Before beginning this subject, I already had some experience with social media. I have a Facebook account, which I mainly use to share pictures of cats and birds and to use the Messenger app. I had a brief Twitter account several years ago, but none of my friends were on it with me, and I found the experience to be very shallow (my personal opinion is that everyone on Twitter is yelling into the void, trying to convince others they’re special). I had briefly tried Pinterest and Reddit; I hadn’t tried Instagram; and who with an internet connection hasn’t watched at least one video on YouTube?
I did enjoy parts of Reddit, such as the fact that there’s a sub for any and every topic, so you can always find a conversation on something you love. However, I constantly found myself opening the app and then resurfacing from my endless scrolling an hour later, realising it was time for bed, and feeling guilty that I hadn’t spent my evening doing something more productive, like reading more of my book.
This is the main reason I only use the one social media account. I find it far too easy to get sucked into endless scrolling, and I don’t like the feeling of automatically reaching for my phone, or turning on my phone to do something else but somehow automatically opening Facebook instead. Having multiple apps only makes this worse.
The platforms I engaged with over the course of the session were the class Facebook group, Instagram, Twitter, and Diigo. I had experience with Twitter, as I said before, however my only knowledge of Instagram was its reputation for hosting ‘influencers’, and I had never heard of Diigo.
I enjoyed using the Facebook group to communicate with others, as it felt more relaxed and therefore easier to share random snippets of information I came across. The ‘likes’ people gave to my posts, even if they didn’t comment, also gave a better sense that people were reading the information and taking it on board, and I wasn’t just talking into thin air. While this is mostly self-gratification, it gives a greater sense of connection to classmates than posting on forums like we usually do.
After using Twitter and Instagram for a while, I began to see how the content they posted differed between each other and Facebook. For example: the State Library of New South Wales’ (SLNSW) Twitter and Instagram accounts, specifically the same image shared at different times, a photo from a Black Lives Matter protest near Sydney Town Hall (2021-a, 2021-b). The tweet has a shorter message and is comprised of a quote and several links to related webpages. The Instagram post has a longer message with different wording, and it has several hashtags and @tags to relevant accounts, such as the photographer, the host of the exhibition the image is being displayed in, and several other photographers who will also be featured. Meanwhile, the corresponding Facebook post has slightly different wording again, with lengthier sentences and less tagging (2021-c). Other Instagram posts contain blocks of hashtags at the bottom of the descriptions, while other tweets may be retweets.
By comparing these methods of posting the same image, and by viewing the broader content of both accounts, it is easier to see how Twitter and Instagram could benefit me as an information professional. Twitter is much faster paced, containing rapid dialogue, sharing of information, and re-tweets. Tweets are often about ‘the thing I just learnt’, such as an interesting article. Instagram on the other hand is crafted, posed, and about the promotion of a book or event. Its blocks of hashtags create the sense of reaching out to others in the same community, and the tagging of the author of the featured book gives a feel of authenticity. This is confirmed by Young and Rossmann (2017, pp. 9-12), who state that images can be harnessed to convey information quickly, build empathy and awareness, and appear more authentic. If I were to continue to use these platforms in the future, I would use Twitter as a method of discovering professional development opportunities, such as articles to read or webinars to watch, and I would use Instagram as a way to simply connect with the library and book-loving community.
I had trouble using Diigo. It wasn’t obvious to me how it was meant to be used, and I wasn’t sure how to find other groups and profiles to connect with, if that was what I was meant to be doing at all. I’m curious about its function for saving articles and highlighting sections of interest; I think it would be a useful tool for collating information for my personal use. However, to me it seems more like a professional development aggregator than a social platform.
Kemp (2020) reports that over 4.5 billion people now use the internet, with nearly 60% of the world’s population already online, and 3.8 billion people use social media. Meanwhile, the 2020 report from the Australian Digital Inclusion Index states that more than 2.5 million Australians remain offline, with geography, affordability, age, and socioeconomic status being key contributors to this digital divide.
These numbers put into perspective for me why digital illiteracy, and its cousin media illiteracy, are becoming more important in today’s web-based society. Both literacies are subjects of interest for me. I have seen in my work at public libraries how people struggle when they aren’t even sure of how to use a mouse, and it worries me what will happen to those who don’t develop their skills in the future. And on Facebook I see constant posts full of misinformation, which are stupid at best, offensive and harmful at worst. The conspiracies surrounding the current pandemic, and the way they hamper efforts to control and eliminate the COVID-19 virus, are the best example of the true impact of media illiteracy.
I think information literacy and its subsidiaries will be the biggest challenge for libraries, as services and technologies become more and more dependent on the internet. Second to this is the erosion of privacy online. Collecting and selling your data to advertisers goes so far as to note where you’ve been (Valentino-DeVries et al, 2018). Me and My Shadow (2017) outlines how companies are creating profiles that include an individual’s political beliefs, gender, sexual orientation, economic status, and interests, and that individual has very little control over how/when the data is collected, who it is shared with, and what it is used for.
