The Librarian was recently privileged to participate in a Medical Library Association webcast in re: Web 2.0. Privileged to share the screen with a number of terrific librarians and library-related persons who helped reinvigorate the Librarian’s interest in talking badly about librarians. Not in a malicious way, of course. Those of you who know the Librarian know that he endeavors, always, to instruct even if a certain amount of ridicule is required. In the Librarian’s classroom, humiliation is never simply random.
Having said that, let it not be thought that the Librarian is one of those authorities who say, “This is going to hurt me worse than it will you.” No. The Librarian fully enjoys making fun of you even while doing it to teach you a valuable lesson. Of course, the Librarian enjoys making fun of himself also. But another corrective is probably in order: the Librarian learns from no mistake, no humiliation, no pain. Every day is a new blank page for the Librarian: new mistakes, blots, erasures that looks just like the mistakes, blots, and erasures from yesterday will occur. But this is of no matter: the Librarian is not here to learn but to teach.
So. Reinvigorated and thus blogging again. Reinvigorated after a discussion about Web 2.0. Not a particularly good term. Somewhat useful. Indicative of something. Not quite sure what. Librarians have embraced the term, though. And, if not the term, then many of it’s precepts, certainly many of it’s tools. But that’s not what we are here to talk about. Oh, no. We are not here to build up, to say: here’s yet another web-based locus, a place where your users are. We are here, instead to tear down. To indicate where librarian zeal for Web 2.0 has made the world a little worse than it was before. The Librarian has made this a habit and sees no reason not to keep it.
So here is the locality, the place where librarians and their notorious bad taste meet middling new technology and, in their enthusiasm, their cat-hair addled impulse to disseminate information—all information, any information—make the Librarian want to believe in a god so he can also believe in Armageddon: Flickr.
The Librarian loves Flickr. It’s a terrific place to store, share, and find photos. It is also, to the Librarian’s mind, a terrific place to make a total boor of oneself.
There are two types of Flickr user: one who is eminently aware of Flickr’s social possibilities, and the one who is not. This, of course, is inevitable. The world can always be divided this way: the one who knows vs. the one who does not know. This, of course, is reductive since it completely ignores the person who says, “uhn, I thought, uh, maybe, uh, that it just might do that.” But that person should be ignored anyway, since that person seldom impinges upon the Librarian’s consciousness unless he or she is wearing a cat sweater, whereupon this person becomes the sole focus of the Librarian’s need to instruct. But the Librarian digresses. The point is: who to hate more? The person who knows precisely that the Librarian has subscribed to a feed that includes all photos with the tags “librarian” and “librarians” or the person who has no idea?
That’s a trick question. The Librarian hates them both if. IF. And here is the crux of this post. The intersection of technology and impulse that makes the Librarian want to smack knuckles with rulers, to give someone the, uh, rough side of his tongue. IF the Flickr user posts screen shots. Screen shots! No matter if the user knows there are subscribers. No matter if the user does not—ignorance is no excuse. The Librarian must suffer through exposure to snaps of someone else’s computer screen. Not of someone else’s party, meeting, presentation, library remodel. Of someone’s freaking computer screen.
Let’s remember that we are talking of librarians here. If the screen shots were, uh, artistic, say a capture of someone’s compromising webcam appearance, this would be of interest. But librarians. The screen shots are, instead, smug winks toward one’s own technological awareness: a Powerpoint slide with one or both words, “library” and “web,” combined with a versioning number, a screenshot of Second Life avatars “dancing,” or otherwise partying down (this is the equivalent of taking a snapshot of one’s IRC session, only the IRC session lacks the really embarrassing names and the ability to portray oneself as a total skank), or of, yes, a twitter post.
So the Librarian has an interest in librarians, not simply to make fun of them. The Librarian thinks they perform a valuable service and are, quite often, even with the evident social handicap of cat sweaters and complete insensibility to the presence of ear-hair in higher mammalian forms, interesting as people. So he subscribes to a librarian feed from Flickr, only to find that an inordinate number of “photos” therein are screenshots—self-congratulatory and terribly boring iterations of “I am in the know.” So, having booleaned out the term “screenshots” to help prevent this exposure, he finds this is still not enough. Some of you oh-so-smug Flickr users refuse to tag your screenshots thusly because you insist that the Librarian be in the know that you are in the know. Stop it. Being in the know is no excuse for being tedious. The Librarian would simply rather not know that you party down in Second Life. Partying down in Second Life is, marginally, more acceptable than dressing in character for a game of Dungeons and Dragons and certainly just as indicative of poor judgement. The most embarrassing part is that you do not know to be embarrassed.
The Librarian does not wish to be unkind. The first Second Life screenshots were mildly interesting, in the sense that the open-air domestic fray, complete with mullets and multi-colored fake nails, on the sidewalks of Pigtown in Baltimore are interesting. Not in and of themselves, but in that someone made the choice to share them. But, really, it’s been done. It is no longer art. (To be fair, the open-air domestic fray remains interesting regardless of its doneness.) There was need for only two Second Life librarian party screen captures to pound the message home: there are people out there who are cool enough to use Second Life. (Please note that the Librarian relies upon the intelligence of his readers to parse the real meaning of that last sentence.) So let’s just stop with the Second Life screenshots altogether, and let’s stop posting our Second Life avatars as our user photo in Ning lest our circular self-satisfaction reach a critical mass and cause a egocentric meltdown.
The Librarian apologizes for the digression into Second Life. There’s just so many places where an earnest librarian can go wrong, and it’s difficult not to put it all in one post. Maybe in the near future, the Librarian can fill you in on the the wisdom of versioning webs and libraries. In the meantime, remember: please tag your screenshots with the word “screenshot.” And please, should you capture a screen of someone’s (particularly anyone who is Famous-for-a-Librarian) ill-considered appearance on a web-cam, drop the Librarian a line and a URI, since he’d miss it otherwise.
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