[AUDIO PLAYBACK - Clip from "The League"]
- Please stop it, all of you.
You guys are so annoying.
All this online social interaction 24 hours a day,
seven days a week.
Jenny, can you please stop posting
pictures of your stupid kid all the time?
- Guys, Taco's got a point, OK?
I mean, the whole, like, Twitter, Facebook thing,
it's getting a little out of hand.
- Well, I've come up with an alternative.
I've created the first ever offline social network.
- I think this has been happening for a while, Taco.
It's called society.
- It's better than society.
It's MyFace.
[END PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
CHARLIE BENNETT: You are listening to WREK Atlanta,
and this is MyFace.
No, this is Lost in the Stacks, the Research Library
Rock'n'Roll radio show.
I am Charlie with a cold, in the studio with Abby, Fred, Liz,
Wendy, and Matthew.
Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme
and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk.
Whichever you're here for, we hope you dig it.
FRED RASCOE: Hope you pull through there, Charlie.
Sounding a little rough.
CHARLIE BENNETT: I'm doing my best.
FRED RASCOE: A little bit.
CHARLIE BENNETT: I was doing great
until I started laughing at Taco there.
FRED RASCOE: Our show today is called Delete Yourself
From Social Media.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Easy there.
Is that a call to action?
WENDY HAGENMAIER: No, but we are going
to talk about why we might extricate ourselves
from online social networks, whether it's even possible to do
so, and we might just talk a little bit about what
this has to do with libraries.
CHARLIE BENNETT: We got to.
It's a library radio show.
WENDY HAGENMAIER: We'll also be welcoming
one of our Georgia Tech Library colleagues,
a returning guest producer of this show, to the discussion.
FRED RASCOE: If you want to join the conversation online,
the hashtag for this show is LITS447
for Lost in the Stacks, episode 447.
If you want to join the conversation offline,
post a handwritten message on MyFace board.
I keep it on a wall in my office.
You log in by knocking on the door.
WENDY HAGENMAIER: Our songs today
are about disconnecting, disappearing,
and what happens next.
Sometimes when we log on to social media,
we're looking for a community, but find out we're
in the wrong neighborhood.
So let's start with a track about being out of place
and escaping.
This is "Patient Zero" by Amy Mann right here on Lost
in the Stacks.
FRED RASCOE: "Patient Zero" by Amy Mann.
Today's Lost in the Stacks is called Delete Yourself
From Social Media.
And joining our crew today is returning guest producer
Liz Holdsworth, STEM librarian here at the Georgia Tech
Library.
And today's topic is whether we should delete social media,
and if so, whether we really can.
So quick round robin in the room.
Who's on what social media?
Charlie?
CHARLIE BENNETT: That's a little personal, don't you think, Fred?
FRED RASCOE: Well, that's what social media is all about.
It's about making connections.
CHARLIE BENNETT: I'm on Twitter for now.
FRED RASCOE: OK.
So it's got an endpoint.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Oh, yeah.
FRED RASCOE: I think you mentioned in a previous show.
Maybe next year.
CHARLIE BENNETT: I'm looking forward to blowing it up.
Yeah.
FRED RASCOE: Right.
CHARLIE BENNETT: How about you?
What are you on?
FRED RASCOE: I still have a Twitter account that I don't--
CHARLIE BENNETT: You don't use it.
You're not on Twitter.
FRED RASCOE: Yeah.
I really just need to delete the account
because I've never checked it.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Delete yourself from social media, man.
FRED RASCOE: I think so.
Liz, our guest today, how about you?
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: I have three active social media accounts.
So I'm active on Instagram, I have a professional Facebook,
and then I have a personal Facebook.
And then I've got a neglected Pinterest page, a neglected
Twitter account, and I can't even remember.
I think I never deleted Myspace.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Oh, wow.
They might have done it for you.
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: Yeah, it's probably gone.
FRED RASCOE: Is there a Friendster in there somewhere?
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: No.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Wendy?
WENDY HAGENMAIER: So I think I started with Facebook.
That was early adopter.
I still have an account.
I really hate it.
And I've thought about deleting it several weekends
ever since we've been talking about this.
And I just don't even want to look at it to delete--
there's pain going on there.
And so I'm working through it, but I'm likely to delete it.
At the same time, I can recognize some value
in some kind of social media.
