Is it really weird that I use a number of social media sites more for some sort of personal record keeping than for actual socializing and networking?  Am I alone in engaging in this type of activity?  Are you not sure what I am asking?  Here are two examples that I feel are pertinent:

1. I have only one friend on Gowalla, one of several location-based social networking apps that are battling it out for user adoption right now.  This one friend of mine lives two states away from me, so it is not likely that we will see that we are in the same neighborhood at the same time and meet up for lunch or something.  Nevertheless, for a few weeks now I’ve been checking in my locations with that service semi-faithfully.   I like how it gives me a fun little icon “stamp” on my “passport” whenever I visit a new location, and I like to look back over all the locations I’ve been recently and think about places I might go soon.  I’ve even added several new venues to the Gowalla system, and I recently reported a problem to their customer service when I discovered that some of their venues in Provo, UT were labeled as being in Springville, UT.

2. I don’t know a single soul in my real life that uses last.fm, a music-based social networking app that pulls played tracks from iTunes and other digital music players.  Using the stats of those pays, it compiles charts showing what you and everyone else on the system listen to most, creates recommendations and custom listening streams for you, shows you how much you have musically in common with any other user, etc.   I watch the charts of my own weekly listening with fascination. I ensure that all of my iPod and iTunes plays are faithfully transmitted to the site, even if, and perhaps especially if, I listened to an album on vinyl or CD (in which case some quick tracking-through in iTunes or on my iPod is afterward required to “get credit” for my listening.)  I have no clue if anyone else has ever looked at these charts, and yet I think about them a great deal.

Of course I would love to have more friends (or any friends) involved in these sites, but they just aren’t there.  (Please feel free to join any of them and there declare your friendship for me.)  But even without friends to share my info with, I think I will happily continue to use these sites.  With or without a sharing audience, one may of course describe this as geeky behavior, and I would for the most part agree with you.  However, I am going to argue that this geeky element of social networking extends far and wide, even in places that on the surface seem much more social, and that it is simply the latest manifestation of a very old and renowned geek activity.

On social media services in which I do have a number of friends, I still find that, more often than not, we end up sharing most of our information with each other through conversations rather than through the interface of the site.  While using the site, although sharing with each other, we are all basically talking to ourselves when we don’t pay attention to what our friends are sharing with us.  I have many work friends on Goodreads.  Even though I rather faithfully update my account with what I am currently reading, what I have read, and what I want to read, and so do several of my friends, I find that more often than not this information tends to be shared while visiting someone’s cubicle to discuss a work issue, or during a telephone call with a librarian in a school.  They don’t seem to know that I put that book up on my Goodreads already,  or I am oblivious to what book they just put on their Goodreads.  Many of us do spend time on Goodreads, but it is usually to organize, explore, and read reviews by strangers, apparently not so much to interact with and look at what our friends are reading.

And now let’s be honest with ourselves; in certain cases this same lack of sociality goes for the juggernaut, that most social of media, even the dread Facebook.  Stop and ask yourself these questions, if you haven’t before:

1. Have you ever logged into Facebook and not actually interacted directly with another person?

Perhaps you are there to play a game, or perhaps you updated your status but didn’t make any response or comment to anyone else.  It’s okay to admit it.  I know I’ve done it.

2.How many people have you friended on Facebook and never yet had a conversation with on Facebook?

I know I’m not the only one that does this, because a lot of people have done it to me, too.  I’m quite okay with it, but I find it an interesting phenomenon.  Uncles, old roommates, cousins-in-law, work colleagues, and kids we sat by in classes in high school: we friend them and then they only sit there in our little box of friends.  Perhaps we look at their photos and see if they ever got married or had kids or whatever, and maybe they pop up in our news feeds every once in a while asking us for help planting Enchanted Kumquat Bushes on their DesertIslandVille, but in many cases we never really interact with each other until the next extended family get-together, or when we run into each other randomly at a store, or never really at all.

So if my theory is correct and we are often not all that interested in interacting with people on social media sites, and we engage in these activities and games whether or not anyone else is actually paying attention to what we are doing, what is going on with all this “sharing” on social networking sites and why do we do it?

