One Hundred and Forty Hashtags

Feeling like Piggy is not a great feeling.  I know what happens to Piggy, and sometimes it feels like the internet is going to break my glasses and throw me off a cliff and I will spend the whole time desperately clinging to my little conch shell while everyone around me screams at each other.  I can’t follow what’s going on with everyone talking at once, and why can’t they just follow the rules and wait for their turn with the fucking conch?
 

I’m the social media intern for a small company this term.  They (we) are getting ready to launch a new project that sounds pretty cool, the Librarian Brain, and that is exciting.  There is also a website revamp happening, so I get to help with content for that as we prepare for launch, which is pretty cool too.  But I spend a lot of time on social media.  I mean a lot of time.  It is amazing to me how much time I spend on social media.  It isn’t even posting and tweeting and whatever that takes up most of that time, it’s trying to get some sort of grip on the conversation.  That’s what social media is all about isn’t it?  The Conversation.  Being the place where consumers can connect with business, where people can connect with each other to share ideas and be thought provoking.  But here’s the thing, natural conversations don’t happen 140 characters at a time.  Conversations aren’t hashtagged into obscurity to make them searchable.  So it feels like everyone is sending their own one-sided conversation into the social media void hoping someone will see it and butt in with a vaguely relevant reply.  Even better if it’s someone with lots and lots of followers.  

When I first started Twittering I was shocked by how much time and effort it takes to get nothing done.  I logged into the account thinking it’d be fairly simple to start retweeting interesting things from accounts we followed or who followed us while getting a grip on the “voice” of the account so eventually I could start producing some original content.  I was so wrong!  One of the first things I noticed is how much utter crap people tweet just because they have to.  And you do have to keep tweeting ALL THE TIME in order to stay relevant, to stay at the top of the news feed.  A lot of these accounts just tweet random ads for how to gain followers (usually by paying for them) with a shit load of hashtags that don’t really make sense.  Because that’s what social media is really about: how many followers do you have, and how can you get more?  I can’t follow the conversation, because there is no conversation.  Sure there are moments when conversation happens, but mostly it’s about getting more followers, getting more exposure, getting more influence.  Being louder than everyone else so they follow you, retweet you, pin you, like you, favorite you.

I try to limit myself to 25 minutes a day, since I have to be on social media every day that is nearly 3 hours a week.  That’s not enough.  The only reason I try to limit it is because I have other things to do, other research for other projects, other writing projects, other things.  Social media is full time job.  You can’t just retweet, repin, repost, you have to create as well.  And you can’t create without a lot of work.  I can’t just pin or tweet an article, I have to read it (or at least thoroughly skim it) so I know it fits the persona this handle is presenting to the world. It’s a lot of work for one sentence of product and a link.  I did research into this, I read the articles, I looked at what others in the industry were doing, and I have determined that I don’t get social media.  I mean, I can do it: I can do the #TBTs, I can follow, I can create new content and repin, repost, retweet things relevant to company, I just don’t get it.  I think social media has somewhat lost the plot, we’ve all gotten so damn busy collecting followers no one can make out what the fuck anyone is saying any more.  I have a grand social media plan that I have lovingly researched and worked out and presented (with praise and positive feedback), but to implement it would be a full time job.  I do my internship for about 8-8.5 hours a week (though I am terrible at remembering to record my time), so I can barely scratch the surface of social media, and so far I only do Twitter and Pinterest.  

This internship has already taught me a lot, and I am sure the next few weeks will teach me even more.  But it is exhausting.  There are days I just can’t face another tweet, another pin, another like-share-favorite-whatever.  I think in hashtags, I dream of how to make things more searchable, I see the world in pins.  When I see and dream and think these things however, I’m not processes the world in terms of conversations, I’m counting followers, and repins, and likes, I’m counting who says they are listening to me, not who’s talking back.  Resistance is futile, my technological DNA is slowly being incorporated into the hive mind of the social network; I still don’t get it, but I can feel it in there changing the way I interact with the people and the world around me, changing the way I think.  I constantly feel like I am teetering on the edge of the cliff staring into the void of the Twittersphere, but at least I got six new followers on this week.

