Thing 8: Communication, Web 2.0 style

Instant Messaging

I have used IM for customer service and technical support in my personal life, and in that context, I’ve liked it pretty well.  I don’t love to talk on the telephone.  (Okay, let me rephrase that because my husband, who calls me Chatty Cathy, would certainly beg to differ with that statement.  I don’t love to talk on the telephone with people who are not my family or friends.)  When I have questions about something, I would prefer to put it in writing...then you don’t wind up having to repeat it 37 times when you are transferred from person to person on the telephone.  You can explain everything in great detail, and it doesn’t go away the minute the words are out of your mouth.  E-mail makes that possible, and IM goes one step further by providing you with an “instant” response...a hybrid combining the best features of both telephone and e-mail.

Of late, I’ve been sucked into the Facebook craze, and I’ve used the IM function there to chat with online friends.  In terms of staying in touch, that’s really a pretty neat trick, too.  I would IM an online friend on Facebook and chat with them for a few minutes, when in most cases, I would not just pick up the phone and call them to talk.  You’re both there already, and it seems to me like it takes less time, effort, and planning than a “keep in touch” phone call.  I’ve had the opportunity to chat and catch up with old friends that I haven’t seen or talked to in years, and that’s been fun.

I did also use IM to chat with a fellow 23 Things participant, a colleague at another library.  We practiced our skills for a few minutes one evening, and I think that while we probably won’t win any IM contests, we can probably hold our own against the IM skills of the general public.

There are some downsides to IM, too, though.  As a perfectionist, I find it difficult to throw capitalization, punctuation, and typos to the wind and just type for content and speed, but the more I use IM, the better I get at these things.  I don’t know the language of IM (lol, ttyl, ttfn are about the extent of my knowledge, and that last one may, in fact, be Tigger language, not IM), but I know that will come with more use.  And if you have a whole lot to say, sometimes it is just easier to pick up the phone.

Regardless of the challenges, I can see how it would be particularly useful when doing reference to be able to go back and review what the person said a moment ago, an option that’s only as good as your memory (and mine’s getting worse everyday) when doing an in-person or telephone reference interview.

Text Messaging

I’m definitely not part of the text messaging “revolution.”  I’ve never sent a text message, and what’s more, I have no desire to ever do so, although I suppose that could change in time.  I find it really annoying when I get junk texts on my cell phone.  I’m one of those people who doesn’t even turn her cell phone on unless she’s talking on it.  I just don’t think I want to be that “available” all the time.  That said, I can see how sending library users text notices to their cell phones could be a useful tool, because I realize that I’m probably in the minority when it comes to my feelings on text messaging.

 

Web Conferencing

I’ll have to cover Web Conferencing in another post.  The next OPAL program on the master schedule is on February 6 at 2 pm, and I won’t be able to do that one.  I’ll have to come back and finish Thing 8 after I have a chance to use OPAL.  Although, I am supposed to do an online meeting via some sort of web conferencing software on Friday, so maybe that will count?

I attended a meeting via web conferencing the other day, and that had its good points and its bad points.  The primary good thing about it was that I didn’t have to leave my city and travel to the meeting location, so attending via web conferencing saved me anywhere from 6-7 hours of my time plus the expense of the travel.  That’s huge!  The worst thing was that because there were multiple people speaking at the meeting, the sound wasn’t always good.  Sometimes it was fine, and sometimes it was impossible to hear because it wasn’t feasible to move the microphone around every time someone different spoke.  With an program like OPAL where they are broadcasting more programs than meetings, I expect that the sound would be just fine.  In this particular meeting, I did have video and access to documents that were discussed, and I did have the ability to chat with other meeting attendees, so the struggle with the sound was definitely worth the trade-off for me.