Here’s one reason I’ve come up with.  I’ve determined that one of the underlying compulsions that motivates my continued usage of social networking sites is a longstanding propensity to collect.   Many of these sites and services allow us to collect and quantify and share things that have previously not been collectable.  Actions, relationships, feelings, almost anything ephemeral or abstract can be commoditized or can be made into an item that can kept, recorded, or transferred, shown to others forever after. Here is my collection of friends, family, and acquaintances.  Here is my collection of places I’ve been.  Here are my favorite restaurants.  Here are all the books I have read in the past year.  Here is the music I listen to the most.  Here are all the jobs and skills I have collected in the past five years.  Here are the games I play and how well I do at them.  Here are the movies I watched last month.  Here are the people and organizations that I admire.  Here is what I read in the newspaper today.  Lookit!

Instead of rocks, stamps or Precious Moments figurines, we can now collect all these little icons that represent little pieces of our lives.  We then use and share all these things in an attempt to define ourselves, or to attempt to dictate how we should be defined or perceived by others.  And now people don’t even need to come over to our house to see what books we have, or wait for us to go get that special shoebox out from under our beds.  It’s all out there for them to look at if they are interested.

Another aspect of this collecting that I’ve been thinking about is to what extent this desire to share or the anticipation of sharing something effects what choices we make on where we go, what we do, what we eat, what we read, etc, even if we are not quite consciously thinking about whether anyone else is paying attention to our collections.  In my case I think it does sometimes affect what I do, but not necessarily in a bad way.  When I get involved in these services regularly there follows a self-consciousness and an accountability that I think is mostly positive in forcing me to not get too habitual, to try new things, to finish reading that book, to not eat lunch at Wendy’s or in the cafeteria every day, etc.  It seems to work regardless of whether anyone is actually paying attention or not.

Of course if these activities were only about showing other people then I could just as easily be tempted to start lying about things.  But collections have never been entirely about sharing or showing off.  Many of our collections are entirely for our own benefit, and never get shared with much of anyone.  And that’s why we keep doing these things online, even if no one is watching.  We collect mainly for ourselves, because our collections please us.  However, I think even the most private of collectors with the most obscure of items has that small hope or daydream that one day the collection will someday be seen by someone else who will truly appreciate it.  Our collections, like journals and photographs, always have some audience in mind, even if entirely theoretical.  When we put our collections online, that audience may be out there somewhere right now.

I know there are also other reasons and desires that lead us to engage in social media networks, but I think this desire to collect, consume and display people, actions, places, words and feelings, now transmuted into electronic trading cards, is a definite reality.

So, what do you think?  Are you collecting your friends?  Did you go somewhere just to be able to say you went there?  I want to hear about it.

I am going to close with a link to a nice little song by Here We Go Magic, off their recent album Pigeons.  The song is called “Collector,” and seemed quite appropriate.

Here We Go Magic – Collector (link to download MP3)
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Some people collect pigeons, you know.

Today I inaugurate a new feature here at the Froz-T-Freez: the Froztmix.  As we commence the beautiful hot month of July, this particular froztmix has been made with pure summer listening in mind.

What is a Froztmix?  It is no more and no less than a virtual mixtape.  This particular mix has been calculated to fit on two sides of a 90 minute cassette tape.  Of course, you can also listen to it using the mp3 player of your choice, or burn it onto a CD.

I suggest this mix as ideal for automobile listening while traveling, or for a small but good sounding portable stereo in an echoey basement or bathroom while doing laundry or other chores.

Well, on with it.  Right click on each side and choose “Save as…” to get the goods.

Froztmix 1

Side A

1. Animal Collective: Summertime Clothes
2. Sleigh Bells: Crown on the Ground
3. Grizzly Bear: Two Weeks
4. Vampire Weekend: California English
5. Atlas Sound: Walkabout (feat. Noah Lennox)
6. Neon Indian: Deadbeat Summer
7. Nite Jewel: Want You Back
8. The Cool Kids: Strawberry Girl
9. Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti:  ’Round and ‘Round
10. Laura Veirs: July Flame
11. Ganglians: To June

Side B

1. Deerhunter: Strange Lights
2. The Carter Family: Keep on the Sunny Side
3. Best Coast: Sun Was High (So Was I)
4. No Age: Here Should Be My Home
5. Girls: Morning Light
6. Yes: And You and I
7. T. Rex: Mambo Sun
8. Vampire Weekend: Cousins
9. White Denim: Shake Shake Shake
10. Holiday Shores: Errand of Tongue
11. Girls: Summertime

If you find that you like any of the songs on this mix, please explore the artists’ work further and purchase the music.  Any questions or comments are, as always, welcome.

