I have already admitted that I am a bad ‘digital native’ but that doesn’t mean I’m incapable of learning quickly. I have finally decided to listen to the multiple speakers that have spoken to our Social Media for Information Professionals course about the benefits of LinkedIn. I used to be under the impression that LinkedIn was redundant for employers, but I have switched gears into thinking that LinkedIn’s potential lies in its ability to cultivate a network for open communication.

I decided it was time to swallow my negative outlooks on LinkedIn and make an account. Many of you who know me will have noticed within seconds of me signing up. I even got a “welcome to the dark side” message within ten minutes, but for those of you who haven’t noticed because you don’t have LinkedIn, I have some explaining to do.

For one, the number of social networking sites (SNSs) is almost endless (Boyd, 2007). Hootsuite currently supports thirty-five social SNSs (Swanson, 2016) and brings potential to librarians. So which platform do we sign up for? I have noticed that from the readings and speakers for the course, four main platforms have been continually cited: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. As librarians we have an obligation to keep up and stay in tune with rapidly changing technology and SNSs. In Walt Crawford’s article Successful Social Networking in Public Libraries he states, “Libraries need to stay in touch with all aspects of their communities, be welcome to new users and new ideas, and serve the local needs of local users.” I agree that good libraries stay in touch with their communities and many of these communities are online. For this reason, I am signing up for the only SNS mentioned in class that I have yet to sign up for: LinkedIn.

If you are like me, and for some strange reason STILL haven’t jumped on the LinkedIn bandwagon, I have compiled some best practices for building a LinkedIn account to help you out.

One article was particularly helpful for the basics of signing up. Bernard Marr in How To Create A Killer LinkedIn Profile That Will Get You Noticed discusses ten practices to help individuals get started:

“Start with a professional photo

Make your headline stand out

Fill out the “summary” field with 5-6 of your biggest achievements

Add images or documents to your experience

Fill out as much of the profile as possible (I have yet to do this, but it’s important that I have gotten started)

Keep your work history relevant

Add links to relevant sites

Ask for recommendations

Use status updates to share industry-relevant content” (Marr, 2015).

Although some of these tips seem obvious, for those who have never used LinkedIn, it can be helpful in getting started and if you follow these basic steps, you can almost ensure that your profile will be viewed as competitive. Lists may vary depending on who is being targeted, but as an introduction to the LinkedIn world, these steps helped me get started.

Again, as librarians we have an obligation to our communities to stay relevant, and this means staying up-to-date with SNSs and other relevant library systems. As for me, I have to get beyond step two of Marr’s article if I will be able to able thrive on LinkedIn.

Resources

Boyd, Danah M., and Nicole B. Ellison. “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship.” Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication 13.1 (2007): 210-30. Web.

Swanson, Tori. “Intro to Social Media Strategy.” Social Media for Information Professionals. Vancouver. 8 Mar. 2016. Lecture.

Crawford, Walt, and Ebrary Academic Complete (Canada) Subscription Collection. Successful Social Networking in Public Libraries. Chicago: ALA Editions, an imprint of the American Library Association, 2014. Web.

Marr, Bernard. “How To Create A Killer LinkedIn Profile That Will Get You Noticed.” Pulse (2015) Accessed 20 March 2016. Blog. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-create-killer-linkedin-profile-get-you-noticed-bernard-marr.

“Would you consider yourself to be a digital native or a digital immigrant? Does your experience reflect the digital native/digital immigrant discourse?”

I recently read an article outlining the discourse on the validity of the digital native and digital immigrant divide. Published by Oxford University Press, Digital Natives: Fact or Fiction? asked its readers whether their experiences reflect the current narrative.

Prensky (2001) was the first to describe the ‘digital divide’ as a gap developing between “the young who have grown up with technology and older people who have become acquainted with technology later in life.” Later on, however, Prensky (2009) acknowledged, “Older people may be digital natives.” Despite these claims, Oxford University press is highlighting that the assumption that young people are good with technology is perpetuated (2001).

So, what if my experience doesn’t reflect the current discourse?