Magic & People Who Care

     I’d been out of school just long enough before starting my MLIS that I was starting to fall asleep without jolting awake thinking “PAPERS! PAPERS! OH GOD THEY’RE DUE!”.  I probably should be better about diligently doing my homework over the whole week if I want to avoid panic, but it’s just so easy to get distracted by, well, everything.  Even when I am interested in the topic I get distracted: sometimes it’s something as simple as getting caught up in an article only vaguely related to whatever topic I’m researching, other times I just have to spend half an hour shaping my fingernails.  Seriously, if they aren’t just right I might catch them on something and break them painfully.  My fingernails and eyebrows are never so well shaped as when I have a massive term paper looming.

     No matter how much I avoid the paper, or the discussion post however, it will always get written.  Usually by the time I finish writing I feel like I’ve just completed a great feat of athletic prowess and my brain must disengage from the world around it immediately to recover; once I even got stuck under a chair I was still technically sitting on (my hair somehow got under the wheels) after a fit of unbridled post-paper-pandiculation caused me loose my balance and my brain was too tired to figure out what was happening until I was staring at the underside of a dorm room desk chair.  I stopped locking my door while studying after than, just in case I ever found myself in need of rescue from the furniture again.

     Granted, this term the bulk of my writing projects are a bit shorter than MA thesis, but some of them aren’t really papers at all, these days I have to websites and videos, and write quizzes, and even occasionally EXAMS!  At least my my MA thesis I got to pick the topic.  Yes, my adviser made me completely rewrite chapter one and then later decided she liked the old way better and why wasn’t chapter two polished I only had to rewrite not re-research, what on earth was I doing with my time (watching Buffy), but at least I picked the topic.  These days I have to write about things like the relationships between Related Terms in an index, or review the online access of an archive.  Incidentally, it is not okay to say to the terms are related “because”, and the archive’s online presence is “pretty good, ‘nuff said”.  I know these things are important for me to know about, but frankly as far as I am concerned the indexes are created by magic and people who care.  I love the fact that there are people who care about creating indexes, and I’m coming to terms with the fact that I am not really one of them.  I care about not letting my team down for the group project, but I just don’t care what type of relationships we mean when we say terms are related.  
     Everything that I don’t care about for this semester is being made ten times more difficult to face by the fact I’ve signed up for classes for next term.  It’s almost here, I’ve paid for it, I can taste it, THE PENULTIMATE TERM!  And it should be fun.  Like really fun.  I’m taking medieval manuscripts paleography and codicology.  I know right?  So exciting you could just...well, maybe not you normal person, but I could.  I will also be doing an internship, so that is exciting.  The internship will be entirely remote work (my friend Adam says it sounds stupid if I say “virtual” and it’s better to call it “remote”, whatever Adam).  I’m pretty excited about that too, I think I wrote in my learning objectives something about using the skills I learned in the classroom in a non-traditional setting.  I have some experience as a marketing and publicity intern; this time however, it will be librarian things rather than publishing things, so it will be new and exciting.  But that is all later, for now I still have to deal with indexes and archives.  So it is back to scope notes and finding aids for the next month before the fun really begins.

On Writing

I used to write all the time.  It wasn’t always about important things—though one could make a reasonable argument that recording the everyday mundane is important—but it was always.  I wrote in class (usually not what I was supposed to be writing), in school assemblies, during (shudder) pep-rallies, watching T.V., eating lunch, sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night and reach for journal because I’d just thought of something—some droll observation or lepid anecdote—that must be recorded before I had any hope of sleeping again.  Eventually I didn’t write as much in a paper journal, though I continued to keep copious notes about my daily thoughts and experiences on paper for later, and I had my first blog.  There was, of course, overlap, a time when I had both a paper and a virtual journal, but my journal had never been for solely private consumption anyway and keeping it online just made it easier to share.

