Precious, Precious Content

Props to the Krafty Librarian for reading the policies on content ownership for a ton of different social media sites and reporting them in one handy post.

It turns out some sites basically claim ownership of anything you post on them to do whatever they want with, while others specify that you do own your content, but still claim the right to use it in various ways.

To some extent I suppose that seems fair. If I build a platform other people like to use, it's reasonable if I get to benefit from their activity in some way. What way, though? Well, that's the question.

Since many of us are not going to swear off social media, I guess we'll all just play along with the grand experiment and see what happens. But if you want to be better informed along the way, it couldn't hurt to read up about these sorts of policies to figure out exactly what different companies can do with the information you give them.

Then make sure an unpredictable portion of that information is weird but plausible lies, just to throw them off.

For example, I used to collect china figurines of geese, preferably geese wearing gingham hats. Ideally there would be a basket tucked under one wing. Flowers in the basket were optional.

It was a thing I did.

Occupy the Library

I see via Shakesville that the Occupy Wall Street Library (the existence of which is super cool) has a web site.

They're working on a catalog using LibraryThing, and are archiving documents produced by OWS activities for the future as well as accepting donated books and making books available.

Love it!

They obviously also have a Facebook page and a Twitter feed, as well as a YouTube channel. This is the 21st century, after all.

I love the idea that a library is a fundamental enough idea that a group of people gathering for totally non-library-related purposes will spontaneously put one together.

Rock on, everyone.

Fun With Your Internet

Combining some of the more frequent non-health topics on this here blog, Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day has given me an online game about social networking and other web tech: Smokescreen.

It offers 13 self-contained but sequential parts with different missions, over the course of which you try to work out the solution to a mystery centered around an online social networking site called White Smoke, using web technologies like instant messaging, photo sharing, etc.

It looks lively and thought-provoking, plus with awesome UK slang!

I only played the first chapter so far, but it was pretty entertaining. I may go back for more. I'm not really in its target demographic since all the characters are teenagers (it's supposed to teach kids useful stuff about privacy and other features of the web world), but don't let that stop you. Kids these days have fascinating lives, you know.

Not like back in my humdrum adolescence, when we didn't even have social networks or adorable tiny computers or cell phones.

Or CDs. Or TV. Or telephones. Or running water. We sometimes had electricity, though!

I grew up in the 1920s.

.

NLM: So With It

From the NLM Announces listserv, I learn that NLM can now be followed and fanned on both Twitter and Facebook.

I'm naturally all over that. I shall frolic in the 21st century with the nation's medical library! It's bound to be super nifty.

I see also that this evening's episode of House is about a sick blogger who may be sharing too much with her legions of followers, thus jeopardizing her relationship with her real-life partner. 

Drama! 

.

Google Pulls Back the Curtains

Rather than provide updates about my personal travel-whining situation, which has just become a ghastly failure in every way, I will note that there seem to be some fairly serious privacy concerns about Google Buzz, the latest hot thing from our technological overlords.

Apparently it links all your info from various Google accounts (Picasa, Reader, Gmail, etc.) and shows bits of that to everyone you're linked with.

Clearly a potential problem if you maintain an pseudonymous blog, like Dr. Isis at On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess, or have an abusive ex-husband like Harriet Jacobs at Fugitivus, or if there's any other circumstance in which you might not want every person on your frequent-contact list to see what blogs you read, etc.

Say, you have different contacts in different contexts and don't especially need to merge them all into one big social network soup.

Apparently you don't even have to sign up for Buzz for certain aspects of this to kick in, which means that even though I do not have a Buzz account, I need to worry about this because of my Picasa, Reader, Blogger and Gmail accounts (I have Docs, too--can other people see what documents I'm working on?).

Not cool, Google.

You should fix that.

-----------------------------

Some hours later:
Update from Harriet Jacobs at Fugitivus about how Google is working on it.

.

Conversing with Multitudes

This doesn't seem to be online at the moment, but there's an article by Clive Thompson in the Feb 2010 Wired called "In Praise of Obscurity" that I found interesting.

He talks about the way that online social networks are great at connecting people and letting them communicate, in some cases allowing for real interaction between, say, artists and fans, but how if one person gets a certain number of fans/friends/followers, the conversation dies out.

He suggests that when one person is talking to a whole bunch of other people, it becomes like broadcasting: you can no longer really expect--and tend not to get--actual conversational responses.

This makes sense when you think about it. It's a sort of scaled up, technology-abled counterpart to face-to-face communication. Thinking about it, I compared it to library instruction (my limited experience with teaching).

