I’ve had a Twitter account for a couple years now, ever since my boss (who might be the coolest librarian in the world), encouraged me to plug in to the greater library world that way...and via Flock, a social browser which I loved until it was announced it would no longer be supported as of April 2011.  I admire cool librarians who have RSS feeds and Twitter accounts and library friends on Facebook and professional contacts on LinkedIn.  And I believe I read an article for LIBR 246 which encouraged young soon-to-be professionals to get an account set up with every social media outlet they can think of.  Start setting up your brand.  Make your name about YOU and what YOU stand for.  Influence and be influenced.  Aggregate and disseminate.  What can be easier than having information from your chosen information providers show up every day on your computer!  Ask and ye shall receive.  Seek and ye shall find.  

But getting information to flow your way is not the whole battle.  Honestly, I find it challenging to take the time at work to peruse the many tweets of the 136 Twitterers I follow.  I haven’t figured out a good way to do it.  After all, do I just scan the first page of the latest tweets?  Should I go back a ways and try to catch up?  Should I use TweetDeck to be instantaneously notified of the freshest news / opinion / personal thought?  In addition to tweets, I have 157 RSS feed subscriptions, and even though I have divided them up into daily and weekly categories, I still feel GUILTY taking time to go through these feeds.  After all, what am I really gleaning from them?  Is it worth using work time to read them?  Goodness knows that once I’m off the clock and at home, I spend as little time in front of computer as possible.  There’s lots of tweets and feeds I simply enjoy--but most of those do not pertain to “library and information science.”  Of those that do pertain to my field of study, many are excellent blogs & tweets--well-written, relevant, insightful, engaging...and varied.  At this point in my life, I feel as though I’m following too many people and too many ideas.  After all, I work full time in a specific library department, dealing with specific issues for specific patrons.  I’m taking two MLIS classes with clearly defined objectives.  And when I’m not immersed in the library world (some days this amounts to a scant few waking hours), I want to think my OWN thoughts, not absorb and process someone else’s.

So what do I think of Twitter?  The whole Twitterverse is a pretty cool way to have a conversation--or rather, multiple conversations--about anything of [fleeting / immediate] interest.  But for me, in my current, very focused, very time-sensitive world, I don’t have the resources to digest a wealth of information from many excellent info providers.  I don’t have the desire, and it’s simply not prudent at this juncture of my library career.  My tune may change when it comes time to develop my e-portfolio and suddenly I’m confronted with the need to articulate over-arching views of the facets of librarianship.  But for right now, I need to ignore most of my 136 Twitter friends and my 157 RSS feeds to simply get through the day.  In the future, I fully intended to prune my info providers down to my favorites--professionally and personally.  That’s a valuable skill we need as librarians, the ability to sort through the noise to the music.  But for now, I just want as much quiet as I can gather. 

P.S.  Despite wanting to limit my Twitter exposure right now, I REALLY want to read Goodnight Tweetheart

[a Love Story in 140 Characters or Less] by TeresaMedeiros, (Book - 2011).  Looks like a fun way to learn about the ins and outs of Twitter!