eSociety: Discovering Humanity in the Digital

Open source, no attribution from memegenerator.com As a public library employee with aspirations of becoming a social media librarian one day, I am interested in an oddly specific subset of digital culture that isn't discussed often in the digital or public sphere. Each week, I will strive to uncover new voices in this conversation, provide personal insights on the diversity contained within this seemingly minuscule area of digital culture, and discuss the potential impacts of libraries on social media both for libraries and the communities they serve. The Evolving Library "Wait, libraries are still a thing? I thought they would be all obsolete by now, since the Internet's where everyone gets their information!" I hear this (or some iteration) pretty much every time I tell someone that I want to be a librarian, and I've gotten pretty excellent at honing the perfect response. So to answer your question if you're one of the confused, or maybe vali...

Tweets have become a political tool of expression, information, and argumentation. While in some cases this is intentional, in the interesting and controversial case of Donal Trump, tweets may just be bullshit. According to Harry Frankfurt, bullshit is everywhere. Everyday we slog through mountains of the epistemically disgusting stuff. But what does bullshit made digital look like? One potential example which receives quite a lot of air time may be President Donald Trump's Twitter feed. The Trump presidency and campaign are in and of themselves controversial, however those are not the subject of this piece. We will be focusing on the nature of content that comes from this source, how it qualifies as bullshit, and on the epistemic implications of this. This exploration will solely discuss the quality of this source of information, and how its content impacts others. The inconsistency that can be found in Donald Trump's tweets is certainly not new; as Stephen Colbert expre...

Everyone has an opinion on the morality of social media use, and about what it means to use social media - you have an opinion on these matters yourself! But do you really know the complexity of this thing you are forming an opinion about? In a time when the terms 'social media' and 'new media' are too often used incorrectly, I hope to help you understand not only what these terms mean, but also to understand that this new tool, by definition, is hard to understand completely. Especially since we are in the midst of constantly experiencing new media every day! I decided to talk to people about their social media experiences: their perceptions, the impact it's had on their lives, their best and worst moments, and what they thought made social media experiences different from those is real life. In these interviews, I discovered that just as in society, everyone chooses to use social tools to interact with each other at varying frequencies and venues, and that we al...