And I also have neglected Twitter and Instagram
and Pinterest accounts, but I don't really look at anything.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Let's move to the younger demographic
in the room.
Abby, what are you on?
ABBY: I have a Facebook that I guess I use to waste time.
Not very actively in any sort of posting capacity--
CHARLIE BENNETT: Already making the point of the show for us.
ABBY: I have a very neglected Instagram
that I didn't even start myself, but is technically under my name
that my friend started for me.
FRED RASCOE: Do you have the password?
ABBY: I do.
I've just never actually posted a picture to it myself.
So that one's fun, but I-- yeah, it's just kind of
been sitting there.
I don't know if LinkedIn counts.
LinkedIn is like a weird--
FRED RASCOE: Oh, I forgot, I have a LinkedIn.
ABBY: Weird space because it counts,
but it's just like a more professional Facebook.
CHARLIE BENNETT: I'd like to point out
that I was thorough enough to delete my LinkedIn also.
ABBY: Wow.
Matthew?
MATTHEW: I have Twitter.
I'm probably going down with that ship.
I like it too much, I guess.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Oh, dear.
MATTHEW: I also have LinkedIn.
That's my two.
FRED RASCOE: But you actually deleted Facebook
pretty recently, right?
MATTHEW: Oh, yeah.
A couple months ago.
Yeah.
And it's led to me not knowing about parties in my own house
and other funny--
CHARLIE BENNETT: That's not just a joke, folks.
We learned about this, that Matthew did not
know there was a party at his house until he arrived home.
MATTHEW: Because I was not on the Facebook group.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Because he was not on Facebook.
MATTHEW: Because parties have Facebook groups now.
I don't know if you guys know this.
Like, that's how kids organize parties.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Hey, don't push your politics on us.
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: I have been to a party that
was organized on Facebook.
CHARLIE BENNETT: All right.
So I heard, so I can waste time, neglected.
I also heard, I like it too much.
And I didn't really hear anybody talk about a purpose
to social media.
Does anyone have a purpose in mind
that you could say is the argument against deleting?
Oh, both of you leaned in.
How about Abby first?
ABBY: I guess Pinterest was one that was mentioned that I didn't
say, but I have a Pinterest.
And I use it more as a kind of specialized search engine.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah?
ABBY: Because I use it to find new recipes
and like new things to bake, and so it's still a creative outlet.
I don't know if I'm really actively
like pinning things or anything like that.
But I do use it pretty frequently as a resource.
MATTHEW: My girlfriend has a very large extended family,
and she's very close with them.
She moved from New Jersey.
They all live in the same neighborhood,
so she uses it keep in touch with everybody.
CHARLIE BENNETT: There we go.
Liz, I think that brings us to what you were saying off-air
about what the purpose of a social media network or account
might be.
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: Oh, sure.
So I can talk about my experiences pre-social media.
I was a queer teenager in a tiny little town in Tennessee.
We had the internet, but we didn't have social media.
So I found other gay people, especially
queer teenagers and teenagers who
are facing the same problems I had,
on websites and message boards, and being
able to talk to people who are going through the same thing
that I was going through.
And funnily enough, I still use it that way as an adult, just
not quite the same way in terms of social support, but more,
what is-- since gay people aren't a hive mind, what are all
the different ideas coming up?
FRED RASCOE: You know, you mentioned
growing up in a small town.
In a small town, everyone tends to know something
about everybody else in that small town.
And social media is kind of sharing that small town
information with a big town, a global town.
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: Oh, yeah.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Creating a small town
that is not defined by geography,
but is defined by interest and identity.
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: Absolutely.
Except that people have access to you.
So in my small town--
Fred and I were talking about early in the week,
I had a super embarrassing high school
incident where my pants got totally torn open
and I was wandering around through my day
until one of my girlfriends took me aside and was like, hey,
by the way, your butt is hanging out of your pants.
I was like, oh, thanks.
Thanks for letting me know.
Get the stapler.
And that happened.
But it was in the context of a group of people who also know
about the play I acted in, and the cross country team I ran on,
and sharing the mat with me during nap time in kindergarten.
So it's like an embarrassing event in a lifetime
of, for the most part, support.
CHARLIE BENNETT: OK.
Well, so now that's a pretty good case for social media,
to try and recreate that sort of network.
We're almost done with this segment so let's go at it hard.
Why should we or why would we delete a social media account?