Virginia discovered this one, and took the photo at my request while I drove.

In the hopes of rectifying this oversight, I checked the CLAU web site, the UELMA web site, and the UELMA conference wiki, but none of these sites are yet endowed with such a list.  It turns out that the people of the Children’s Literature Association of Utah, although great at picking out their nominees and booktalking them at the conference, aren’t that quick at updating their web site.  Well, that’s okay, neither am I.  Getting desperate, I then consulted my friends Google, Bing, and Twitter, in the hopes that some insider or fanatic had posted this info on their blog or tweeted about it, but the only semi-relevant hits these engines gave me was someone’s beehive-2011-long-list shelf on Goodreads, and one guy’s tweet from UELMA.  It turns out that Utah’s school librarians aren’t exactly Twitter fanatics.  A true librarian, unlike the wanna-be librarian that I am, may point out that it is less effective to choose these popular search engines when researching information.  However, I stand by my methods, as I have little faith that any database or resource on Pioneer will help with this research problem at this point in time.

It was at that point that I realized something. Because there is apparently nothing out there about these new nominees in the electronic world, if I were to publish the lists here on my blog (purely as an informational/journalistic service, of course), I would possibly become one of the top search results for “2011 beehive nominees,” and also I myself would become that fanatic that I was searching for.  This has proved to be an opportunity I can’t pass up, so, without further ado, here are the 2011 Beehive Book Award Nominees in every category except for young adult fiction. If anyone out there in bloggie land has that young adult list and feels like sharing, holla back in the comments. YA nominees now added! I hope that CLAU doesn’t blacklist me from joining now that I have scooped their own website.

Congratulations to all the nominees!

2011 Beehive Children’s Fiction Award Nominees

• 11 Birthdays by Wendy Mass (Scholastic)
• The Adventurous Deeds of Deadwood Jones by Helen Hemphill (Front Street)
• Binky the Space Cat by Ashley Spires (Kids Can Press)
• The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly (Henry Holt)
• Extra Credit by Andrew Clements (Atheneum/Simon & Shuster)
• The Leanin’ Dog by K. A. Nuzum (Joanna Cotler Books)
• Me and the Pumpkin Queen by Marlane Kennedy (Greenwillow)
• Mudville by Kurtis Scaletta (Alfred A. Knopf/Yearling Books)
• Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin (Little, Brown)
• The Year the Swallows Came Early by Kathryn Fitzmaurice (Bowen Press/HarperCollins)

2011 Young Adult Book Nominees

• Along for the Ride by Sarah Dessen (Viking)
• Brooklyn Nine: a Novel in Nine Innings by Alan Gartz (Dial/Puffin)
• The Chosen One by Carol Lynch Williams (St. Martin’s Griffin)
• Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson (Simon & Schuster / Atheneum)
• The Compound by S.A. Bodeen (Feiwel & Friends / Square Fish)
• *The Devil’s Paintbox by Victoria McKernan (Alfred A. Knopf)
• *Eon: Dragoneye Reborn by Alison Goodman (Viking / Firebird)
• Flygirl by Sherri L. Smith (Putnam / Speak)
• Musician’s Daughter by Susanne Dunlap (Bloomsbury)
• My Fair Godmother by Janette Rallison (Walker & Co.)
• Princess of the Midnight Ball by Jessica Day George (Bloomsbury)
• Project Sweet Life by Brent Hartinger (HarperTeen)

(* = “mature readers”)

2011 Picture Book Nominees

• The Apple-Pip Princess by Jane Ray (Candlewick Press)
• Birds by Kevin Henkes; illustrated by Laura Dronzek (Greenwillow)
• That Book Woman by Heather Henson; illustrated by David Small (Atheneum Books for Young Readers)
• Chicken Cheeks by Michael Ian Black; illustrated by Kevin Hawkes (Simon & Schuster)
• The Circus Ship by Chris Van Dusen (Candlewick Press)
• Duck! Rabbit! by Amy Krouse Rosenthal; illustrated by Tom Lichtenheld (Chronicle Books)
• Higher! Higher! by Leslie Patricelli (Candlewick Press)
• Just What Mama Needs by Sharlee Glenn (Harcourt)
• Most Loved in All the World by Tonya Hegamin; illustrated by Cozbi A. Cabrera (Houghton Mifflin)
• Tsunami by Kimiko Kajikawa; illustrated by Ed Young (Philomel)