After listening to Tori Swanson, a Hootsuite Corporate Solutions Consultant, speak to my Social Media for Information Professionals course two weeks ago, I realized that I am not entirely on my social media game. During her presentation she mentioned four key social media platforms that—in her opinion—we (as future librarians) should utilize: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

As a “digital native,” I do not possess all the confidence it takes to operate at the highest level of a digital marketing or communications professional like Tori does. Many positions that I have interviewed for this semester, however, have assumed that I can operate on this plane, despite this information gap on my resume. My technological skills (or, rather, my lack thereof) are in fact barriers to me as a young person. Not only do I not possess many of these skills, but I don’t even have a LinkedIn account. It was this realization that prompted me to blog about my inexperiences of technology skills as a ‘digital native.’ Last week I was told by a young public librarian that most interviewers look at young librarians in training as a vault of technological skills and knowledge even when most of the time we are not. So, do my experiences reflect the digital native/digital immigrant discourse?—No.

It is just something we are going to have to deal with.

Anyone (including me) can learn to use technology, but as ‘digital natives’ we must learn it to survive amongst those who are good with technology. It may not be fair, but that is the reality that we (as future information professionals) are going to have to come to grips with. There is an assumption that we are proficient with tech, and we will be judged on these assumptions. I am a highly trainable individual and sharp when it comes to learning new things, however, to my surprise, it has been difficult to find these opportunities in a place that supports future information professionals. If I am being honest, my social media course has been my biggest connection to the tech world.

My first step is to follow Tori’s advice and to get a LinkedIn account. My future strategies include signing up for “Group Training Sessions for all things social media strategy, Instagram, and Mobile for iOS, from our expert Hootsuite Social Media Coaches” (Swanson, 2016). I also plan on asking one of the PhDs here at SLAIS to run an extra HTML training session for students who have classes during the current sessions. It’s true that the iSchool has in many ways let down its students on the tech front, but I have heard these comments echoed across different North American information institutions. For now, it seems like for many of us who have not found our technology grounding, we will have to search it out ourselves. As future librarians we must see the value in gaining the skills that we are assumed to have. The bottom line is that as young information professionals we are expected to have mastered technology, whatever that means.

I am a digital native and I suck with technology.

Resources

Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon, 9:1-6

Prensky, M. (2009). H. sapiens digital: from digital immigrants and digital natives to digital wisdom. Innovate Journal of Online Education, 5

Swanson, Tori. “Intro to Social Media Strategy.” Social Media for Information Professionals. Vancouver. 8 Mar. 2016. Lecture.

“Human brains are exquisitely evolved to adapt to the environment in which they’re placed. It follows that if the environment is changing in an unprecedented way, then the changes too will be unprecedented…So the fear I have is not with the technology per se, but the way it’s used by the native mind.”

–Susan Greenfield. In The New York Times (2012).

After watching Danah Boyd’s YouTube video, It’s Complicated, it became clear that her experience using the Internet was very transformative, and maybe this experience was just as transformative for young people. Her questions complement my last post and beg the question: How does technology change everyday life? Much of what Boyd discusses speaks to anxiety and concerns from parents and seeks to address individuals’ motivations for staying connected.

She raises a very important idea: “What young people are doing and what we blame young people for doing is not necessarily the best way to look at it and we need to actually look at our own practices.” She points out that we often blame young people for things that adults also do. Boyd recalls experiences watching parents staring at their phones through the entirety of their children’s sports games.

Even as a young adult I am told that I need to get off my phone and smell the roses. My offline self, however, always bleeds into my online self, and it can be hard to distinguish between the two. Obviously I know the difference of physically being on and offline, but lines get blurred when we talk about privacy, or the work place. E-mailing your boss on a Sunday night, for example, may be considered inappropriate. On the other hand, she may need specific information before Monday.

I am not addicted to my phone. Some of my motivations may be as simple as texting my mother to tell her that I love her.

There are various, non-life threatening reasons young people are motivated to stay online. Staying connected is simply one extra avenue through which we can, and should, stay connected to each other.

It is true that young people consume (and produce) an extraordinary amount of media. A study in 2010 from the Kaiser Foundation found that teens were spending seven hours and thirty-eight minutes on their devices every day. Although this sounds alarming, it is important to keep in mind that many young adults multitask and consume multiple media channels at once. This could include texting, watching a YouTube video, updating Facebook, and at the same time polishing off an essay. Connectivity can be achieved sporadically throughout the day—not just sitting in one place. Millennials have been brought up in a world of ubiquitous technology and should not be expected to avoid using it. Since there are such high concerns about young people being addicted to their technology, perhaps instead of telling Millennials to unplug, it might be more useful to come up with constructive ways to educate young people on the ways in which technology can be useful in the Information Age.

We don’t need strategies on how to break our addictions to our cellphones. We are simply adapting to the environment in which we have been placed, including using educational information technology to aid us. One place that we can begin to break down these barriers and talk about the benefits of technology is the library. Other spaces such as school and the home should also prioritize discussions on innovative, responsible, and safe technology use.

References

Boyd D. “It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens.” New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014.

Greenfild, Susan. Are we Becoming Cyborgs? The NewYork Times, 2012.

Kaiser, Henry J., Family Foundation. “Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-Olds.” 2010. Web.

Images

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10208113009965956&set=a.10203858053954715.1073741830.1321534174&type=3&theater

https://twitter.com/marawritesstuff/status/654445828925472768

As a grad student, I rarely have the opportunity to read for pleasure these days, but one week before classes started up again, I found a moment and went outside with just a book in hand. The book was Michael Harris’s The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection. It sparked in me a fair bit of reflection about the unintended consequences of living in a world that is constantly connected to the Internet. One of the main points in the book—that my generation represents the only one in history that will experience life both with and without the Internet—made me think of how I should consider the implications of our logged-on-lives. I wanted to take a minute to discuss my relationship with the Internet.

It is scary for me to think that when I have kids, the Internet will be something that is natural and therefore something of which they will be barely conscious. Consequently, I think this is a very precious moment for all of us to reflect on moments before and after the Internet began. I took away from my reading of Harris’s book two main points about my own connectivity.

The first is that many online ties are only reflections of my offline life. Harris says, “Arguably, the larger and more productive world that our technologies deliver is simultaneously an impoverished version of the older one—a version that rejects direct experience and therefore rejects an earlier conception of reality that had its own value. We see more, yet our vision is blurred; we feel more things, yet we are numbed.”

Although this comment seems to reject what the online world has to offer, these ideas are reflected in Boyd and Ellison’s work that discusses bridges between online and offline social networks. Boyd and Ellison (2007) have noted that “the available research suggests that most SNSs primarily support pre-existing social relations.” Furthermore, Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe (2007) have argued that Facebook users typically maintain their existing offline relationships or solidify offline connections, as opposed to meeting new people. “These relationships may be weak ties, but typically there is some common offline element among individuals who friend one another, such as a shared class at school” (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). Much of what these authors are saying reminds me of my mother telling me to get off the computer and go play outside. For me, however, it is important to stay as connected to my offline world as it is to be connected online. There are unique affordances that both worlds have to offer.

For instance, my family lives in Ottawa and rarely do I get to see them. This week I was able to Skype my niece on her birthday. Without Skype, Facebook, and many other social media platforms that the Internet provides, I would be unable to see them grow while I am here in Vancouver.

I think we need to be aware of our connectivity and strive for a balance between our online and offline presences. Obviously it is different for every individual, but reflecting on the ways we spend our time online can give us insights into how we spend our time offline.

Harris describes ‘absence’ as silence, wonder, and solitude, things he believes diminish when we are constantly connected. He wants us to remember what real absence is like and fears that we will all lack absence if we do not strike up a balance. He is neither for nor against connectivity, instead asserting that, like any other part of our lives, we have to check the balance. Once in a while, it is worth reconnecting with our offline selves.

Stop. Reflect. And stay connected.

References

Boyd, Danah M., and Nicole B. Ellison. “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship.” Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication 13.1 (2007): 210-30.

Nicole B. Ellison, Charles Steinfeld, and Cliff Lampe. “The Benefits of Facebook “Friends”: Exploring the Relationship between College Students’ Use of Online Social Networks and Social Capital.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12.3 (2007): 1143-68.

Harris, Michael. “The End of Absence: Reclaiming what we’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection.” New York: Current, 2014.

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