Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Not enough time in a day . . .
My online escapades consist mostly of working on my MLIS degree, reviewing email, checking this week’s weather, and managing my library account. While pursuing my online degree, I have participated in using wikis, creating screen casts, and interacting with patrons via chat reference. These are tools I’ve used for my coursework but not on a regular basis. Therefore the extent of my daily activities using social software is generally limited to checking email; while I have three different accounts, only one is used primarily for keeping in touch with friends and colleagues, while the other two are used as aggregators for school forum messages.
The main reason I’ve shunned social software on a personal level is my perception of the time involved using it. Once I’m online, I tend to go into addiction mode: checking email every half hour, clicking on interesting sounding hyperlinks, reading news and entertainment blips, searching anything and everything, etc. Therefore if I set up a social networking account such as Facebook, I would undoubtedly invest a significant amount of time checking it repeatedly throughout the day. This is a predicament for me since I often feel that I should be spending the majority of my time doing just about anything else besides being online. So it remains to be seen how I’ll do budgeting my time after I’ve delved further into the world of social software, and especially social networking.
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I feel the same about the amount of time social software seems to take. While I have become your average facebook addict, I definitely feel that my time would be better spent in the real world developing real connections and getting real things done.
ReplyDeleteBut the tricky thing is, it seems as if the "real" world and the digital world are becoming one. Our MLIS program is a perfect example. All this time I'm spending on my computer isn't just screen time; at the end of it, I'll have a REAL master's degree I can use in the "real" world. "Library 2.0" is a great example- a true merging of the real-world library with its digital presence to produce an entity that has real impact in both worlds. I think Blyberg did a great job in his blog demonstrating the "realness" of library 2.0. Even facebook is becoming real- I get a lot of important updates from SLIS in my feed! :) Good luck surfing the interwebs!
My son's high school uses Facebook for their daily bulletin, so I really "have to" check Facebook every day to be sure I'm keeping up with his school events.
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