If you're showing someone something one-on-one, it's very informal and responsive, and you can solicit (and tend to receive) frequent feedback. "Does this make sense? Is there something else you'd like to know about that database?"

With a few people at a table, say, you have to formalize the presentation a little more, but there's still plenty of space for questions and answers. When you get larger groups into a classroom setting, it's less likely that people will ask questions--maybe they ask the person next to them instead, or maybe they just don't ask at all because they hesitate to interrupt what has to become a fairly formal class.

And once you're addressing a lecture hall or an auditorium, you almost never get any sort of response. If you were talking to, I don't know, a football stadium full of people (has anyone ever done library instruction for a football stadium?), it would only be more pronounced.

At that level every person feels like an anonymous member of a crowd: they know the person speaking can't focus specifically on them, so they don't bother (or feel comfortable) asking for individual attention in the way that a person in a group of 10 might. (And on the flip side, you can invite a response in a small group and, if you let the silence drag out long enough, someone will almost always speak up, due to the pressure of expectation being divided among only enough people that each one can be individually identified...where if you let the silence linger in a football stadium, I imagine you could be out of luck.)

The article suggests that online you can keep the 'personal touch' capability in a social network of more people, up into a few thousands (where a real-time face-to-face conversation involving 3,000 people would obviously be unworkable), but that once you get to several thousands the anonymizing aspects of the crowd kick in and people stop conversing even if they're all technically linked up in the same network.

At that point, I suppose, it makes sense to split into smaller more specially-focused groups again, maybe sub-groups of whatever it was that brought you to the main group in the first place. If it was a network of cupcake aficionados, say, maybe you subdivide into chocolate and vanilla groups, lavishly frosted and simple, etc.

I think we see this happen in all kinds of ways, really. It seems like a part of the way human attention works.

I mean, how many viewers complained about the TV show Heroes having too many major characters to really focus on? (Not just me, right?) To me, anyway, it seemed that the storyline fractured after a while because we never spent enough time with any one character to actually care what happened to them.

There were a lot of potentially interesting characters there, but we didn't get to know them, so we lost interest. And by 'we' I am here speaking for myself and my spouse--we stopped watching it partway through the second season, not because we disliked it but because we couldn't be bothered to follow it anymore. We couldn't maintain interest, essentially.

It also reminds me of how, when I was a kid, I figured out that more toys did not necessarily mean more pleasure in said toys: if you have a lot of something, then it's not as special to you anymore.

I enjoyed my tiny twistie dolls (we always said 'twistie,' although you may be more familiar with the term 'twist tie'), and since we had plenty of materials I had the power to make dozens--hundreds!--but I found that it was more fun to make a few, focus on them, and give them names and personalities and long exciting sagas of adventure.

I could only really focus on (develop relationships with, in social terms) a limited number of them. If I had 300 tiny dolls, how well could I really know any of them? How much energy could I devote to telling and enjoying the individual stories I made up for them?

We just can't care about multitudes of things the same way we care about a select few things. We don't have the energy, or the attention, or the time. So I guess it makes sense that we just can't converse with multitudes the same way we can with a select few (even if that select few, online, might be hundreds or more).

And online conversations can be spread out over time as well as among people. I wonder if that's involved somehow. Maybe we can pay attention to more people a little bit at a time. Anyway, it's fascinating stuff.

.

Speaking of Social Networking...

...and personal presentation on the web in general, the good folks at Common Craft have a video about how to guard your online reputation. For this reputation is a precious thing!

Just think before you post, is what we're saying. That movie of you breaking into a daycare, emptying the piggy bank and pouring shots of moonshine for a group of wide-eyed toddlers will come back to haunt you.

I know it haunts me.

iLibrarian saw this first.

.

Tell No One

Interesting article in the New York Times (via Double X) about the difficulties of severing contact with former boy- or girlfriends after a breakup, in the bold new age of social networking.

We've probably all heard by now about the strange awkwardness of breaking up with someone by changing your Facebook status to 'single,' and become somewhat familiar with the way that social networking, like a small town, can ensure that everyone in a circle of friends knows everyone else's business.

I can see how this would add layers of complexity to already difficult circumstances, and it's of modest but not pressing interest to me.

The part of the article that does surprise me is the line "Sharing passwords to e-mail accounts, bank accounts and photo-sharing sites is the new currency of intimacy."

Hm. I am dubious. Do people really do this? Just say, 'here are my email passwords--check it out'?

By this standard, I am without intimacy in my marriage. I share my passwords with no one. No one!

