Tag: twitter

The signal and the noise

Posted on by Alissa

We’re all goin’ on a twitter holiday
No more tweetin’ for a week or two
Fun and laughter on a twitter holiday
No more tweetin’ for me or you
For a week or two

(With apologies to Cliff Richard, who seemingly had the right idea)

I’m not always good with noise. My brain is regularly full of noise (anxiety) but can’t always process it (mild autism). Noise-cancelling headphones are my workplace saviour. Moving out of a flat on a four-lane road brought me desperate relief from traffic noise. Until recently I didn’t fully realise how much noise was in my life, and how much easier things are without it.

This month’s GLAM Blog Club theme is ‘Obsession’. I used to be obsessed with Twitter. It was the first thing I looked at when I woke up and the last thing I looked at before I fell asleep. I spent untold hours of my life firing little bursts of Opinion into my eyeballs like it somehow mattered. I fired off my own bursts right back. People liked the sound of them. I became a small Somebody in a small field. I kept going. Until about three weeks ago, when I suddenly stopped.

I decided to take myself on a twitter holiday. I reckon it’ll be permanent.

What began as an accessible and low-stress place to network with other librarians and share ideas has morphed into a high-stress horrorshow of anger, trauma, grief and drama. It’s not a healthy place to spend time. It’s where people go to start fights, let off steam, vent, have Opinions, scream. It’s also massively overstimulating. I popped back on briefly to attend the latest #auslibchat and immediately wished I hadn’t—not because of the chat itself, which was pleasant and informative, but because the website is designed to grab and hold your attention for as long as possible. My friend Hugh, who saw the light and quit Twitter long before I did, has likened it several times to a poker machine. It’s shamelessly addictive. You’ll never get back what you put in. The best thing to do is to cut your losses and go.

Everyone is angry and no one is listening.

I am very aware that I owe my career to Twitter. Being a small Somebody and giving myself a platform helped me meet lots of great people, grow new ideas, stand up for what’s right. It has made me the librarian I am today. But it is so bad for my brain now. Giving my account to a trusted friend and forcing myself to log the hell off has improved my mental health immensely. No more blasting fire and anger into my eyeballs. No more tediously scrolling past arcane fights and drama. No more unconsciously making space in my brain for whatever American Library Twitter™ reckons about something, whether it’s worth listening to or not.

Being extremely offline has meant I now have the brainspace to read and think more deeply. After years of being largely unable to do either I know this brainspace is a rare and precious gift. I don’t want, and can’t afford, to squander that gift on shouty pixel horror. Besides, my to-be-read pile is literally taller than I am. I also started noticing how much mainstream news content is either ‘Some people on the internet are angry about this thing’ or ‘Here’s something that went viral three days ago’. Making news from newsfeeds is called ‘juicing’ and there’s a lot of it. I left Twitter to escape all this stuff. Why does it persist in following me around?

As Information Officer for ACORD, the ALIA Community on Resource Description, I manage the Twitter account that was my idea in the first place. I logged on there today to share our committee survey of Australia’s cataloguing and metadata community (it’d be really helpful if you did it, cheers). Yet somehow an account that only follows 16 others, most of them assorted professional bodies, still has inflammatory content in its main feed. How does this happen? How can I escape it?

In the short term I don’t see myself returning to Twitter. In the long term, once I figure out how, I intend to use it as a unidirectional broadcast platform, syndicating posts from this blog and making other announcements as the need arises. It does mean losing out on that sense of community and broader professional awareness that attracted me to Twitter in the first place, and a small part of me misses that. But I definitely don’t miss the nonstop screeching that now pervades the place. My brain can’t separate the signal from the noise, so I am forced to silence both in order to function.

I once described Twitter as ‘the introvert’s megaphone’. For a moment I wished I still felt that way about it, eager to find like-minded people in the shrieking cesspoool, able to use the site to my advantage. But times have changed. I’m not sure I’d recommend Twitter to new librarians anymore. Apparently one library school makes students create a Twitter account as part of an introductory course, which was probably a great idea five years ago but today feels like punishment. It reminds me of having to create bookmarks on del.icio.us during an undergradute French class ten years ago. I didn’t understand the point of spending time on dying websites. (Ironically, the WordPress auto-tweet function no longer works on this blog after I migrated it to a new server. So it might be a while before anyone sees this post. Sorry about that.)

For now, I find things out from assorted email newsletters (including the one I write for ACORD, you should totally sign up), RSS feeds and messages from friends. It’s kinda nice not being so plugged in all the time. It’s lovely to have a bit of peace and quiet.

