix culture allows for a lot of laziness.

Some of the most interesting Web 2.0 projects I’ve seen are about rewarding creators who can work outside the traditional model. Molly Crabapple’s Week in Hell (she’s locking herself in a room to create for a week) raised thousands of dollars on Kickstarter (over five times her original goal so now they’re going to make more stuff with the extra money). She’s helped raise the question of whether Kickstarter is more important/useful than Arts Council grants for artists.

So yes, social media is helping fuel that kind of creativity, but it’s important to note that people are giving her this money because of her talent. The connections are about funding and supporting creativity, not inspiring it.

I love Neil Gaiman as much as the next person, and his presence on Twitter is huge. But, I don’t love him because of that social media scene. I love the work he does. Making meaning from the banal is a nice idea about social media’s relationship to creativity, but the fact is that most of the banal is still pretty banal, even when it’s aggregated.

I guess I’m saying that “fostering connections, building networks, creating new knowledge” isn’t creative in and of itself. It has to be supportive of some actual talent.

librarian != marketer

July 27th, 2011 • 3 comments library
Tags: christopher rollyson, collaboration, content, conversation, empty, libr559m, marketing, marshall mcluhan, module 3, retweets, school, social media, substance, twitter, vapid, wikipedia

There’s an idea in the social media-verse that “conversation is the content.” That kind of quote makes me angry. In the article linked to (which isn’t specifically about libraries but for other businesses engaging in social media) Christopher Rollyson is talking about marketing and how content doesn’t mean anything when you’re talking about marketing. For him, social media being social is about not outsourcing your social media to marketers because “people can smell manufactured content a mile away,” which is a different thing. I think too many people involved specifically with Social Media! ignore the idea that collaboration about nothing is empty, and having good content is bedrock essential.

Now, Rollyson has a good point, clouded by a stupid italicized quote, especially in the library world. Manufactured content is dumb and nobody wants to waste their time with it. But equally bad is the idea that a library can just be there being social with nothing to talk about. Chatting about nothing, trading jokes like a real person does on Twitter might be engaging but isn’t useful for a library or organization.

I think you’ve got to have cool stuff to talk about before you start a conversation. That’s how you get Rollyson’s “human spark of knowledge and caring.” Maybe that’s just my aversion to small-talk, but if you want someone engaging in conversation on behalf of your institution that person needs something to talk about. Just talking doesn’t mean shit. If you want an audience to return you’ve got to be doing good work (or at the very least spotting good work others are doing and pointing it out) to be talking about.

We’ll be getting into this more in our course when we’re talking about Creation, I’m sure, but the Rollyson article ticks me off because the blueprint for success in social media needs Vision, Strategy, Test and Services (though the services bullet point is so filled with marketing buzzwords I can’t even read it). Nowhere there does he talk about making something worthwhile to be talking about.

That is my biggest problem with social media. Just because “the medium is the message” doesn’t mean that’s a laudable state or that you can ignore your content. It seems that people get so starry-eyed about it they forget that there needs to be good work going on to be promoting.

Chatting and collaborating just to garner retweets, favourites +1s, or buzz in whatever new digital form is empty bullshit that I for one don’t want to be participating in. I’m in a substance business, not advertising, and though we can use social media to promote our items of substance the medium can’t be our goal.

quashing participation

July 21st, 2011 • 6 comments library
Tags: administration, angry, annette de faveri, australia, beth davies, blog, bureaucracy, communications, community, community-led libraries, courses, danah boyd, disciplinary hearing, i got in trouble because of my blog, koha, libr559m, libr579b, module 2, offline, online, opac, participation, school, social media, twitter

Information professionals should be using social media if they care about the rest of the world. I mean, I’m a fan of cataloguing in a cave, but engaging with your community is important. Even if you’re the most locally focused librarian ever in a community where none of your users give a shit about Twitter it’s important to be using it to pull in information and to show off the knowledge being created in your community.

One thing we learned in our Community-Led libraries course with Beth Davies and Annette de Faveri was the importance of not coming into a space with an agenda. Not showing up and saying “Here are some awesome things the library can do for you!” but hanging out and asking what is happening with them, letting the community lead the library. That takes a long time. I think participating online requires a bit more push than that, because if you’re just hanging out as a library, not talking on Twitter, you’re invisible (in a way you aren’t when you’re sitting in a halfway house with a box of donuts).

I also think the idea of a limit to our participation in social media is stupid. I mean, sure, posting pictures of patrons on Facebook without their permission is a bit sketchy. But stopping information professionals from being part of the world just because of who their employers are is bullshit.

A story from work: A library in Northern Australia was making use of some of Koha’s features to integrate a blog onto the front page of the OPAC. The library staff were creating this information to participate in the wider world and were really proud of it. And then their Communications Department found out and shut it down. Not because of something bad that happened but because of stupid bureaucratic power disputes that said librarians aren’t authorized to create publications. That story makes me incredibly angry. To have participation curtailed by the communications department who wanted more control over messaging is kind of terrible.

