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Revisiting my medium

I’ve decided to try and change the way I interact online, and have already made a few changes that almost certainly no one has noticed but me. The first is that while I visit and “use” Facebook, I have never actually liked it very much and do so really only because that’s where the people are. On the other hand, I really do enjoy Twitter, and am far more engaged there than I ever was or will be on Facebook. I was piping my Twitter posts into Facebook, just as a simulacrum of interaction…but I don’t think I want to do that anymore. So I’m not.

I have also gone weeks this year without blogging, and after consideration, I don’t like that very much. Why not just use Facebook to write things like this? Because I really do feel very strongly about controlling how my words are displayed, and I want to own my own voice. So I’m going to try to blog more frequently, about things that I find interesting, and share those things out to Facebook and Twitter and elsewhere…but I want to try and make my blog somewhere people can come and learn about what I’m doing and what I think is cool in the world. It used to be that, and I think I need it to be that again.

The TL;DR version is: I’m going to try and blog more, and share more accurately the things that I think are interesting or important. I will use Facebook and Twitter as other channels to talk, but if the medium really is the message, I don’t want my message to be Facebook and Twitter. I want the medium to be my own.

By griffey

Jason Griffey is the Director of Strategic Initiatives at NISO, where he works to identify new areas of the information ecosystem where standards expertise is useful and needed. Prior to joining NISO in 2019, Jason ran his own technology consulting company for libraries, has been both an Affiliate at metaLAB and a Fellow and Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and was an academic librarian in roles ranging from reference and instruction to Head of IT at the University of TN at Chattanooga.

Jason has written extensively on technology and libraries, including multiple books and a series of full-periodical issues on technology topics, most recently AI & Machine Learning in Libraries and Library Spaces and Smart Buildings: Technology, Metrics, and Iterative Design from 2018. His newest book, co-authored with Jeffery Pomerantz, will be published by MIT Press in 2024.

He has spoken internationally on topics such as artificial intelligence & machine learning, the future of technology and libraries, decentralization and the Blockchain, privacy, copyright, and intellectual property. A full list of his publications and presentations can be found on his CV.
He is one of eight winners of the Knight Foundation News Challenge for Libraries for the Measure the Future project (http://measurethefuture.net), an open hardware project designed to provide actionable use metrics for library spaces. He is also the creator and director of The LibraryBox Project (http://librarybox.us), an open source portable digital file distribution system.

Jason can be stalked obsessively online, and spends his free time with his daughter Eliza, reading, obsessing over gadgets, and preparing for the inevitable zombie uprising.

3 replies on “Revisiting my medium”

I very much agree with your comments here and have done the same myself! I was an early adopter of F@cebook in 2006 thanks to my student workers at Miami University and later joined Twitter. Over the course of time, I grew more and more concerned with privacy issues, and then later issues of true content ownership. Coming from a corporate background, I have long ago subscribed to the idea Steve Gibson has said where “all the cloud is, is your saving your data on someone else’s hard drive.” In that, you just can’t control it in reality… I never worry about the NSA and my comments, but I do worry about the marketers. There’s no way to stop them really, all I can do is interrupt their data feed on my activities and leaving Facebook and limiting my interactions with Google and Amazon seem to be the best I can do.

I’ve been inspired by a lot of your work over time, and for the past year I’ve been working on ideas around microcomputers as servers, and an “anti-cloud” ideology for library services (especially for small/special libraries). During this research, I’ve also used “Little Snitch” on my Mac as an application level firewall to monitor my web browsing in detail. Over time, I have grown more and more disheartened with the amount of connections my system makes to other services when doing simple acts such as loading my LinkedIn page. I have abandoned Facebook more than two years ago, so I can only imagine what Little Snitch would report if I logged back on to load my feed there…

Thank you for all the great work and content you put out to the library community.

Mike Wells
Northern Kentucky University

This is awesome, I look forward to reading more! I keep telling myself that I will blog, too. Over the past several months, I have made accounts on all of the major social networking sites, but I don’t remember to use all of them. But, if one of them needs to “go”, it will be Facebook. I still check it for news relating to my friends and family, but I don’t think I’ll be posting much any more.

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