Take off those headphones and let this world pour into you
Throw off those glasses and then you’ll start seeing
Forget those battles, those ones that mean nothing to you
Know you’re alive and just smile, you’ll start hearing

Somewhere out beneath the heavens and the atmosphere
Somewhere out among the silence there’s a voice
There’s a feeling that takes over and it has no fear
When you’re caught between the signal and the noise

The introvert’s megaphone

Posted on by Alissa
Tag yourself, I’m the fail whale. (From an image by Yiying Liu)

I can’t remember exactly why I joined Twitter. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time. I’ve been on that website in one form or another since 2009, mostly to lurk behind locked accounts, but in October 2015 I decided to start tweeting for real. I was partway through my library degree, I had recently begun my first job in a library (albeit in an admin role) and I think I was feeling somewhat isolated. I’m sure my lecturers mentioned Twitter was where all the library conversations were happening. So I decided to join in.

Still #onbrand after all these years.

(For those wondering where my handle came from: I think I spotted someone else’s typo somewhere and ran with it. People address me as ‘lissertations’ all the time. I have no issue with it. ?)

Three-and-a-half years and over 14,000 tweets later, I’d like to think it was worth it. Saying ‘I have learned so much from other people on twitter’ feels hollow. It has completely transformed my ways of seeing and thinking about the world, about librarianship, about our past and our future. I’ve read so many insightful articles, posted by so many incredible people. I thought I had a handle on how the world ought to work. Boy, was I wrong.

Twitter has long been touted as the social network of choice for library and information workers, but different people use it in different ways. You’ve got your lurkers, your occasional users, your influencers, your trolls, your personal brand maintainers, your organisational accounts that shitpost more often than they realpost, your crossposters from Linkedin or Instagram, your ‘I only tweet at conferences’ types, your backchannellers, your agitators, your real people, your fake people, your twitterbots. I probably fall into several of those categories, but above all else I try to be honest online. I say what I mean and I mean what I say. I have always been an opinionated introvert, but too often the opinions can get lost in IRL networking situations because people are hard and scary. Twitter has helped me to network and communicate with an audience that doesn’t need to know I’m an introvert. For me, it’s the perfect megaphone.

I am acutely aware that at this point I basically owe my career to this platform. Because of Twitter, thousands of people know who I am, hundreds of people have read my blog posts or heard me speak, dozens of people have met me at conferences, a handful of people have become my closest friends, and at least two people have offered me employment. I absolutely would not be where I am today if it weren’t for being on Twitter. My presence there has helped me get a foot in the door, at a time when breaking into the library industry is harder than ever.

And yet I have achieved this through somewhat unconventional means. We’ve all read articles like ’15 Twitter Tips for Librarians’ and ‘Top tips for using social media for professional networking’. I’m pretty sure I’ve done everything these articles tell you not to do. I don’t use a picture of myself as my avatar (and never will), I seldom use hashtags, I have no social media strategy besides ‘these are my opinions today’, I follow whoever I want and not who the ‘influencers’ are, I tweet about all sorts of non-LIS topics (principally environmentalism), I blur the line between ‘professional’ and ‘personal’, and I overshare all the damn time.

That’s not to say you should necessarily follow my lead, or that the above articles are bad. The advice in them is simply not to my taste, with one major exception: I absolutely adhere to Kate Davis’ rule of ‘Don’t retweet without reading (unless you make it clear you haven’t read it yet)’. In this era of abundant bullshit, we have a responsibility as information professionals not to share or spread harmful, inaccurate or offensive content. All our retweets are endorsements. If I share something, I am sending a message that I vouch for its integrity. I want my word to mean something, both online and off.

Because I have become such an outsized Twitter Personality™, which I’m not sure resembles my actual personality all that much, I sometimes feel obliged to keep tweeting and maintaining a presence, even when I feel I have nothing to say. I have also found myself composing tweets in my head before I’ve even reached for my phone, rearranging an anecdote for maximum likes, retweets and dopamine hits. It’s all a bit sad, really. Aside from an extremely private Mastodon account, Twitter is the only social media I have. It’s easy to develop a certain tunnel vision when you’re on the site for too long, mindlessly scrolling because it feels weird not to. It’s easy to be a bit too online.

Some of you might be unsure about joining Twitter, considering most people these days associate it with a certain American president. I want to be clear: most of Twitter is an absolute binfire. It’s abhorrent. It’s a cesspool. It’s home to some of the worst people on the entire internet. But library twitter is different. It’s full of people who are passionate about libraries, having the best and most urgent conversations, sharing the most important ideas, making the most fruitful connections. You don’t need to be #onhere as often as I am in order to get something out of this platform. Make Twitter work for you, not the other way around, and it can help you do incredible things.

Five things I didn’t learn at #VALA2018 (because I didn’t go)

Posted on by Alissa

VALA2018 logo with sadface

This is my actual face.

I was sad to miss VALA this year. I had long dreamt of attending this huge library technology conference, seeing my favourite people, learning about what others are achieving in this space. The lineup looked amazing, and I’m sure I would have had a whale of a time. But I didn’t have a spare thousand bucks (!) to drop on a ticket. My workplace, where I am on a temporary contract in a non-library-technology role, would not have financed it either. So I didn’t go.

