Category: Random Thoughts

I just spent some time paging through Facebook for the first time in a while and realized that there are all sorts of people there that I like a lot but no longer know very well. I’m not very good at keeping up with friends, actually. I’m bad at maintaining email correspondence (though I’m far far better at email than paper correspondence), and I’m not a phone person, so I almost never pick up the phone to call my friends unless there’s business to accomplish. All of this means that if you don’t live near enough to hang out with me in person, your blog posts don’t appear in my aggregator, or your Twitter posts in my Twitter timeline, I’ll have a hard time keeping up with your life. And it’s only my own fault, I know, but it’s true.

But before I beat myself up too much over being such a passive consumer of my friends’ lives, I think there’s something about keeping up with things like Twitter or Facebook (I really must make that part of my habit!) that mimics a face-to-face relationship in a way that email and phone conversations can’t. These things allow for a constant peripheral awareness of friends’ lives, piece by piece, moment by moment, which neither requires nor benefits from coherent summary. Each post reminds you of your friend’s existence. Like water dripping into a bucket, each new post replaces whatever measure of acquaintance had evaporated since the previous post.

The more I see my friends’ status updates, the more likely I am to write them an email or call them on the phone, too. So I guess passive consumption isn’t so bad as a starting place.

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You’d think that in a small town with two four-year colleges the last thing you’d have to worry about is your movie-watching options shrinking. Not so, apparently. This fall our (admittedly dingy and icky) movie theater closed. This month our movie rental place closed. I assume Netflix and things like bittorrent are to blame, and I blame them heartily. This seriously cramps my entertainment style.

Sure, I could subscribe to Netflix, and I probably will, now. The problem is that I go for weeks and weeks without watching a single movie, and then I hit one of those weekends where all I want is to achieve a state in which my brain doesn’t have to function at all for an extended period of time. On these weekends,I rent a huge pile of movies and watch them all, regardless of quality. Netflix doesn’t seem to accommodate such binge watching very well (at least, not until faster DSL connection speeds are available in my area), and the public library isn’t open late enough on Fridays for me to realize that this will be one of those weekends and get myself over there after work. Also, I’ve seen most of their holdings.

So here I sit, Netflixed out of my passive entertainment habits. I guess that means it’s time to develop new habits.

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Today, a few of us were kicking around ideas for better communicating our individual stores of professional knowledge with each other and with others in the library, and I realized that this is something I’m terrible at doing. It’s not for lack of knowing things that are happening in the wider world of librarianship, or library technology, or social tools online, or any number of other things I keep half an eye on every day. If anything, my communication problem has its cause rather than its solution in the fact that I keep half an eye on these things every day.

Day in and day out, I hear people talking about librarianship, social web tools, and library technology. Last night I was chatting with somebody while he coded modules for Evergreen. Today people discussed whether all LIS students should learn at least a little programming. In the past couple of weeks we’ve debated the merits and characteristics of unconferences, teased apart copyright issues as they apply to emerging formats, shared ideas about discovery platforms for libraries, matched people up with the bibliographic software that best suits their needs, discussed centralized virtual reference, and talked about what options exist that could help us make our catalogs more usable. That’s a lot of conversations, and many of them don’t arrive at clear conclusions or “ah HA” moments. And yet, drop by drop, they add to my knowledge of what’s going on out in the world of librarianship, and they become the back story that informs my reaction to more formal library-related “news.”

So at what point does this kind of thing become “news” that I should spread around amongst my colleagues? I’d never think to get to work the morning after such conversations and write up the equivalent of a conference report for my colleagues. Not only would this normally mean a daily email from me, but even if that were requested, I’d have the hardest time figuring out just what to include.

Here’s what I mean. Have you ever fallen out of touch with a good friend and then found that when you finally manage to contact them again, you have very little to say? And it’s not for lack of news to convey. It’s because any piece of news you convey will require too much explanation, too much back story. And really, it’s the back story that would be interesting to your long-lost friend, but you’d have to figure out how much of it to tell, and how to explain all the tangents, and… and suddenly it all seems like too much. Nobody has that kind of time. And so the conversation lags and only the vaguest information or the highlights pass back and forth, revealing nothing about the interesting and complex issues that lurk beneath those highlights.

So here I am, stuck in an odd space where it feels like I never really learn anything news-worthy because of the paucity of epiphany moments, but where I’m inundated with information all day long, and where communicating anything coherent about this information would take more time and effort than seems warranted (especially since I can never be sure which information will be useful to my colleagues).

Seems like I need a blog or something…

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A while ago somebody asked me why I was worried about one of my online friends. How could I tell that this friend had probably been through a terrible weekend? He hadn’t posted anything online about it, and he lives clear across the country, and I’ve never met him in person. So what was the clue?

I didn’t know. But I knew that I’d worried about that friend all weekend and ended up being proven right, unfortunately.

Talking to people in person, we use non-verbals as huge clues about how that person is feeling. I can see when people are tired by the way they carry themselves, the look in their eyes, the pace of their speech, their tone of voice. All of these tiny clues add up to a fairly clear picture of tiredness, and I don’t even have to think about processing this information. I just know it, and I respond accordingly.

But I’m beginning to think that there are non-verbals to online communication as well. As a community gels, I get used to the kinds of words people use, the pace of their posts, the times when I can expect silence, and the times when I can expect excitement. These things have very little to do with the actual content of their posts but everything to do with the person on the other end of the posts.

It’s kind of amazing, actually, and incredibly touching to see a community keeping tabs on its members and reaching out when things seem off. I’ve had friends check in with me when I stopped posting for a while, and I’ve seen the same happen for others. And just this week I was floored when, after posting that computer monitors were seeming painfully bright all of a sudden, a friend said she’d thought this sounded like a migraine, except that “Iris doesn’t get migraines.” And I don’t. Or rather, I hadn’t until yesterday. (They’re not fun, by the way, in case you had any doubts. I say that knowing full well that mine was a light-weight in the land of migraines.) This friend didn’t have to investigate past posts and think about whether she’d ever heard me talk about migraines before. She just knew that this was different. The fact that she knew this kind of thing just reinforced for me that it’s not just what we post online that lets people know who we are, it’s also what we don’t post, and how we post what we do post.

In a world of text, this is the kind of thing that replaces non-verbal communication. This is the kind of thing that allows online communities become more than just a group of people with similar interests.

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