Consider the role of social media in building up networks and a sense of community.
com·mu·ni·ty /kəˈmyunɪti/
1. a social group of any size whose members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage.
3. a social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists (usually preceded by the ): the business community; the community of scholars.
4. a group of associated nations sharing common interests or a common heritage: the community of Western Europe.
5. Ecclesiastical . a group of men or women leading a common life according to a rule.
Social media has, undoubtedly, brought me closer to people in definition number 3, the "Librarian Community" (oops! space for me in Private Eye there!) and I follow several virtual colleagues via Twitter. Of these, the most prolific is @joeyanne, whose blog I've been following for a few years now (so long, in fact, that I can't remember how I discovered it). Now I can keep up with little snippets of Jo's experiences via the handy medium of Twitter, and its lovely 140-character limit.
Unfortunately I have found that, with very little of any interest to discuss, my tweets seem to revolve around annoying things that happen at work and topical news stories, interspersed with retweets of content much wittier/more interesting/of greater worth than mine.
Do I feel like I am part of a wider network of librarians? 11 librarians follow me on Twitter, I follow 8 librarians - not a very wide net, more like a sieve. What I have found is that the initial excitement of social networks disappears quite quickly, and people you followed stop tweeting. This is also true of blogs and forum sites. Many people start off a blog with good intentions, but of the twenty or so cpd23 blogs I have been following, probably a third haven't posted in a while. Now I know I'm not the world's most regular blogger, but I thought I was being really slow in keeping up with the programme until I saw that some people haven't posted since Thing 4 (automatic smug points for me then). It's a little disappointing to follow someone who posts some really interesting things to return to their blog and find out that they've got bored or gone on holiday to Outer Mongolia for six months.
Although I have been reading other cpd23 participants' blogs I have not made contact with anyone (not even posted a blog comment). I have found Google Reader and Twitter to be the most useful tools for keeping up to date, and I'll probably keep using those after cpd23 has finished. I can't say whether I'll get more involved than just reading and digesting other people's blogs and occasionally making some contribution of my own.
In terms of the "sense of community" that social networking may help to foster, I'm not really sure if librarians form a "community". Then again, it is an overused term: count the proliferation of "communities" used in official soundbites - "the gay community"; "the muslim community"; "the traveller community". Such phraseology only imbues the term with pejorative connotations. It separates the group of people being referred to, it makes them "other". A lot of people, especially those who read the Daily Mail, are afraid of the "Other", assuming that it's some Bogeyman ready to break into their houses and steal the deeds to the property.
But I digress. The "Librarian Community" is quite active on social media, and it is a good place for advocacy (although whether it filters out of the echo chamber remains to be seen), however, I do wonder at the people spending so much time online. I haven't got a lot of time to spend online (indeed, when the students some back, my worktime internet use will really drop) and I take part in a lot of real-life community-based activities (with people who aren't librarians) out of work time. There is a danger of spreading yourself too thinly. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that the online community of information professionals are a really great bunch of people, but I have a life outside librarianship, and at the moment it's too busy to contemplate adding a new dimension of socialising (whether online or in person) to the mix.
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