Sometimes I go back and look at the old journals (both on the shelf and online) and wonder why I stopped.  The obvious reason is that I graduated: I’d moved from paper and pen to laptop upon graduation from high school, and then just stopped writing my blog once I finished with (what I now consider “round 1” of) graduate school.  I guess it seemed like a natural break, my blog was a student blog and I was no longer a student.  Now of course I look back and think, so what?  Yes, I talked about classes and homework, but I also talked about travel, and books, and going out with friends, and interactions with strangers at bus stops.  Looking back I think the blog was not about student life, it was about the life of a student and then I think: I didn’t stop traveling, or reading, or meeting odd strangers on public transportation, so why did I stop writing about those things?  I never seem to be able to answer myself in a satisfactory way, but I do have an answer for why I don’t writing now.  It’s not that I don’t do and think things any more, but rather that I am horribly out of practice writing all the time, and no longer posses the youthful arrogance that assumes anybody cares.  Or maybe I never had that, sure I enjoyed when people read my blog and thought it was funny, or insightful, but all the time I wrote it I wrote it for me, back then the catharsis of writing was far more important than the being read.

I suppose that didn’t change, not really anyway.  I still find myself writing on scraps of paper, or typing my thoughts on Word or Google Docs when I am at my computer, the difference now is that I don’t post it.  Usually it gets lost or recycled, and nothing remains by the feeling of having purged my thoughts onto the page.

When I started my MLIS program I thought maybe I would start writing again, after all I was a student again, falling back into all my other old habits (good and bad) so why not thing one too?  I even had a class that required me to start a blog, or at the very least write specific entries into a blog I already had.  It was perfect, I had made an attempt to start a blog while working in a bookshop to keep track of book reviews and recommendations, but had not steadily kept it up—this was my chance to revive it, to reflect on my experiences in, and while in, school the way I had though high school, undergrad, and graduate school (round 1), and to create a record of my time as MLIS student I could look back on down the road.  Obviously things didn’t quite work out that way.

***

I never exactly fancied myself a writer, but I was a person who writes.  Even now I think of myself somewhat in those terms, my internal monologue certainly sounds like I’m writing and editing it even as I think (oddly, my internal monologue often speaks in a British accent—Fife, Yorkshire, or London mostly—depending on which friends I have been emailing or which BBC shows I have been watching.  It is actually quite jarring to hear myself speak when I have been left in my own head too long.  My external accent may not have been altered by my time abroad, but the little voices in my head have never quite left the UK), but I don’t write it down anymore, and I often find that not anchoring my thoughts on the page leaves them much more scattered than they used to be.

As may, or may not, be obvious from the asides, my thoughts don’t flow in a linear pattern.  They like to jump around and writing them down grounds them, the slowing down of the thought process that is the result of writing (mostly by hand, but to some degree typing as well) forces me to pay attention to the jumps and connections and I keep track of my own train of thought better.  In short, writing helps me be a better thinker; maybe that’s why it was always important to write EVERYTHING as a student, it cleared my mind to focus on my studies.  I very well may have finally figured out the purpose behind all those free writes my junior year English teacher made us do in high school, she wanted to teach us to think by forcing us to pay attention to our thoughts.  Of course the irony is the moment she told us to free write anything in our heads was the moment my inner monologue would practice being silent.

Letters to the senators

Most days my job is pretty standard for the office wench: I scan, I photocopy, I put things in envelopes to be mailed out by other people.  Some days, however, someone comes up with a task that turns unexpectedly odd.  Unbeknownst to me, earlier in the week one of the attorneys with whom I work asked a legal secretary to find out the proper address when writing a senator; little did she know finding an answer would involve three legal secretaries, several attorneys, at least two manager managers, and me (an “office specialist 1”).  It turns out no one really knows how to address a senator in a letter, and most people don’t really know where to find that information either.  Being a good little future librarian I took the question and hand and within about five minutes had three corroborating sources in the form of two government websites and Emily Post.  Turns out for state senators you’re really supposed to use Mr or Ms in the salutation (though you do address it to the Honorable So-and-so on the envelope); this came a rather a surprise to everyone, and it was generally agreed that it was “just like the federal government to address state senators as Mr or Ms rather than Senator!”.

