Category: Random Thoughts

I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes people tick. Sometimes it’s so that I understand my friends better. Sometimes it’s so that I understand myself better. Sometimes it’s so that I can teach better. Sometimes it functions for all three purposes simultaneously.

Like, lately I’ve been thinking about how human interaction works online and off, and particularly what kinds of information people need about each other in order to interact easily together.

At the conference I went to last week we heard about an assignment that failed and talked a lot about why that might be. The assignment was for Russian language students to participate in a Russian language forum on a fan site for a Russian pop star. For those of us who spend a lot of time online, it was kind of unsurprising to hear that the students didn’t get much in the way of participation from the forum denizens (and that the teacher had to reassure the forum owner that they weren’t some sort of spam bot). If 15-30 students suddenly showed up in my online space asking seemingly random questions, I’d be taken aback, too. So that’s one piece of the still-disconnected thread in my head. It takes time and participation (in a genuine way) before people in a forum will interact with you. First you have to interact with them and give them enough of your personality that they remember you.

Speaking of which, remembering each other is kind of complicated. There are no faces to remember, or clothing styles. Avatars, sometimes, but it seems like the people I remember best online have some kind of hook. My friend Jason is the Zotero guy. He’s more than that, obviously, but that’s his hook, particularly for people who don’t know him as well. My other friend Jason is the Apple/tech-predictions guy. Again, he’s way more than that, but that’s his hook. These hooks are kind of like stand-ins for faces — not complete representations of the person, but something to recognize from across the room.

I also got to hang out in person with a friend I normally can only hang out with via IM, and we realized how much online conversation narrates what we’re doing in real life, and how little that’s necessary when we can actually see the other person. I didn’t have to say I was cooking dinner. The cooking of dinner was pretty obvious. Online, though, these mundane things provide valuable context for what we might be thinking or how interrupted a conversation is likely to be. And more than that, they help me know how my friends are doing and help me read between the lines a little, more like with face-to-face friends.

And then there’s a habit a few non-local friends and I have of starting off a “conversation” simply with the name of the day and a semicolon. “Sunday:” (After all, coming up with a subject line is the worst part of subjectless online communication, so a day of the week works just fine. I wish email didn’t scream at me for skipping the subject line.) I rather love this habit we’ve formed even though there’s almost never anything earth shattering in the follow-up pieces to those conversations. For example, today I wrote, “Furnace guy, resting, now getting ready to spend the rest of the day on the reference desk, with a break for dinner at a friend’s house.” That’s barely even interesting if you’re my mother. But these conversations keep me feeling connected to these friends and help me to predict the kinds of interactions we’re likely to have, and when, and about what. They also give us things to talk about when “furnace guy” has come and gone. (In related news, my house will no longer be in danger of blowing up when the furnace kicks in.)

It’s about the little stuff, for me. If I have to wait for big stuff I’ll usually have nothing to say. And if you wait until you’ve got big stuff to tell me, I no longer know how to read between the lines. There’s just so much to compensate for when you can’t actually see the person you’re talking to.

And now I should get back to prepping for these classes I have coming up this week. *sigh*

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There’s a rather fascinating discussion happening these days around licensed content. I mean, it’s technically about using Netflix to extend the library’s collection, but it’s actually about licensing and terms of service and to what extent it’s our professional duty to enforce the letter of the law or, on the flip side, push at the boundaries a little in hopes of effecting change.

I wonder if the conversation would be different if we were talking about some other kind of Terms of Service. It strikes me that we see easy analogies between streaming video and the kinds of content we’ve shepherded since forever even though streaming video is really quite new, and so professional debates that we’ve had about everything from closed stacks to copyright to food in the library all rally around to reinforce the Respect The Content side of the debate, the side that is really quite uncomfortable with the idea of lending these DVDs without explicit permission in the form of a license.

Then there are the Terms of Service that come with tools or platforms rather than content. When those are wacky (or if we read them at all) it seems far more likely that we’ll cry foul and raise our pitchforks at the vendor who created such inhumane and restrictive licenses. Is this because there isn’t an easy analogy with our traditional responsibilities since the days of clay tablets? Or is it because using tools and platforms seems like an easier analogy to the other major piece of our work: the piece that protects our patrons right to do their own thing with whatever content we can (legally) provide? Or is it because it’s easier to tell people they can’t do something than it is to be told we can’t do something?

I think the Netflix thing will work itself out one way or the other pretty soon (probably when Netflix creates a new license). I don’t think the problem of navigating licenses is going away in the foreseeable future.

P.S. The backstory

• Tame The Web (Where it all started)
• Information Wants To Be Free
• Library Law Blog
• FriendFeed Discussion

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I don’t know if this is “just one of those things” or if it’s something that needs changing, and yet I find myself thinking about it a lot ever since Bethany Nowviskie wrote her Fight Club Soap blog post about the Nature/UC feud.

Most things on an academic campus are set up to get out of the way of scholarship — to make scholarship absolutely as easy and pain free a process as possible. After all, scholarship is the raison d’être of the institution, and scholarship is angst-ridden enough just on its own. It functions best when its practitioners are constantly right up against their limits, right where they’re most vulnerable and facing insidious insecurities. So it makes a whole lot of sense to make as much as possible get out of the way of these endeavors. But there is a cost.

Nowviski pointed out the cost from a licensing and collection development standpoint, but I’m sure that’s only the beginning. For example, newer faculty here often point out that our institution is in much better shape than many they applied to because we were still hiring faculty all the way through the financial melt-down. And it’s true; we did fare better than many other institutions. But what they don’t realize is that we had staff layoffs and FTE reductions and that we continue to lose staff through attrition, and all so that we can preserve the school’s commitment to hiring new faculty and reduce the teaching load across campus. So telling me that I just don’t know how tough it is out in the rest of the academic world where there were real job losses  is both true and not true at all. I really did fear for my job, and the library is now doing more than before but with fewer FTE, as are most other staff departments on campus. But we also do everything we can to make sure this doesn’t affect the faculty and students as they pursue their work.

Sometimes I wonder if a little more awareness would be a good thing. But maybe it’s not. Maybe more awareness would just increase angst, and goodness knows scholarship is angsty enough on its own.

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