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: Because when my pants tear open
and somebody has their camera phone
out and then puts it on Facebook and Instagram or wherever,
I don't have that context, that supporting community.
I am now the butt of the joke for 300 million people.
CHARLIE BENNETT: OK, that's your pun.
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: Yes.
CHARLIE BENNETT: For the show?
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: Yes.
I'm so proud of that.
FRED RASCOE: Well done.
Also, I think in social media, the pants tearing open
tends to usually be self-inflicted.
CHARLIE BENNETT: In order to get likes?
FRED RASCOE: Or accidental.
Yeah.
CHARLIE BENNETT: I feel like there's
a fragmentation of identity when you're talking about the history
that you share with people, their understanding of you.
Everyone's got a version of their friends in their head.
And the idea of there being another sort
of automated version that sort of
pulled out of a statistically very small number
of preferences and actions that then lives online, like an AI.
That just seems kind of creepy and wrong.
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: Yes.
And?
We also have diaries.
The diary that didn't get thrown in the fire when your family
destroys your paper--
papers in the 19th century where we can know somebody's thoughts
or their letters that maybe they wouldn't have shared.
The person who's coming to mind is--
oh, who wrote Ulysses?
WENDY HAGENMAIER: James Joyce?
CHARLIE BENNETT: James Joyce?
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: James Joyce.
Read his papers one day.
CHARLIE BENNETT: I don't think I will.
I like the books I don't want anymore.
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: He's got some very specific feelings.
CHARLIE BENNETT: OK.
Fred, do you feel like we've laid the groundwork
for the rest of the show?
FRED RASCOE: I'm going to delete my social media and everyone
else's, too.
CHARLIE BENNETT: This is good.
I like this.
I like this a lot.
WENDY HAGENMAIER: This is Lost in the Stacks,
and we'll be back with more about deleting ourselves
from social media after a music set.
File this set under HM742.P3723.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
CHARLIE BENNETT: That was Link Wray doing the Willie Dixon tune
"Taildragger," and before that, "Becoming Shadows"
by Stef Chura.
Songs about disappearing and covering your tracks.
WENDY HAGENMAIER: Welcome back to Lost in the Stacks.
In the last segment, we talked about why
we might want to hit the eject button on our social media
accounts.
But even if we want to do that, can we?
In a previous show, we talked about life
without GAFAM, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft.
Of those companies, Facebook is the company that many of us
here on the show have successfully eliminated
from our lives, or some of us.
Are we confident in that deletion?
When Facebook says we don't keep your data, do we believe them?
CHARLIE BENNETT: No.
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: No.
CHARLIE BENNETT: In fact, they will put stuff on your operating
system, on your browser to keep tracking you even
when you're not logged into Facebook.
So clearly, they are keeping something.
FRED RASCOE: Yeah.
I think it's just too valuable.
They would not be able to--
even if they deleted your account,
you never logged on to Facebook, again.
the two, three five years, whatever
you spend on Facebook, the data that you have given to them
is just too valuable in the other applications and business
opportunities that they undoubtedly want to pursue.
They might even want to know what you did in your last six
months before you deleted your Facebook account
so they know how to maybe stop other people from deleting
their Facebook account.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Now, certainly, that's one of the reasons
to delete your Facebook, because of the recognition
that your data is being used, is being recorded in a way
that you don't have much control over.
But I deleted my Facebook so that my behavior would change.
That's my main reason.
And that has worked, and that's a real thing.
FRED RASCOE: We should add, this is
our speculation about Facebook.
Yeah.
We're totally operating on a, what do we think,
not what we actually have evidence of.
CHARLIE BENNETT: It is true that there was the recognition
that there was tracking when you were not
logged into Facebook if you used your personal web
browser, iOS, whatever.
So that's out there.
ABBY: But that's also something that Facebook is not
the only one that uses that.
So it's not like they have some special tool where they're
the only ones tracking you.
Like, that's how you get targeted ads for--
CHARLIE BENNETT: Oh, I think Mark Zuckerberg
is a very special kind of tool.
ABBY: I mean, yes, but.
Facebook isn't the only company doing that.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Does anybody here think you cannot delete
your Facebook, either socially or professionally, effectively?
Does anybody feel like--
where are you, Wendy, with this whole
I want to delete my Facebook?
WENDY HAGENMAIER: You mean-- well,
do I think that if I deleted it, they would delete my data?
Or just, I can't quit.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Both.
