I r srs librarian. This r serious site. (A meta-post)
Those of you who are still subscribed to my RSS feed have, I’m sure, noticed a lack of bloggage here lately. Something about moving to a Domain of My Own, and putting it next to my professional portfolio, has made me slightly paranoid about writing anything in this space that might make me look unprofessional. I’ll want to blog about, say, knitting, or links to interesting but random stuff I find around the web, or what I made for dinner, and that’s the cue for the little inner voice to say “But colleagues and potential future employers will wonder why you’re blogging about that and not about Big Important Issues In Librarianship!” And I’ll think: hmm, nah, maybe I’ll just put that on Google Plus where I can regulate who sees it. Because having no new posts on the front page is better than looking like I’m not serious about my work.*
That inner voice sounds a lot like this LOLcat, as a matter of fact:
And then I get into the habit of squashing the urge to blog if it’s not up to my self-imposed standards of SRS LIBRARIAN-ness, so that even posts about things library- and IT-related don’t get written. (Is this too offhand? too outdated? too lightweight? too polemical? too jokey? Better be safe and not write it at all.) It’s not like the old (relatively) carefree days when I was a semi-anonymous blogger at Blogspot, or even a nymous blogger at Typepad. I love being able to point people to my very own site, but I think I’ve given myself a complex about what should go on it. Probably unnecessarily; as I said during the Ivan Tribble controversy, if potential future employers declined to hire me on account of my having a blog, I wouldn’t want to work for them anyway.
Anyway. All of that, plus being really busy and, consequently, too tired most evenings to spin words together, has led to a lot less writing for public consumption than I used to do. And that’s a pity; it’s not like I ever had a huge audience, and it’s not like I think my blog posts are so important that the world will be irreparably impoverished by not reading them. But too much of my writing energy has gone into the walled gardens of Facebook and Google Plus lately, and that doesn’t quite sit right with me.
So: from now on, when I hear that no-frivolous-blogging inner voice start up, I’m going to visualize it as a cat in an oversized bow tie, and laugh at it. Even when I’m not being a SRS LIBRARIAN, I’m going to try not to let self-consciousness stop me from blogging altogether. Hold me to that if I disappear again, please, Reader?
In closing: xkcd, as always, says it better than I can.
* I’m still working on ridding myself of the assumption that “serious about my work” = “thinks of nothing else during every waking minute.” I blame grad school for that one.
I have the exact same problem. Plus the need for a time machine and more hours in the day. It is extraordinarily difficult sometimes to balance between networking, being social (not necessarily the same thing), and doing research.
Anyways, hi! I will try to hold you to this new commitment of blogging in wilder gardens. It does feel different to read you here, rather than inside them.
Hi back! I didn’t know you had a new site! Looks lovely — I like the succulents (or are they cacti?).
And indeed: sometimes a TARDIS would come in very handy. Or a Time-Turner. But the TARDIS would be much cooler, obviously.
What Paige and Amanda said. And now I have the dilemma as to whether I should comment here under my pseudonym or my Real Name™. *laughs*