The Death of the Library? A Lunchtime Twitter Conversation

April 22nd, 2009 • View Comments Communities, Toronto Social Media

Yesterday, as lunchtime approached, I was reflecting on two things: a) how hungry I was; and b) a comment made on Monday night about the potential death of the library due to the growth of augmented reality, and the ability to have the information we need at our fingertips. As content moves into a digital form, the book, as a unit with a limited lifespan (due to decay, etc) seems to be one on the decline.

I thought this was worthy enough to have a discussion over, and so I posed a question out to my Twitter community, which read:

Interesting thought out of last night’s #refreshevents: what do we really lose by the death of the library?

As Twitter is a largely digital society of people, I expected answers leaning towards very little, or nothing. What I got was actually pretty surprising. Out of the 41 replies that I received on the topic, more than half of them defended the experience that a library offers, or the benefits that come from having a shared space like that. They included:

First thing that comes to mind is access to books for kids. I remember signing out 10-12 books at a time in my younger years.
Jon Lim

The best smell in the world, and a kick-ass numeric cataloging system. Otherwise? Not much. Digital persists more tenaciously through replication and indexing.
Noah Zerkin

if you get rid of libraries, then how do people who can’t afford the internet learn?
Share Sigma Chi

nothing compares to sitting down with a good book. Libraries let us have access to free literature. Digital versions are not free.
Clarisse Mussi

Certain content is much better in book format as it needs to be read curled up in a big comfy chair.
Adam Thody

Interesting stuff for sure. Of course, then there was the other side, or people who may have not have taken things quite as seriously. Excerpts include (left anonymous; if you want credit, just ask):

…You don’t need to keep a shrine to dead trees to offer services to a community.

…What was the library’s URL again?

…We also lose the notion of ‘Naughty Librarians’ Dear God No!

…Books are overrated. I can learn everything I need from the back of a cereal box. For example, did you know Trix are for kids?

Again, interesting stuff, but perhaps not as… academically appealing as some of the previous reasons.

Paige Dzenis brought up a great point I thought on the difference between print and digital:

There’s studies about how we interact with paper and digital differently; paper invites you in, digital becomes an extension of self, so the relationship (interactivity and engagement-wise) we enjoy when reading books etc on paper is hard to replicate on a screen

I think that’s incredibly valid, and one of the hardest things left for digital to tackle. The Kindle is a step in the direction of having a tactile reading device, but doesn’t quite tackle that gap. If we completely remove the paper experience, maybe people would learn how to adapt digital to fit their needs, but that’s an uncertainty that we can’t answer.

So what do I think? The library is a location that isn’t going to disappear. Between the fact that for many it’s the first contact in a community for many newcomers, a host of resources directly available for free, and helpful staffers who can point you in the right direction, the library serves a useful role for our society. It will certainly have to adapt to meet some changes – more eBook access, smart recommendations on site, an updating of content, access to different types of media – but I think the space is too valuable for us to lose.

What do you think? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Thoughts on Kuznicki’s “Birth of Swarm Intelligence”

January 12th, 2009 • View Comments Communities, Toronto Social Media

Mark Kuznicki has written a fantastic post regarding Twitter, its ability as a platform to allow us to work together, and the problems faced from that sort of scenario. At the time, I somewhat facetiously told him that I thought it was the best post of ’09 thus far (when it was posted at Jan 5th); upon further reflection and seeing discussion on it, both on Twitter and his blog, I still feel quite strongly about it. Read his post, and then come back for my thoughts below.

Twitter as a platform, for any of you who haven’t used it, carries many different possibilities for usage. When it was first introduced, it was pitched as a micro-blogging platform, and as a way for you to let your friends and colleagues know what you were doing. (In fact, that’s still what Twitter promotes as their model; witness their catchphrase still being “What are you doing?”) However, in certain geographic areas, Twitter is becoming more of a tool for conversations, and from these conversations become action. Mark talks about a few Toronto-centric examples, and I’ve had discussions with a few people on the difference between using it to update versus to converse. I think that both the ability to reach a large network instantaneously but be forced to be clear and eloquent as you are confined to 140 characters has contributed greatly to the sense that anyone can collaborate without it seeming like too much of a timesink. In essence, because it doesn’t seem like you’re spending time doing work, and because you’re working together to co-create things, you’re able to be far more efficient and get far more done.

Mark raises a few different questions that the advent of this going forward would raise, mainly in the split between the connected and the non-connected:

To realize the potential of this collective intelligence, we have problems to solve:

1. How do we involve, include and reflect the values of the non-connected periphery in our hyper-connected core?
2. How do the myriad fleeting ideas that emerge find stable structures to see them through to execution?
3. How will existing structures have to adapt in order to allow this new potential to be realized and harnessed?
4. Whose interests are served by the new emergent order and whose interests are harmed? How will those conflicting interests be negotiated?

Out of these four questions, I find the fourth the most interesting, and tied in directly with the previous three. When looking at the conversational elements of these networks, tied in with the ability to move things forward through virtual communication, you do end up leaving a lot of people by the wayside. At present moment, who you end up serving are those in the tech community, and whatever interests they may have and share. There is some pushback on whether you will need to adapt these methods to ensure inclusion.

However, I’m going to take the approach maybe expected of a tech-savvy 20-something, and say that those of us currently using this tool to accomplish these goals shouldn’t have to change anything. Should we continue to prove its effectiveness in getting things done and providing meaningful change, the world will learn to adapt to us. Twitter is not a difficult tool to use by any means; if it continues to be successful, people will educate themselves on how to use it. In the meantime, in order to get some of those voices we may desire on certain projects, it falls upon the community to reach out to convince these voices of the necessity of their inclusion, and of the benefits that being included may provide to them. That’s not an unrealistic proposition. Shall they not want to be included, both we and they will have to find alternate means to accomplish the goals we all set forward. I’m not approaching this with a “my-way-or-the-highway” mindset; merely demonstrating that outreach can occur in both ways, but if swarm intelligence proves to be the way to go and you aren’t responding to it, there shouldn’t be an expectation of the community to have to bring you into the fold.

In case it isn’t obvious, both Kuznicki’s post and my commentary should be propelling you towards using Twitter; if you currently aren’t using it, and have no desire to do so, I’d be curious to hear your reasoning behind it.

#HoHoTO – Toronto’s Twitter Holiday Party

December 16th, 2008 • View Comments Toronto Social Media
Tags: #HoHoTO, social networking, Toronto, Twitter

Weird here is normal. Weird here is the extreme somewhere else. - Champions of Nothing, Matthew Good

I couldn’t help having the above quote echoing through my head last night before attending #HoHoTO, a holiday party for the Toronto Twitter community, raising funds (and foods) for the Daily Bread Food Bank. Any time you gather “people of that ilk” together in a large group, one never really knows what to expect. Last night’s event, though certainly not without a couple of people that didn’t quite fit in, really relieved any of the concerns I had, and has already become a must-attend every year for me. After the break, a few thoughts of mine on the experience I had with everything surrounding the event.

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