Both.
WENDY HAGENMAIER: I'm open to the possibility
that they wouldn't delete the data, because I think
it's hard to do data governance and ensure what you have where.
But I mean, if anybody could pay to do good data governance,
Facebook could.
I don't know if they will.
Why it's hard to quit?
Because yeah, so many years of my life are--
and connections that I have with people but I don't maintain.
Like, there's shame associated with Facebook for me, I think,
in that I feel like I should use it and there's pressure
and there's personal pressure and peer pressure
and I just can't even untangle it all.
So that's why I don't quit.
But I think I could.
I think I could untangle it, like make a big workflow diagram
and then be at peace and quit.
And I would definitely download the data.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah.
The first step is to admit that you're powerless over Facebook.
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: Yeah.
FRED RASCOE: Liz, could you delete
either your personal account or your professional account?
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: I guess if I wanted to.
Right now it's still useful for me, so I don't.
I did go through-- chose to do a Facebook
diet, my personal Facebook diet last year
where the first part of the year I checked Facebook once a month.
I put some time on a Saturday and went through, just
to make sure that I wasn't asking people about their mother
and their mother was dead, or that kind of thing.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Liz, lots have happened
since you left Facebook.
Here are 172 notifications of people who
liked pages we think you like.
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: Mhm.
But I chose to do that to produce the amount of stress
that I had from checking Facebook regularly
and seeing people's political posts that I didn't want to see,
even if I agreed with it.
So being more deliberate in how I use social media
has made a big difference for me.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Wendy said something very interesting,
that there's guilt and shame surrounding
the idea of deleting a personal history
and taking away connections that you had, humanity that you
had shared with other folks.
But a big part of what we fear from social media
seems to be the recording of our history,
including the recording of guilty or shameful history.
So there's also an entanglement.
I feel like there's the entanglement of if Facebook
as it is now, did not exist, would you
ask for it to be invented?
As it is now, not the original Facebook.
And I absolutely would not ask for a company like Facebook
to suddenly spring into existence
and allow me all that stuff.
I would much rather have better email,
have a better kind of feed reader for my friends as opposed
to the massive network.
And you got to just rip the Band-Aid off, I think.
That's not a call to action.
There is going to be some kind of loss
because you have accrued.
But you can download your data.
Not the whole Facebook page.
They strip out comments and things.
They make sure that you regret leaving Facebook behind.
But also, what if it just blew up?
What if it just disappeared?
How bad would that be for you?
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: It'd be fine.
I like using it.
It's a tool.
I actually get way more pleasure and enjoyment out of Instagram.
I like that much better.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah.
Methadone is a lot better than heroin.
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: Yeah, isn't it?
And I like Twitter.
I'm a Twitter lurker, and there are
things that I get from Twitter that I can't see anywhere else.
So I got to watch all of these content providers,
like Town and Country and The New Yorker and New York Magazine
unionize, BuzzFeed, parts of their stuff unionized,
and that played out on Twitter.
You got to watch it.
FRED RASCOE: Like, the narrative was not elsewhere
that you could have found?
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: Not really.
Not much.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Is that a benefit or is that a stopgap
because we no longer have local journalism?
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: Both?
CHARLIE BENNETT: Oh.
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: Yes?
CHARLIE BENNETT: You're not Phil Burress.
You're not allowed to say depends.
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: Well, I try to look at it this way.
So no social media, 1990s.
Let's say I'm 34 in 1998.
I would not know about the staff unionization
effort at the Miami Herald if it happened at that time.
I just would never know about it.
I wouldn't be able to send them a pizza
or a note of encouragement or anything like that.
So I have that through Twitter that I wouldn't have otherwise.
CHARLIE BENNETT: I feel like this is the McLuhan argument.
That's an extension of our information gathering,
and thus is a good thing.
But it is then corrupted by the things that
are done with the recordings of our behavior
and the intrusion of private interests
onto essentially an extension of our senses.
Well, since I just killed the conversation dead,
we'll be back with more Lost in the Stacks
on the left side of the hour.
MANDY: Hi, I'm Mandy, the accordion playing
data librarian, and you are listening to Lost in the Stacks
on WREK Atlanta.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Today's Lost in the Stacks
is called Delete Yourself From Social Media.
We're discussing whether social media
can be removed from our lives, whether we can remove ourselves
from social media, whether we should.
Who benefits with or without social media?
