Been a while since I participated in blogosphere conversations. That’s bad of me. I also miss it. So here goes.
Rochelle starts a meme about one’s TechNOTs. Steve picks it up (among others), and quietly notes a dichotomy in the responses that I find very interesting: “a list of technologies or technology skills,” he says. (He sees another dichotomy that he addresses very well, but that’s tangential to mine; go read his post.)
That is interesting, because if I divide my own list that way, a pattern emerges. “Technologies” tends to equate to “gizmos” in my mind, and get bypassed in large part because I’m a frugal soul who doesn’t usually burn money on stuff I’m not dead sure I’ll get my money’s worth from. I don’t experiment with expensive gizmos. I don’t lust after them, even when everyone around me swears they’re the bees’ knees. I just don’t.
So the entire mobile revolution has plain old passed me by; I never had a Palm, never bought an ebook gizmo despite my close involvement with the industry, don’t have a Blackberry or an iPhone or any other kind of cell phone, don’t foresee acquiring them. Ditto gaming. I own no console, no DDR pad, no library of PC games. I do have a (smallish, as these things go) library of tabletop roleplaying games… but go figure, all my gaming these days is online, most of it journal gaming. I did read books from Microsoft Reader on the old Silver Surfer. I suppose you might say that I’m a general-purpose, networked kind of gal. My tabletop RPG library has to do with face-to-face gaming opportunities. My other gaming is an offshoot of general-purpose technologies I already use.
The online analogue tends to be subscription services and social networking. I don’t do Second Life; I don’t have that kind of computing horsepower and bandwidth, and I don’t want my money sucked up into the SL vacuum. I don’t do MMORPGs. I killed my Facebook account after Beacon. (Tip for those killing Facebook accounts: Facebook doesn’t actually kill your account; they retain your info. My advice is to zero out your info by putting in a bunch of fake stuff, and then retire the account.) I have a LinkedIn account, but it’s basic-level and I don’t do much but accept link requests. I do have a paid LiveJournal account; I bought it after it became clear that LJ filled a real niche for me—semi-private ranting, essentially, and no, you really needn’t rehearse the “nothing on the Internet is private” argument with me, kthx—and before LJ wigged out in various annoying ways. I also have a paid account on the service where I do my online journal gaming, because it’s a small service that deserves the support.
But by and large, I’m okay with my decisions in the gizmo realm. I don’t feel I’m missing anything I’d value greatly. It’s all good.
Tech skills, now, that’s another story. I’m perpetually greedy for these, I feel perpetually behind, and I don’t feel good about that at all. The thing is, that’s just the normal state of uncertainty for techie-types. I don’t know anyone with a highly technogeeky job who feels they know it all. Maybe back in the ENIAC days techies could feel like that, but not now.
My list: Ruby (because I want to hack on the BibApp), PHP, all sorts of sysadminly stuff that makes my brain hurt on a regular basis (Tomcat wrangling especially), Fedora (the digital repository, not the Linux distro), more complex SQL (joins and HAVING clauses and whatnot), better Java (so I can do Aspect programming in Manakin).
My problem here is that I don’t learn new stuff until I have a project to work on—and sometimes not even then. I can’t sit down with an O’Reilly book and learn something until I have a context to apply it in. My pattern would be sad if it weren’t so funny: I start something, get stuck, swear a lot, and then go find the book and have six epiphanies in the first ten pages. (Or not. I still don’t entirely understand how multiple bracketed expressions in XSLT work, and none of my XSLT books has yet managed to enlighten me.)
So that’s my technofaux list, for your delectation. Onward.
The latest Cites and Insights (PDF) spends a fair bit of space on this “slow library” thing, analogous to “slow food” et cetera. Frankly, the slow movements annoy me—not because I don’t do some of the things they advocate, but because they’re so incredibly self-righteous and condemnatory about other things I do. I’d be much happier with them if their practitioners demonstrated joy in their own practices rather than scorn and distaste for mine.