It may not have been the most exciting thing that ever happened, but it did emphasize the importance of knowing where to look for the information you need.  And now, if any one asks me how they address a formal letter to a rabbi I know the proper salutation depends on whether or not they have a PhD, and I can write to any bishop—be they Catholic, Protestant, Methodist, or Mormon—pharmacist, or widow safe in the knowledge my etiquette has been fully vetted by the US government.

Resolutions

It’s a new year and a new term is just around the corner; once again classes are filled with possibility and I am filled with resolve to not write my papers the day they are due.  Seriously, I am getting so much worse at this, back in my undergrad days I have a very strict the-paper-must-be-finished-no-less-that-twelve-hours-before-it’s-due rule (by second semester “finished” because “all but final read through/edits”), but I’m pretty sure this past year I was still writing the last paper for my fall class two hours before the deadline—writing, not editing or proofing or submitting WRITING.  

I’m not usually one for resolutions, but every term I seem to find myself making them knowing full well my resolve won’t last past the second happy hour invite.  The knowledge that I am a serial procrastinator and do some of my best work on too-much-caffeine/too-little-sleep plan is little comfort in heat of the stressful midnights spent drinking cold tea typing till my fingers cramp.  This year, however I am going to be better (maybe)! I am going to get my work done extra early (probably through February)! and I am absolutely, positively going to be 100% (75%-80%) finished with my homework before I binge watch the last two seasons of Breaking Bad this weekend!

Vocabulary Lesson - Homophones (part 1)

Nobody is perfect.  Everyone makes mistakes when writing—typos, grammatical errors, silly misspellings, not noticing that auto correct has “fixed” your nephew’s name (Dex, with a "D" auto correct!) until after you’ve sent the text.  I myself am absolutely terrible at putting commas after prepositional phrases at the beginning of a sentence while I am typing, (most of the time it’s because I rewrite the sentence 8 times, combine with four other sentences and then move it to the opening paragraph because that’s where that idea really should be anyway) but that’s what editing is for: to catch, and fix, mistakes before it’s too late.

I don’t care about informal writing.  If it tickles your fancy in informal writing to throw in numerals, or drop vowels, or only write every third letter that’s fine by me—with the one giant caveat that you get your point across with a minimum of fuss for your intended audience.  Because communication is the point of writing.  Which brings me to my point.  WHY CAN’T PEOPLE WRITE?  I'm not talking about small children, these are college and graduate school educated people.  In my day, a missing Oxford comma was grounds for Comment (yes, with a capital C!) from the professor, and ridicule from classmate.  Then again, I was educated in Scotland where we had undergraduate gowns, and ran into the north sea at dawn on May 1, and they whacked us on the head with a bit of leather at graduation.  Perhaps an American education is less strict about punctuation. 

For most of the last two years I have been working a variety of temp jobs, I’ve been in HR in offices and universities, I’ve worked in law school admissions, and I’ve worked with college students seeking employment.  In nearly all the positions I’ve worked in the last two years, cover letters and resumes have crossed my desk on their way to hiring managers, and admissions officers.  With that many cover letters crossing my desk, I expect to see the occasional mistake, the key word there being OCCASIONAL.  The number of times I have seen the sentence “my interest was peaked…” is no longer a statistically probable typo, it’s a choice people are making.  While it is entirely possible all of those people did, in fact, mean that their interest had either reached a summit or was sickly looking, I feel the more likely scenario is that they simply don’t know the difference between “peaked” and “piqued”.  I always have a nasty little urge to write to them saying “While enjoying a delicious piquéd¹ chicken sandwich at lunch, I peeked² at your cover letter; my interest was piqued³ by your use of “peaked”⁴, is it possible you picked the wrong homophone?.”  I always imaging a confused look followed by their head exploding.  

 

---

1 adj. of meat, flavored with strips of bacon, larded.
2 v. to glance at, to pry (among many other meanings)
3 adj. characterized by an arousal of a feeling, esp. curiosity or interest (among many other meanings, none synonymous with “peaked”)
4 adj. (1) having reached a peak or point, (2) sickly looking