Who has privilege to be forgiven for a thoughtless tweet?
Who is held accountable?
Jon Ronson, author of So You've Been Publicly Shamed,
was asked about his thoughts on the matter in an interview
with The Guardian online.
This was his response.
When I wrote Publicly Shamed, there
# was no #MeToo, no Black Lives Matter.
Those more positive uses of public shaming
happened after the book came out.
We're in this weird position where
social media treats serious and unserious transgressors
in the same way.
If someone tweets slightly wrongly, uses the wrong words,
they are treated with the same ferocity
as someone who commits an actual crime.
But all humans have stuff going on.
We're not just that casual tweet, that combination of words
taken out of context.
And I, Charlie, might go so far as
to say that we're not just that combination of images,
tracked data, and likes on Facebook taken out of context.
So let me see if I can clear my throat,
and you can file this set under BF1389.D57W45.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
MATTHEW: You just heard "Exist Stage Right" by Ronnie Burns.
Before that was "Self-Made Man" by David Byrne.
Two burns.
Those were songs about trying to claim control
of yourself and your identity.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
CHARLIE BENNETT: This is Lost in the Stacks,
and our show today is all about deleting social media,
deleting parts of social media, being forgotten online.
Liz, libraries have a policy of being both a community hub,
and a place that is supposed to remember nothing about you,
your motivations, or your reading habits as a person.
Are libraries going to lead the charge in the social engineering
change to disconnect or be forgotten?
Are we going to embrace it?
How do we reconcile our missions with the inevitable fact
of social media?
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: We're not.
MATTHEW: Oh, no.
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: I know, I'm good for it.
OK, so you have libraries up north,
and this is where I'm failing my worthy colleagues who have
events where, this is how you install the Tor at-home--
CHARLIE BENNETT: Tor browsers.
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: Yeah, Tor browser,
so you can search the internets, do your thing
without any kind of tracking or extremely difficult to track
tracking.
And then we have folks who are desperate to preserve everything
we can about society.
So I'm going to--
I do have the right credit for this.
I went to school with a librarian
named Billie Cotterman.
She has, I think, another master's
in the classics and talks about what
it could have been to have access
to every tweet a Roman made.
Like how that would have enhanced
her study of that society.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Well, if the graffiti is any sign,
it would been mostly vulgar jokes and pictures of--
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: Some things never change.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah.
FRED RASCOE: So if digital preservation does its job,
humanity will have a record of every tweet made from 2006 to,
I think 2017 that the Library of Congress collected.
Is it a good idea that the Library of Congress
has a copy of every tweet from that time period?
Like, warts and all?
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: It's agonizing, but--
and I've thought this over quite a bit.
And it's agonizing, but a 10-year slice,
all things being equal, still working on it,
I think that's a beautiful thing to have.
And also, that was a very interesting 10 years in internet
development.
You could say looking at that body of information, oh yeah,
white supremacists really started tweeting very loudly
in 2006 or 2009.
Or we can see how this spread.
CHARLIE BENNETT: And being able to search an archive of tweets,
not using Twitter search, but instead using an actual built
to search function, would allow someone
to get a lot more out of that collection of tweets.
FRED RASCOE: To be clear, you can't
search that library of Congress collection or access,
it's totally--
CHARLIE BENNETT: No one can.
Yeah, yeah.
FRED RASCOE: Yeah.
CHARLIE BENNETT: But when it's time,
I can only hope that future historians don't have to use
the Twitter search function.
WENDY HAGENMAIER: It seems like maybe we can a little bit
reconcile or, Liz, the services you referenced,
the privacy instruction can coexist with Twitter archive
at LC because librarians might play a role in empowering people
to understand terms of service, understand how they can opt out
so they don't--
so that they aren't in the archive of whatever
is being collected, or they aren't
in the classics digital preservation example,
just sort of so people know what they're getting into.
That might be a way of reconciling our mission
with the reality that is--
or our desire to preserve with our desire
to enable patron privacy.
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: Sure.
And I had to go back and look and see
when the right-- not just the right to read.
So does the library have a variety
of things that can offend you?
A variety of things that can offend you, but also,
your right to develop as an intellectual privately.
So the books that you check out aren't--
it's just you to do.
And that was a, I guess, relatively recent invention.
So 1939, that was incorporated into the ALA principles.