Not even for little things like Hulu or Amazon. My passwords are mine alone. Sometimes I sit in my room turning them over and over in my mind and hissing "my preciousssssss."

Then I make a swallowing noise in my throat. It's just so delicious.

Granted, this privacy would become problematic if I died suddenly. My online bank account would be troublesome to access. Good luck straightening out the details of my retirement accounts and so forth. And if you wanted to gather some of my photos from Picasa, go through my half-written fiction, try to assemble the details of what I was working on so you could finish my important e-book cataloging project, well, that would be tough too.

Start guessing!

Anyway, I don't know. Do my spouse and I have a sad and distant relationship, with our separate social networking accounts and secret passwords?

That's what you call a rhetorical question, I guess, since I'm not particularly interested in changing things even if someone tells me the answer is "yes." I just find the idea of sharing that kind of information a little weird.

But I know different people have different levels of comfort, and if someone else thinks it's totally cool to swap Facebook passwords with their significant other, and finds it a little weird that I huddle in the dark clutching mine close to my chest as if they could save me from the harsh grip of true intimacy, well, as long as they're not married to me (and as far as I know they aren't), it's no concern of mine.

.

Goodbye, Cruel Virtual World

If the holidays have you feeling like spending more time with offline people in face to face relationships, and you want to end it with all this online social networking, consider the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine.

The Suicide Machine promises to kill your online persona(e) and delete all your friends/contacts/followers/networks and posts, leaving only your famous last words to let people know you've committed online suicide.

It currently works on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter, and apparently is popular enough that you may sometimes get the disheartening message "Sorry, Machine is currently busy with killing someone else".

The Machine is free and argues for its own relevance with these stirring words:

Everyone should have the right to disconnect. Seamless connectivity and rich social experience offered by web2.0 companies are the very antithesis of human freedom. Users are entraped in a high resolution panoptic prison without walls, accessible from anywhere in the world. We do have an healthy amount of paranoia to think that everyone should have the right to quit her 2.0-ified life by the help of automatized machines.

Check out the Memorial Pages for info on those who have committed web suicide already, with a picture of the deceased, the site(s) abandoned, the number of virtual friends left behind, and last words, if any.

I personally do not yet feel trapped in a "high resolution panoptic prison without walls" (I'm OK with my current use of social networking) but I have to say that's a very poetic way to put it, and if someone does feel thus imprisoned, this looks like a clever way to break free. Don't let ancient social networking site memberships keep you bound to an online existence that has become nothing but pain and trouble!

Sadly, this doesn't work for Friendster, which is the site I really never update. My other accounts are at least sporadically looked in upon.

Identity Woman brought this to my attention.

.

Yup, That's Me

I see on Well and PsychCentral that someone did a study and found that the way people present themselves on Facebook is generally an accurate view of their personality.

It doesn't say what personality traits are expressed by failure to log into Facebook and update your profile on a regular basis, but presumably neglectfulness, distance, and lack of caring for others.

For shame, me. Why am I not on that that site five times a day like a normal, sociable person capable of engaging with others?

And in examples of Facebook's usefulness, I enjoyed GruntDoc's post about someone being late to work and one course of action being "I’ll poke him on Facebook" to remind him.

.

Taking Class Online

Found this expanded discussion of class lines on social networking sites (previously mentioned) on Racialicious.

It's a "rough, unedited crib" of a talk given by danah boyd, and suggests that the migration of large groups of people from MySpace to Facebook as the latter was surging in popularity represents a kind of online "white flight." It's a very interesting piece, with a kind of disturbing take on how we pick our pastimes.

The discussion in comments is also interesting, with people talking about their own experiences, and ways in which the author's observations don't necessarily hold true in other countries.

Death Peanuts on the March

Being at least as interested in peanut butter and hysteria as I am in legal matters, I naturally perked right up from an afternoon headache to pay attention to this BMJ column by Nicholas A. Christakis (via Well).

It suggests that the current social concern with peanut allergies may be an example of mass psychogenic illness (called "epidemic hysteria" in the olden days), which is "a social network phenomenon involving otherwise healthy people in a cascade of anxiety."

So should we all get off Facebook? Now now now?!

Ha, not really. I do know the difference between one use of the term 'social network' and another.

But it is interesting to think of ourselves as being in the midst of an epidemic hysteria, isn't it?

The idea is based on the author's interpretation of measures taken to protect allergic children as being wildly excessive given the risk (which is real for some, but small population-wide in comparison to the danger posed by things like swimming pools, automobiles, and sports, which kill way more children than food allergies do).