Instead, I attended vicariously through Twitter, where the @VALAlib account (ably run by @mpfl) live-tweeted throughout the conference. The organising committee also posted all the conference papers online before the conference, which turned out to be a boon for cross-pollination!

Somehow, between eyeballing the #VALA2018 hashtag and sitting at work trying to get work done, I managed to learn a few things… or not:

  • Everyone is off-message. If everyone at a conference agreed on everything, it would be incredibly dull. Yet I was struck by how often I seemed to hear conflicting messages in rapid succession. One minute we’re told that we don’t need 100% accuracy in our metadata. The next minute we’re told about all the wonderful things linked data can achieve, which depends on accurate linking and relationship-building. Which is it? Linked data is useless if it isn’t accurate, and such is the nature of digital that it’s either accurate or it’s not. There’s not a lot of room for error.

People were also deeply conflicted about vendors. Some people said we should love vendors. Some people were a lot less complimentary about vendors. Some people appreciated the people who work for vendors but not the socio-political circumstances that enable this work. Because I wasn’t caught up in conference frenzy, where you nod along to and agree with and blindly tweet everything that is said to you, I found I noticed these contradictions a lot more.

  • Do everything. Or not. We’re in a tough spot, skill-wise. We’re constantly encouraged to invest in our own professional development, in many instances by learning to code. On the other, we hear that upskilling ourselves in multiple areas is actually doing us a professional disservice, as an increase in skill is generally not matched by an increase in pay. Code is useful, code is good. Except if too many people learn to code, then it’s bad.

I agree that not all librarians would find coding skills useful or necessary in their work. But with library services becoming increasingly top-heavy, with less skilled staff continuing to lose their jobs, with the industry contracting, with the job outlook for librarians looking rather bleak, with our future becoming increasingly reliant on technology whether we like it or not, wouldn’t you want to make yourself as employable as possible, and learn some code basics?

  • Show me the money! The conference was also filled with exhortations to do things. Make that bibliographic data linked open data! Surface those ‘hidden’ local history collections! Don’t put up with crappy products and services from vendors! Yes! Sure! I will totally do all these things with no additional budget, no staffing, and on top of my existing responsiblities!!!1!

On one level, conferences aren’t meant to be realistic. Presenters will usually highlight the good things they do and gloss over the bad things it took to get there. (Andrew Kelly’s talk was a notable exception, and I’m sure there were others.) We’re meant to leave conferences hyped up and enthused and ready to make change happen in our workplaces and communities. But I brought a much higher dose of cynicism and realism to my remote conference experience. I can’t implement any of these radical and awesome ideas, or in fact any ideas at all, without additional funding, staffing, support and time. Or a permanent job.

  • Technical services librarianship is public work, and deserves to be valued. Finding myself a bitter, cynical husk at the end of this post, I decided to watch Angela Galvan’s heavily livetweeted keynote, ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Standardized’. I hoped it would energise me again. I wanted to reconnect with why my work matters, why tech services is not dead, why I spent three days lurking the backchannel of this conference in the first place.

It was immensely gratifying to hear Angela speak of tech services as ‘public’ work. Our direct patron interactions may be limited, but the interfaces and discovery systems we create, maintain and troubleshoot are the centre of most patrons’ experiences of a library. They may never visit us in person. They may never speak to a staff member. But they’re using our catalogue, our databases, our libguides, our websites. Those things don’t build themselves. They exist because a lot of people worked very hard (and a small number of people paid a lot of money).

The characterisation of tech services workers as the ‘backend’ of libraries is increasingly inaccurate. The metadata I work with is viewed by thousands of people. If they can’t access an online resource, it’s my job to rectify it. I may not get to decide what the library purchases and how much they’re willing to pay, but I can decide how that resource is presented to patrons. I game the search results all the time. I edit metadata every day to make it better and clearer for patrons to use. I may not be public-facing, but my work certainly is, and it’s about time library administrators really acknowledged this. A little self-esteem is a wonderful thing.

(Not gonna lie, I was also extremely here for the LexisNexis joke. Next week, part of my ref desk work will likely involve advising first-year law students how LexisNexis works. I hope they don’t ask me. I have no idea.)

  • Go in person next time. In the end, I was surprised by how much I got out of a conference I didn’t attend. I definitely learned more, but I don’t think I enjoyed it as much as I would have if I’d been there in person. I also missed out on all the networking and socialising, which many people say is the best part of conferences, and to be honest it felt a bit sad watching all these people have fun at an event I couldn’t go to. I’m very glad that the conference papers were uploaded ahead of time and I would encourage the VALA committee to consider doing this again.

But next time, I think I’d rather just go.