Free Range Librarian

I move between many cultures, and as I ride that bus, I pick up habits from one and transfer them to another whether I mean to or not. So recently I was IM’ing with a friend, and after the second time I corrected a term I had misspelled, he pointed out that was unnecessary (he politely did not add how irritating it is, like most conversational disruptions). I hadn’t even been correcting my IM typos for years until my recent foray into AcLibLand, where the average techno-skill is lower than in my native habitat.

This all bubbled to the forefront this morning, while I was working on a presentation about social software and in one slide trying to explain 2.0 culture. There clearly is one, and there’s even a biblioculture within it, as the lolbrarian phenom makes clear. What I have come up with so far:

1.  Humorous
2. Non-hierarchical
3. Time/space “shifted”
4. Skeptical of authority
5. Tepid about privacy and DRM
6. Immediate, here-and-now, epistolary
7. High tolerance for typos and errors

¡

I’m sure others have done better on this topic… it’s just one slide among many. I am drawn to this list, which means it means something to me.

Posted on this day, other years:

• Farewell, John Iliff - 2006
• The New York Times on Ethics and Blogging - 2005

Bookmark to: