In my efforts to be more connected with the professional community at large in library world I’ve been a member of Twitter and FriendFeed for about a year. I liked it at first reading other people’s thoughts and ideas, sharing my own, and seeing what news and links others posted that I might not have seen otherwise (or may have ignored until a critical mass all post the same story).
Lately, I’d not been feeling the vibe:
- Too often I was reading a lot about the mundane daily life of people I don’t even really know.
- Some of the people I follow can “tweet” an awful lot in a short amount of time. I’m sure they’re wonderful people, but I don’t have time/patience to read all that.
- Since I’ve been working in records management since last summer, even the library-related content wasn’t too relevant to me.
- I admit that I’m egotistical enough that I’m miffed that people rarely respond to anything I post. Even my comments on FriendFeed seem to be thread killers.
One day last week I came close to deleting my Twitter and FriendFeed accounts. But then I decided, it’s probably not them. It’s me.
So instead, I:
- Un-followed some of the folks who I was finding were posting the mundane/overly-frequent content. Again, wonderful people I’m sure, but I think if this is going to work for me I have to reconcile to the fact that a “follow” is not a binding contract.
- Put my real name into my handle to make it more professional. It was easier on Twitter where I’m now LiamTSullivan, but on FriendFeed I have hybrid real name/nick name liamothemts.
- Since I’d not found many people in the RIM field on Twitter on my own, I asked for good people to follow on, where else, Twitter. Since I’m also now an assistant to the archivist at my library I also asked for good archivists to follow on Twitter. I got an excellent response with some good suggestions from some unexpected sources. There’s even a blog post for 25 People All Archivists Must Follow on Twitter sent to me by my wife’s cousin.
- I’m making a concerted effort to be more participatory myself, posting work-related stuff, and responding to others. And I think it’s working.
And thus the story of my social media midlife crisis and how it’s been satisfactorily resolved. Now if I can just get through all the people complaining about the redesign of Facebook.
PS – Feel free to follow me on Twitter and FriendFeed and tell me I’m being a pompous windbag if you so feel inclined.
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