I have been aware of tracking like this for a few years, and I take precautions to use privacy protection to block ads, trackers, and wipe cookies. I also review my privacy settings on Facebook regularly to make sure as little information as possible can be collected about me. What I have learnt in this subject has reiterated for me how important it is to stay on top of such precautions. It also circles back around to the need for me as an information professional to push my library to hold digital literacy programmes for our customers.
I found the process of researching subjects for the blog posts to be enjoyable. It was stimulating to read about a topic and then research how it might or already is impacting upon the library profession. The simple fact that 2.5 million Australians remain offline leads to the question of what impact is felt by those people, and how libraries can assist them (as I discussed in the OLJ task for Module 2). Meanwhile, Virtual and Augmented Reality (VAR) is already being implemented in libraries, and this leads to an exploration of how it is being used, what future uses may be, and issues associated with such technology (Module 3).
I find that I am a visual learner, and the process of constructing a blog site was entertaining for me, as it laid out in a clear structure what I have learnt so far. I also found it satisfying when I could tag multiple blog posts with the same subject. For instance, I tagged two posts under ‘fake news’ and ‘disinformation’, and just having the visual of the number 2 after both tags gave me a sense of achievement and recognition of the fact that I was building upon my own knowledge. It also highlighted for me what topics I am most interested in.
It was engaging to read posts from other students, to compare my own thoughts on an article with theirs, and with other students who had also written about the same article. Different people take away different points from the same subject, and it expanded my understanding of an article to have these other points and quotes highlighted and examined. For example, Naomi also discussed VAR in one of her posts (2021). Whereas my discussion was concerned with more broad advantages and disadvantages of VAR in the library setting, Naomi focused on VAR in VET libraries due to her work at a TAFE institute. Reading the two posts led to a more holistic understanding of the topic for me rather than just writing my own view.
Overall, I have enjoyed conducting research and posting blogs on a regular basis. I enjoyed learning the theory behind how to create a social media strategy, and I can see how I benefit from such information, whether it is casually assessing my own workplace’s social media to see if I can make suggestions, or if I were to try to create my own blog. Creating blog posts was more time-consuming than I had thought, even though they were only 400-words long. But the snippets of information garnered to write the posts have piqued my interest, and they have given me more to think about in terms of what issues and innovations are affecting libraries.
Going back to why I only use one social platform, despite the benefits I discovered with Twitter and Instagram, using several platforms across the session has confirmed for me that I prefer to stick to one. The competition for my attention from Facebook, Instagram and Twitter was tiring. I remembered why I left Twitter years ago (it still seems like screaming into the void for attention to me), and the fact that Instagram is mobile-based and not completely compatible for PC bothers me. I also find its visual nature to be somewhat shallow, and obvious in its attempt to grab my attention. It is a platform for promotion of some kind, and nothing else.
Facebook suits my needs. It is compatible for mobile and PC, its posts contain more information, and it isn’t restricted to one style of post – it can share an image, or plain text, or a quick link, or a mini-essay, depending on the need. As Young and Rossmann point out, it really is versatile and a one-size-fits-all base (2017, pp. 9-12).
Word count: 1812
Kemp, S. (2020, January 30). Digital 2020: 3.8 billion people use social media. We Are Social. https://wearesocial.com/au/blog/2020/01/digital-2020-3-8-billion-people-use-social-media
Me and My Shadow. (2017). Trackography. https://myshadow.org/trackography
State Library of New South Wales [@statelibrarynsw]. (2021-a, January 21). “What stood out at this one was the sheer reverence that was had by all there.” Photographer @Jamesbrickwood spoke to [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/statelibrarynsw/status/1352043504407609344/photo/1
State Library of New South Wales [@statelibrarynsw]. (2021-b, January 12). Out of the 1440 minutes in each day the moments captured by photojournalists become history. From catastrophic weather events to [Post]. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/CJ7PsDIIeYh/
State Library of New South Wales [The State Library of New South Wales]. (2021-c, January 12). Marking its 10th year, the Photos1440 exhibition returns to the Library this Saturday 16 January with a look back over [Image attached] [Post]. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/statelibrarynsw/photos/a.116332719267/10159245317889268/
Taper, N. [Naomi]. (2021). Virtual & Augmented Reality. Naomi’s INF206 Blog. https://thinkspace.csu.edu.au/naomisinf206/author/naomi-taper2/
The Australian Digital Inclusion Index. (2020). Measuring Australia’s digital divide: The Australian digital inclusion index 2020. https://digitalinclusionindex.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/TLS_ADII_Report-2020_WebU.pdf
Valentino-DeVries, J., Singer, N., Keller, M. H., & Krolik, A. (2018, December 10). Your apps know where you were last night, and they’re not keeping it secret. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business/location-data-privacy-apps.html
Young, S. W. H., & Rossmann, D. (2017). Using social media to build library communities: A LITA guide. Rowman & Littlefield.
