Free Range Librarian

Perhaps I’m feeling frisky because Jerry Falwell just died, or because I did my first Wikipedia edit, which was to the Wikinews article about him (I changed “reverend”–which is not a noun–to “minister”; it wasn’t the only style problem with this article, but it was the one that bugged me enough to take action).

But regardless, I have to respond to this slightly dated MSNBC article about Twitter, in which the reporter, Helen A.S. Popkin, concludes that “Twitter is stupid,” adding, “Twitter is just the latest development in the biggest generation gap since rock n’ roll invented teenagers.”

The first problem is the hugely sloppy demographic assumption. I would hazard the median age of my twit friends means many of us are in increasingly short supply of estrogen or head hair.

But the real problem is that the article is predictable and trite. A mainstream media reporter sneering at another new networked software? News at 11! A year from now, we’ll have the road-to-Damascus conversion, in which the reporter discovers, hey, there really is something to those doggone Internet tubes; then said reporter (after her gig is outsourced to India) will end up as the “content advisor” for some similar new service, cranking out press releases in which her company’s new product “moves the needle” (when it is not “opening the kimono” or creating “synergy”).

Popkin concludes that conversation on Twitter is banal. Lady, lady, lady: most conversation is banal. And ungrammatical. And mundane. And repetitive. And pointless, if you aren’t focusing on what Twitter is doing, which is providing a hangout for communing with your buddies, colleagues, and other interesting people. It’s a remarkably low-overhead hangout, as well, with no demands for special software, convoluted avatars, or special language.Of course, that may be the problem: for those of us who were around since the list of interesting places to go on the Internet took up two pages at best, Twitter is awfully easy. How can it be any good, if there’s no geek factor?

Popkin doesn’t even do the legwork to find out if what Twitter is really about–or if it has any interesting uses, failures, or successes. John Edwards’ campaign was using Twitter, at least briefly; what happened to that? I’d like to find out. I am now enjoying TwitterLit, which twice a day provides me with opening lines from novels–and I’m curious about the origins and motivations of this service. There’s enough real news about Twitter to do more than call me a teenager.

I don’t know if I’ll be on Twitter 4ever (Twitter’s 140-character text box puts a certain compression on one’s tping). I don’t know if I’ll be on it next week. But I do know that judging Twitter because it does what it is designed to do–transfer water-cooler chitchat to the Web–strikes me as the desperate cry of a reporter in need of a hot topic, stat.

Popkin’s takeoff on Twitter is funny (she imagines Jack Bauer keyboarding comments such as “thinkin i gotta torture this guy. oh well”), but the fundamental nature of Twitter comes from another well-known television event:

Angie: What do you wanna do tonight?
Marty Pilletti: I dunno, Angie. What do you wanna do?

That’s Twitter: what I ate, and what you ate, and the temperature outside (or inside), and whether you’re happy or sad, and how you feel on Mondays or the first day of your job or the last day or any other day, and on and on. The dumb, boring, wonderful stuff of life.

Oh, and I’m kgs on Twitter.

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Ron Miller, a freelance writer, posts about using libraries to do “old-fashioned research.”

It’s a flattering post, but several flags popped up for me: first, that a public library couldn’t meet his needs; second, the silos between academic and public libraries (as Frank Paynter notes, when you’re out of academia, you’re cut off from all the content within Higher Ed); third, that the academic librarian was initially intimidating.

Finally, my brow rumples every time I hear that libraries and librarians are still useful, which immediately raises the question of just how long that state of affairs will last (we are still selling horseshoes! you can still buy a typewriter!). The lady doth protest too much.
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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.

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