Thoughts on Social Media

I know I owe some posts about learning the things a new librarian learns. I do. It turns out, being a new librarian takes up enough time that blogging about it seems excessive. (Go figure.) That said, I did find the time to write an article for NMRT Footnotes about settling in in a new place—I stand by my suggestions, though, if I’d written it a few weeks later I might have done a better job of acknowledging how tough it can be. It’s weird to be in a place—and now I mean “place” metaphorically—where you have some new friends you like a lot and are pretty certain you can rely on, but you still feel kind of like you shouldn’t, because you’re just not sure you’ve earned the social capital. And you miss your old friends but feel like it’s a slight on your new friends to admit it, while talking about how much you like your new friends also feels like a slight on the old ones … I’m moving way out of librarianship, here, but I imagine any readers who have moved long distances probably have a sense of what I’m getting at. (And any friends no doubt think I’m being silly. I don’t think any one of them, new or old, doubts the high regard in which I hold them.) I addressed how to meet those friends, in the article, but not how to really end up integrated, completely, into your new home and social groups. It wouldn’t have been that interesting—I’m pretty certain the only thing for it is time.

Which continues to pass. (“Time is marching on, and time is still marching on. You’re older than you’ve ever been, and now you’re even older….”)

It doesn’t help that I have two other blogs. The former is the Moving to Alaska blog, which I nominally share with Dale (he posted once), all about the trip up here and, well, all that stuff I was talking about in the first paragraph—becoming Alaskan, I guess. The second is very my-library-centric. I write it mostly for my coworkers. But if you were really interested in seeing what I’m up to, you’d be welcome to check those out. :D

Excuses aside, I have been thinking. I’ve composed a couple of blog posts in my head, some of them even about librarianship, but not followed through. I still owe a post about how I think scholarly communication will evolve—at least in the STEM fields—but I’m still rolling that one around.

The thing that brought me to the blog window today, though, was social media. A number of my coworkers seem interested in “this Web 2.0 thing,” and I feel like most of them probably participate in some way or other. Some are on Facebook, a few have tried Twitter, nearly all of them read or write blogs… But the thing they lack—and the thing I keep trying to manage for myself—is a method for participating in multiple, but not all, of them sensibly, with as little repeat information as possible. For instance, if all of someone’s tweets go to Facebook, why would I be their friend in both places? (Increasingly, the answer is, “I won’t.”) I continue to passionately hate the posting of piles of Twitter updates to a blog—it’s not obviously inappropriate, I suppose, or nobody would do it, but I think it conflates the intended usage of each medium. Either I want to see what you’re thinking as you think it—in which case, I will follow your tweets—or I want to see some [more or less] well thought out prose—in which case, I will follow your blog. If you do both well, I’ll follow both. But it bugs me to see a bunch of outdated (by the time the harvester puts them on your blog) one- or two-sentence statements where I expect full paragraphs. Maybe I’m getting grumpy in my … uh, not that old of age, actually. Either way, it’s enough to make me unfollow your blog, if you are not in all other ways stunning. The same goes for those awful “feeds”—they may be useful in real time, though I personally just don’t care that much about what any one person is doing online—but they are 100% pointless in a blog. If you want to archive that junk, open a blog just for it; don’t torture your readers with that inanity, or you’ll lose readers.

Wow, feeling a little ranty. Sorry.

I can’t control what others do online, but I do have a measure of control of how I interact with it. If a blog becomes a Twitter/stream archive, or if its author is wrong all the time, I unfollow it. If a Twitter account doesn’t have enough information or entertainment value, I eventually unfollow it. (I break this rule for friends. I have a couple of friends who post “I ate a sandwich” kinds of things, but I continue to follow them because I like them enough to overlook that.) Similarly, turnabout is fair play: unless you’re awesome enough to be worth following with no reciprocation (I’m looking at you, Stephen Colbert), not following me back means, eventually, I’ll stop following you.

I’ve taken to making groups in my Twitter readers, for keeping up with the people whose every tweet I feel like I should read, and I let the rest of it wash by, checking when I have time. I miss a lot—in all honesty, I feel like I’m kind of losing my grip on Twitter, not interacting with more than 10% or so of the people I follow—but I also still gain a fair bit of information, using it that way.

Facebook, I mostly catch up on 2-3 times a day. I try really hard not to send more than 2-3 Facebook updates a day, as well, because I don’t want to be annoyingly “noisy” there, in the same way I might on Twitter. It’s almost a Twitter “best of,” for me.

Meanwhile, my Google Reader is assiduously sorted (though Future Feminist Librarian-Activist should go in “Libraries” half the time and “Social Issues” half the time—and would, if Reader had that kind of granularity in filtering); that is arguably where I’m the most heartless in unfollowing (blogs), because it’s impossible to tell who is and is not following your blog; therefore, no hurt feelings. I’m only semi-heartless in unfollowing people who share with me—you have to post a whole lot of irrelevant stuff for me to unfollow you, there, given the ease of scrolling past boring stuff [and my uncertainty in telling whether it’s possible to know who is following what you share]—but I’ll do it, at need. (Given the number of lolcats I share, I don’t feel like I’m justified in being overly judgmental about what others are sharing. ;))

But I’m not sure whether I have an overall “policy” about all of it. Or whether I need one, beyond wanting to be able to explain it, quickly and usefully, to others who want to manage their own social media floods. Frankly, I’m sure I’m not doing it as well as I could be, so I wonder if others have their own policies about all of it, or if everyone flies by the seats of their pants, the way I do. (My social media policy is as disjointed as this post, you could say…)

I’d love to compare notes on all of this, anyway. What do you folks do?