rage against the acronym, cont

I have always prided myself on being able to handle the technological onslaught as it comes, adding and subtracting email addresses and user id's with ease. But I have to admit that I am starting to feel… weighed down.

In many ways, the iPhone has helped me immensely. I stay on top of my spam email account now (which catches all unwellness email and anything else I do out in the Internets) as easily as I do my private email because I can check both with ease in a few clicks. I can check my work email from the phone. Our family calendar situation has been totally tamed with the phones and google's help.

But the amount of information to read and consume… has quintupled. It was already my area of feeling out-of-control. I am now a devoted NY Times reader with the app and I wasn't before. Friends are constantly posting helpful, interesting or important links to articles in their Facebook status updates. My blog reader is perpetually at 1000+ unread posts and every few months I give up. I can't decide what to do about it. I know the answer involves culling and limiting and editing and none of those things are my strong suit. I did categorize blogs a while back and this helps me keep on top of the ones that matter – IVP, IRL, Librarians….

Which brings me to the conundrum at hand. Another dreaded acronym.

Professional (or Personal). Learning. Network. Or PLN, on every. single. fricking. librarian. blog. Ugh.

Why? Why why why? Why must everything get a CUTE NAME? WHY?

I am drawn to look up a social history of acronyming. I would assume I would find that people like to make things shorter, that saying "The blogs and twitter feeds and online articles I read on a regular basis" is just too long. Fine, I guess. But let's be clear that we are basically talking about using RSS feeds and bookmarks and such. Using something like Google Reader to read them. Forming a community of colleagues. This is not revolutionary. Bloggers have been doing it for quite some time.

I think it speaks to much more. If I try really really hard to pull away the layers of my grumpy onion self, I guess some inner part of me can try to be empathetic to the people who use this term the most. I think it might have something to do with that vaguely useless premise, "the digital native." I would posit that perhaps "digital natives" (a term I sort of grudgingly apply to myself) are not really using the phrase "Personal Learning Network" to describe their online activities. It's just LIFE. The Internet is so much a part of my daily life that I don't need to name it anything or announce that I am LEARNING now. I am learning all day long. I am online all day long. I am connected at pretty much all times.This is one of those facts that makes some people shake their heads and wrinkle their noses. It is one of those facts that is simply true about a large percentage of the people my age and younger that I know.

It is only going to be more so.

My biggest current complaint about organizing and reviewing the scads of information that comes through my computer each day is that it feels like it all needs to be double. To borrow the hated terms, it feels like I need one network for my "Personal Learning" and one for my "Professional Learning." While at the same time, I long for them to merge into one easy-to-manage smorgasbord. And yet I am not quite at a place where I am willing to use my personal twitter account to follow my own school, or bigtime librarians or educators or authors with whom I might converse. I am not ready to create a googlewave account in my private email address name and share it with my colleagues. I am not ready for my library's blog to be tied to my gmail. I am constantly doublechecking to see whether I am commenting on a professional blog using this blog's address and then wondering whether it matters since anyone could google me anyway.

I was talking about this with my assistant yesterday in an exciting "let's try all the things online we haven't tried before and figure out what is good and bad about them" afternoon. We signed up for Delicious and then found some quirks we found too annoying. I am trying Diigo now and liking it better. I tried StumbleUpon and found it sort of a timewaster. I read about many of the other Social Bookmarking and Sharing options.

What I am searching for is a cure for the doubling factor. What if I want one list of articles and posts in a "personal" list and one in a "professional" list and want to be able to share the professional articles with colleagues without them seeing my collection of articles on, oh, let's say… raising pet rats or something. What if I want to tweet with my professional peers about library matters or with my bosses about education without them all seeing that I was ramped up and tweeting all over the Top Chef Party during the finale (Yay #tcparty! Boo that @topchefkevin didn't win!). The first conundrum might just be possible – still determining how. The second one seems impossible. Can I really have TWO twitter identities when I can't even keep up with the first one?

So I ask myself whether it's realistic to keep my two lives separate forever. My assistant countered that it's perfectly natural to want a private life. But I am still shaking my head. How can I be OK with throwing up a blog with my name attached and a deep archive of mental illness and cervical mucus and yet find the idea of my colleagues reviewing my Top Chef tweets a bit embarrassing? What's the big deal if the technology committee sees what I like to read about in my spare time? How much of a private life do I actually need? "You wouldn't want kids emailing you at night," my assistant said, mentioning that even though she could always just wait and answer it the next day, the fact of it in her inbox would feel like it was hanging over her head. I think I felt the same way a decade ago. But now I have little trouble letting something sit overnight in my inbox. And if a kid had a quick question at night and I could shoot back an email with a web address (something that happened twice this week), I would totally not mind doing that. I am sitting there with the laptop open all night anyway. Why wouldn't I help my kiddos with a quick task?

There is so much going on here. There is my strangely intense rage against acronyms that really needs further psychological consult. There is my overwhelmedness at the intensity of information flow. There is my excitement over the possibilities of information and education and my tiny kernel of hope that I might be able to revolutionize my library program if I can just get it all under control and teach it the right way and figure out what to teach and with what equipment and when and how and with whom.

<pant pant pant pant>

Here. Go read this article.