Part of my visceral reaction to that story has to do with my personal history working at a public library that had a regressive attitude towards people talking about things online. I was disciplined for blogging about work on my personal time. The disciplinary hearing involved the director of our library telling me I was not fit to be a librarian and shouldn’t go to library school because of my disrespectful attitude. This experience led to my disclaimer/explanation page you can see linked to on my library blog’s of Opinions & Assholes page, and you can read some of my other ruminations about privacy and the like when that former library actually created a social media policy because of me. That link includes a response to a danah boyd article.

scavenger hunt for inforg 2.0 terms

July 17th, 2011 • library, tech
Tags: 2.0, art, cliche, comics, computers, education, incrementation, libr559m, module 2, neurologist, ning, nsw, puns, scavenger hunt, social media, state library, version numbers, webcomics, wired

When I looked up Education 2.0 the bookmarkable stuff I found was a defunct Ning site (and an active one for Art Education) references to the Khan Academy and some interesting articles from Wired in 2007 when they were doing an Education 2.0 spotlight, plus a Neurologist talking about an Education 2.0 that hasn’t been achieved because computers are still an afterthought. They all had to do with interaction and participation through digital media, so that’s good and consistent, I guess. I liked the fact that two Ning groups were noticeable since I think of them as one of the interesting upstart social media companies that seems to have melted away into corporate blandness. (I may be completely misreading the current state of Ning. If so, and you care, I’m sorry.)

Another use of 2.0 I looked briefly at was a subject dear to my heart, comics. Specifically webcomics. There was a book in 2008 called Webcomics 2.0 and reviews even then mentioned the confusing nature of the title, since the book might be seen as a sequel. I thought that was kind of interesting since this was a book made about internet people and you’d think the audience would be up on the buzzwords.

As far as libraries go, I found an interesting non-bloggish blogspot site from 2008 run on by the State Library of NSW, billed as a Learning 2.0 course. While they use the 2.0 thing consistently with the rest of the webiverse there (though Australians I’ve met tend to say “web two” instead of “web two point oh” which still weirds me out), what I really liked is how they called their 2010 sequel course New South Wales public library learning 2.1. The idea that you don’t jump straight from 2.0 to 3.0 and that bit of consistency with how computer people do version numbers, which is where we got the whole 2.0 thing from anyway, made me very happy.

I feel like libraries and other information organizations just use the 2.0 because they like to keep up with trends from five years before. Individuals within organizations might be pushing for things earlier, but by the time stuff gets approved it’s become cliché. I guess the good thing about only using the terms once they’re cliché is that “everyone knows” by now that people saying 2.0 mean something to do with computers. It doesn’t mean much but it’s something to start with, I guess. (And if people don’t try to make godawful puns with it.)

creating stakes to fight apathy

July 17th, 2011 • 2 comments library, tech
Tags: activism, apathy, culture, internet, libr559m, magpie librarian, mission, module 2, new york, participation, paul ford, politics, r david lankes, reading, revolution, school, social media, the atlas of new librarianship

Using social media as a way of creating a space for people to have a stake in their culture is hugely important. That’s how you fight apathy and how you a human is alive. The notion of people asking Why Wasn’t I Consulted? more in the internet age compared to the TV age is huge.

From Confronting the Challenges of Partcipatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (PDF link):

“Politics, as constructed by the news, becomes a spectator sport, something we watch but do not do” (Jenkins 2008: 10).

That is a terrible thing. If there’s going to be a revolution it can’t be televised because everyone needs to participate in it.

This is an issue that affects librarians even beyond the actual serving of our patrons, but in keeping our jobs. A bit on library student apathy from Magpie Librarian:

We’ve been thinking of who our next advocates might be. I thought I was pretty damn brilliant to think of trying to tap into the MLS student population. I figured that a) they’re already passionate about libraries and b) they have a vested interested in wanting library jobs to open up. I went to speak at a NY library school that I will leave unnamed. They well-publicized my event during curriculum space (a time when there would be no classes). I spoke in the student lounge to a group of students glued to their textbooks. I talked about library closures, layoffs, the future of libraries. I didn’t get much of a response, other than an uncomfortable wall of silence. One of my fellow Urban Librarianites called out, “Do any of you care about advocacy? You know, the apathy is what’s going to kill us.” A girl looks up from her textbook, “I have a lot of reading to do.” I silently handed out some advocacy tips and got the hell out of dodge.

R. David Lankes’ states in his Atlas of New Librarianship:

The MISSION of LIBRARIANS is to IMPROVE SOCIETY through FACILITATING KNOWLEDGE CREATION in their COMMUNITIES.

I love the concept of librarians being agents of change, and how it requires more than simply lurking. There has to be creation going on, not just talking, but creating a space for people to participate in creation is one of the most important things a library can do.