Before then, librarians really took an active role
in directing your reading, because they wanted to turn you
into a certain kind of person.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah, and they knew
who you were because they were a member of the community.
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: And they had values about what was valuable.
So nonfiction.
You could check out two nonfiction books,
and then you could have your novel because then you've
had your vegetables.
CHARLIE BENNETT: OK, let me ask you something.
So which part of library services
do you imagine social media reflects?
Is it our browsing and checkout history, or is it publishing?
Because no one would ever say, oh,
once you got your book published,
I bet you didn't realize that it was
going to end up in a library.
But we imagine that our actions and behavior are not
going to be tracked.
Which do you think social media is?
Is it a giant publishing-- a self-publishing endeavor
that we're all taking on?
Or is it our behavior instantiated?
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: I teeter, but I have to go with self-publishing.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah?
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: I go back and forth on this,
and I'll probably change my mind next week
and come to regret this.
But Wendy has a really good point about teaching people
how to be deliberate in the public sphere.
And we have lots of social norms about how
to be deliberate in the public sphere.
And social media is relatively new.
It's, what, 10, 15 years old, and we kind of haven't caught up
with it yet, I think socially.
So having that help to be a person
of public, public libraries do that work as well.
That's where I'm landing right now.
CHARLIE BENNETT: That's your position, but you hate it?
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: I just--
I go back and forth.
Some of my ideas when I was 19 were really stupid,
and I'm glad that they weren't available and glad
I didn't have camera phones to record that.
On the other hand, there are some 19-year-olds out there who
have terrible ideas, who never leave those ideas,
who then go do terrible things.
FRED RASCOE: I'll also note that while we were finishing up
our discussion there, somebody's social media notification dinged
on the phone.
I think it might have gotten picked up on the mic.
Once again, we at Lost in the Stacks
have merely scratched the surface of an important topic.
And we were joined today by guest producer Liz Holdsworth.
She is STEM librarian and esteemed colleague here
at the Georgia Tech Library.
Liz, thank you so much for joining us today.
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: Always.
Thank you.
FRED RASCOE: And we'll be back after a music set.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
WENDY HAGENMAIER: File this set under BX2845.F73.
[MUSIC PLAYING] You were the promise at dawn
ABBY: That was "I'm Stranded" by The Saints,
and before that was "Is This What You Wanted?"
by Leonard Cohen.
Songs about choosing not to connect and what happens next.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
CHARLIE BENNETT: Today's Lost in the Stacks
is called Delete Yourself From Social Media.
WENDY HAGENMAIER: We talked about why
someone might choose to delete some or all of our social media.
FRED RASCOE: And if someone chooses to delete it,
is it really deleted?
LIZ HOLDSWORTH: And should it be deleted?
Who gets to decide what can be forgotten
and what needs to be remembered?
CHARLIE BENNETT: I'm just going to say I do.
All right.
Roll the credits.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ABBY: Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration
between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library,
produced by Charlie Bennett, Ameet Doshi, Wendy Hagenmaier,
and Fred Rascoe.
WENDY HAGENMAIER: Abby was our engineer today,
and the show was brought to you in part
by the Library Collective.
Registration for next year's gathering is open now.
Find out more about them at the librarycollective.org.
FRED RASCOE: Legal counsel and notepads and sharpies
for posting offline messages were provided
by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group
in Atlanta, Georgia.
WENDY HAGENMAIER: Special Thanks to Liz
for being on the show, and thanks, as always,
to each and every one of you for listening.
FRED RASCOE: Find us online at lostinthestacks.org
and you can subscribe to our podcast pretty much anywhere
you get your audio fix
CHARLIE BENNETT: Next week on Lost in the Stacks,
Liz will return asynchronously, along with our colleague Marlee,
to talk about captains of book chapter writing.
FRED RASCOE: Time for our last song today,
and I'm not totally convinced that eliminating social media
from my life is achievable.
And I have the same fantasy about not carrying a smartphone.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Fred, let's just go to the mountains, man.
Let's just get out of here.
Just crush all our electronics beneath our heel.
FRED RASCOE: Sounds great.
But at least from my point of view,
I'm going to carry that wish as my heart's wild desire.
It's never going to happen, though, is it?
CHARLIE BENNETT: It is a wild desire, though.
FRED RASCOE: So let's close with "Wild Desire"
by The Celibate Rifles.
Have a great weekend, everyone.
[MUSIC PLAYING]