Take reading. I read books. I read articles. I read them both in print and onscreen. Ooooh, watch the fur fly. I’m not supposed to read serious prose onscreen. Screens are too fast, don’t you know. I’m supposed to print that stuff out, or buy it in print, because otherwise (apparently) I’ll get distracted by the Next Shiny Thing (because it’s all about the continuous partial attention, don’t you know) and I won’t understand it as well as the Slow Person.
The Slow Person can bite me. Good and hard. I read a lot onscreen, and frankly, I prefer it. For whatever reason, I’m much more susceptible to distractions when reading in print. It’s positively easier to follow an argument or backtrack for proper understanding when I’m looking at a (well-designed) web page or (yes, even) PDF. It may have something to do with ergonomics—I read print in all kinds of contorted postures, whereas in front of my work desk, I’m properly seated and prepared to pay concentrated attention. Whatever it is, it’s a fact for me, and it’s not a fact the Slow People are prepared to accept.
You know, now that I think about it, I think it’s partly because onscreen reading is active for me in a way that print reading isn’t. I was brought up never ever EVER to write in books; some people have annotation and marginalia habits, but I never have had. I don’t even talk back to print books; they’re just kinda dead, dead words sitting on dead pages between dead covers. Reading onscreen is different. If I’m reading something I like, I can del.icio.us it or blog it or Twitter it, do something with it. Because I am a producer as well as a consumer of onscreen text, I feel closer to other producers of onscreen texts, and I feel a certain license to talk (and sometimes yell) at the screen, treat the words as living things with a living mind behind them.
That’s me. I’m not you, and unlike the Slow People, I’m not claiming you should be me. I am claiming that my pattern of interaction with text is just as valid and useful as the Slow Person’s. Prove otherwise, Slow People.
This leads me to take a brief crack at the “continuous partial attention” meme. CPA is supposed to be bad for you. You don’t get stuff done. You don’t do it as well. Et cetera. My question is this: doesn’t this depend on where we set the goalposts? If the goal is “read and understand the latest Cites and Insights,” then I fail miserably, because I’ve been popping between that, this post, and a few other things… and I rarely read all of a C&I to begin with (sorry, Walt) because not all of it resonates. (Walt’s much more of a stereophile and gizmo hound than I am.) If the goal is “integrate what I find useful about C&I into my mental landscape,” well then, that changes things, doesn’t it? Blogging things is part of how I assimilate them, how I think them through. It’s possible to consider my peripatetic read-blog-read process CPA—but that isn’t how I experience it in my head.
I’m willing to entertain the possibility that CPA damages me worse than I know. I’ve been CPAing since high school at least; it’s all that’s ever gotten me through some lectures and presentations, because if they’re boring (for whatever reason; some are boring for reasons of content, others for reasons of presentation style) and I can’t CPA, I zone out completely, which is worse. On the whole, though, I can live with my personal attention style. Somebody’s gonna have to show me it hurts me.
The last meme on the slate today is the “So, why’d you become a librarian?” meme. Er, it seemed a good idea at the time? The more interesting question is how I became the kind of librarian I became. Part of that was lucking into the right job, and things could assuredly have been different—but it was the right job partly because of intense personal interest.
What I usually explain to people is that I have an overdeveloped social-relevance organ. This is true, and it fuels my interest in open access and always has, but it’s not the whole story. The rest of the story is that there’s more Don Quixote in me than I’ve frankly been able to make my peace with. I’m a questin’ beast, I am, despite the manifold frustrations and irritations of questin’. I do have limits, though; I won’t run my lance into brick walls. I need some kind of accomplishment or potential to keep me going, or I just—stop.
Anyone who troubles to read between the lines here has no doubt figured out that I have come damn close to throwing in the towel on institutional repositories. (Not open access. There’s a difference.) No real accomplishments in three years of trying, and potential was fading fast—but Harvard just changed the game, and I’m seeing possibilities again. Rosinante’s got a new saddle, I’ve got a new lance—time to see what I can do with them.