It increases my determination to continue eating peanut butter at every opportunity. Fight hysteria! With excited exclamation points!

Ahhhhhhh! Peanuts!

Perils of Distractedness

Know what I've just realized I hate?

I hate when I neglect to check my SLIS email account for, oh, about two and half months, because looking at Outlook is weird and poky and difficult on a Mac, and then I finally do check it and there's something I really wanted to have received and responded to, oh, about a month ago.

Yeah.

Serves me right for not being on top of my email accounts (or, I know, setting them to forward somewhere so I can check them all at once, but I kind of like having separate addresses for different things, if only I'd remember to look at them all).

Let that be a lesson to all my adoring followers: check your accounts on a regular basis whether you use them much or not!

This goes for social networking sites as well. I should really look at LinkedIn a little more often. Also, I suppose, ye olde Friendster. Second Life. Goodreads. And so on.

 

Spooky Socializing

I have to love this Rough Type article for the title alone: Sharing is creepy. You know, it really is! (Hey, how come Nicholas Carr writes blog titles posts in sentence case, while I write them in title case? Am I horribly, horribly wrong?)

In addition to having an entertaining title, however, the post is also an interesting exploration of some of the odd aspects of social networking and web-habitation. It can be disconcerting to reflect on how much personal information we share, even when we've willingly chosen to do so in order to facilitate participation in online communities.

The post quotes a couple of other interesting pieces, including a Wired article I read a few days ago. Certainly we live in odd times.

In other news, it is the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and is Blog for Choice Day in the pro-choice blogosphere. 

I think you can guess which quote sums up my feelings on this matter: "Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others!"

Resolutions

I like iLibrarian's list of 10 Social Media Resolutions for 2009. Reminders 5 and 6, to Create Good Habits and Get Organized, are particularly telling for me. 

I should get organized, and form better habits for managing my various socially networked personalities!

I've left a profile or two to languish, unloved and un-updated. Is that any way to stay networked? On the other hand, who has time to cherish every single membership?

Still, it's a good list. 

Protecting You from Socialization

Stephen's Lighthouse reports the weird fact that the Calgary airport, while it offers free wireless internet (which is certainly good) blocks access to Twitter and Facebook.

Hmm. I don't know, this just seems bizarre to me. I suppose it's based on that panicky idea of social networking sites as seething swamps filled with sex predators trying to befriend naive children, and the airport doesn't want to risk an outcry? (After all, where better than an airport to lure a child into a restroom...OK, I'm just going to stop.)

Because otherwise, what are the airport tech people trying to do? Protect people from possibly missing their flight announcements because they're so enthralled with posting status updates? 

The post does not report on the accessibility or otherwise of MySpace, Orkut, Friendster or any others; presumably they're blocked as well. 

Seems a strange thing to be concerned about. But hey, free wireless, I guess, and you know what they say about beggers and their ability to be choosers.

Modern Academia

Tiny Cat Pants pointed out an intriguing (though as yet somewhat sparsely populated) social networking site: Academia.edu. 

To be fair, both Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day and Science Roll saw it earlier, but I must have been ignoring them. I was probably distracted by zombies or something. 

Aside from having a great URL, Academia.edu aims to list academics from all over the world, displayed in a tree format, with links to other people working in the same research area, other people from the same university, etc. It also offers said academics a handy way to have a professional webpage, and although it's not totally clear to me how this works (the FAQ is a little spare), it appears you can upload your papers, presumably to share.

You can browse departments or research areas, search for universities and people, and invite others to join, just as you'd expect from a social network. I imagine you can also send internal emails and such.

Signing up looks pretty easy, although I didn't try it since I figured I'm not an academic. There's no written guideline that I could find on who's allowed to sign up and who isn't (although the process involves placing yourself at a university), so it's kind of a self-defined community, but I'm not a researcher or anything, so I'm self-excluding.

Anyway, it really is pretty cool to look at. Try typing a university name and watch how neatly it scrolls!

I do kind of wince at the automatic news updates' use of the plural pronoun, as in "Muttonchops Wilkins (University of Whiskers) added themselves to the department Mathematics." 

I know, I know, 'they' and 'them' for an individual is commonplace now because it avoids the whole 'he or she' question. I recognize the issue and I can deal with the solution, which is at least easier than getting everyone to adopt some entirely new pronoun that we just made up.*

But 'themselves'? As if there are literally multiples of this person? Can't we at least say 'themself,' which, though a grammatical monstrosity, at least sounds singular---and, in a way, by its very weirdness calls attention to the fact that it's being intentionally used in order to address an accuracy issue with the language, and is not just sloppiness?

So that's my language whine of the day. Come on, Academia.edu, take a stand for decisive singular-plural pronouns! The people (by which I mean the various 'themselves' of me) demand it! We can make this good English, by gum!

Mmm...gum.

*Although honestly, I'd cast a vote for calling everyone 'it.' I like the utilitarian functionality. "Muttonchops Wilkins added itself to the department Mathematics:" what's so wrong with that? 

Of course, I have always secretly admired robots. But I digress.

Facing the Web

Not to just be constantly obsessing over Facebook---I'm aware there are other fine technologies out there---but I found a couple of quite interesting articles that made me think about it again.

One, from the Boston Phoenix, addresses Facebook phobia, which the article defines not so much as the fear of Facebook as a site, but as the sense of social uneasiness one feels when one's every published mood swing and activity ("Jane is weeping and drinking wine") is broadcast to every person on one's social network. 

The piece talks about the pressure to select just the right titles for the favorite movies, music and TV shows sections, the nerve-wrackingly public nature of changing your relationship status, and the general anxiety of feeling that people you know from all kinds of places (work, high school, family) can see and perhaps judge your profile.

I can see what the article is saying, and have only my own experiences to go on by way of argument, but I have to wonder if most people really take Facebook profiles so seriously. I mean, yeah, I think about what I put on there, but I don't assume other people are studying it in any kind of depth, nor do I carefully pore over my friends' profiles for clues to anything in particular. 

Future research studies may reveal more!

The second piece, from Slate, is called How to take a Web head shot, and has relevance beyond the merely Facebookian, since as the article notes, it seems a lot of things (Gmail, Apple for iChat, blogs, social networking communities) want your picture these days.

The article discusses the challenges of finding the right picture, some popular picture types (with a link to a fun Guardian article detailing nine common styles for byline photos), and some common responses to the demand for photos (some pick a photo and use it everywhere, some carelessly post hundreds of photos, some refuse to include an image at all).

Remember for a moment how much attention people used to lavish on the perfect quote for their e-mail signature. Now that self-conscious energy is applied to a photo.

I do vaguely remember the era of carefully-chosen email signature quotes, and can sympathize with the pressure of trying to find just the right one, something that expresses something key about oneself, but will also append nicely to messages from "wanna go out later for beer?" to "I'm delighted to announce my engagement to the love of my life" to "I'm saddened to announce that my father was just brutally murdered by me." 

The whole problem was too much for me, and I personally have never used a signature quote. I've been known to express various things via photos, I suppose, from the careless, frequently-changed one, to set-it-and-forget-it, to the artistically blurry and unrecognizable, depending on the context.

There's a definite feeling of revealing something significant when you put a photo on a public space, and I was leery of it for quite some time (and still am in some contexts). One notes the large number of blogs that have a (presumably) real name attached, but no picture. Keeping the headshot off the page seems like a way to keep a modicum of distance between the writer and the vast, adoring public (howdy public!). 

On the other hand, putting the picture right up there might be seen as a way to more publicly claim and own your words: "that's right, here I am, and I said this; what of it?" 

Me, I'm constantly looking to disown everything I ever muttered. Politics, you know.

Speaking of Social Networking

I just heard the exciting news that MLA is now on LinkedIn (thanks to the no-doubt awesome Brandi Tuttle). 

And OMG, I'm on LinkedIn too! 

MLA and I should totally get together and chat about stuff we like. Although my profile is ugly because I don't check it that often and can't be bothered to brighten it up in whatever way one can brighten profiles on that site.

Possibly I will not be cool enough to hang with MLA.

Just Another Pretty Facebook

I've found Facebook moderately helpful as a sort of medium-level social interface: I don't use it for many heart-to-heart conversations, but it helps me keep in casual contact with people I would otherwise not be in contact with much at all.

This was particularly interesting to me as a distance student while I was working on my degree, since I was able to add as friends some of the people in my classes in different parts of the country. We could then do the internet equivalent of waving hello to each other in passing, occasionally stopping to chat. 

It's not that we're becoming bosom pals through social networking sites, but we're acquainted. 

I'm now finding that helpful in another situation as I prepare to leave one job for another. I know a lot of people in my current job, and one always says "we'll keep in touch," but everyone knows that most of the time you don't.

Now we can link up on Facebook before I go, and we'll automatically keep in touch, at least a little. And being a little bit in touch may make it easier to send a quick note and ask if someone wants to have lunch, or whatever.

It will be interesting to see if that will make for a different experience leaving this job, than the last one I left, when all we had was email.