2011 Informational Book Nominees

• 14 Cows for America by Carmen Deedy and Thomas Gonzalez (Peachtree Publishers)
• Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream by Tanya Lee Stone (Candlewick Press)
• The Boy Who Invented TV: the Story of Philo Farnsworth by Kathleen Krull and Greg Couch (Alfred A. Knopf)
• Darwin by Alice McGinty and Mary Azarian (Houghton Mifflin Books for Children)
• Down, Down, Down: a Journey to the Bottom of the Sea by Steve Jenkins (Houghton Mifflin)
• George Washington Carver by Tonya Bolden (Abrams Books for Young Readers)
• Life in the Wild: George Shaller’s Struggle to Save the Last Great Beasts by Pamela S. Turner (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Mermaid Queen: the Spectacular True Story of Annette Kellerman, Who Swam Her Way to Fame, Fortune & Swimsuit History by Shana Corey (Scholastic)
• Nic Bishop Frogs by Nic Bishop (Scholastic)
• You Never Heard of Sandy Kofax? by Jonah Winter and Andre Carriho (Schwartz and Wade)

2011 Poetry Nominees

• Be Glad Your Nose Is on Your Face by Jack Prelutsky (Greenwillow)
• The Bill Martin Jr. Big Book of Poetry edited by Bill Martin Jr. (Simon & Schuster)
• Button Up: Wrinkled Rhymes by Alice Schertle (Harcourt)
• Dinothesaurus: Prehistoric Poems and Paintings by Douglas Florian
• Far From You by Lisa Schroeder (Simon Pulse)
• A Fuzzy-Fast Blur: Poems about Pets by Laura Salas (Capstone Press)
• Partly Cloudy: Poems of Love and Longing by Gary Soto (Harcourt)
• Truckery Rhymes by Jon Scieszka (Simon & Schuster)
• The Underwear Salesman: Jobs for Better or Verse by J. Patrick Lewis (Ginee Seo Books)
• Whiff of Pine, Hint of Skunk by Deborah Ruddell (Margaret K. McElderry)

Examples of things I learned

• All kinds of great and wacky ideas for programs and events to do with students in a library, which got me all excited, until I remembered I don’t have a library to do them in or students and teachers to do them with.  This plethora of ideas came courtesy of Lanell Rabner, librarian at Springville High School and also the current president of UELMA.
• It turns out that Dickens’ Great Expectations and the beginning novel in Stine’s Goosebumps series are basically the same book.  Seriously though, I learned a bunch of cool ideas about archetypes and the universality of narrative, and the importance of libraries/librarians refraining from putting up any impediments to a child’s choosing a book to read, even (and perhaps especially) if it is something lame like Goosebumps.  This came from a session by Clint Johnson, a writer and writing teacher at Salt Lake Community College.
• Not every session you attend in a conference is great.  This realization helped me begin to understand why a few conference-goers seemed so jaded about the whole thing.  I am still a rookie and I mostly drank up the kool-aid  the whole time.
• Perhaps most importantly for my current job, I learned  how to steal MARC records from the Canadians.  (Thank you, Summer Cornelius of Hurricane High School.)

So that was basically my freshman UELMA experience.  Stay tuned for my next post, in which I reveal to the web some exciting information to which only I and a few hundred others were privy as attendees of the conference.

(Pat’s B.B.Q. in Salt Lake City)

Fifteen Favorites:

1. Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavilion
2. Grizzly Bear: Veckatimest
3. Holiday Shores: Columbus’d the Whim
4. M. Ward: Hold Time
5. Andrew Bird: Noble Beast
6. Woods: Songs of Shame
7. Dirty Projectors: Bitte Orca
8. The Flaming Lips: Embryonic
9. Passion Pit: Manners
10. Caetano Veloso: Zii e Zie
11. Mormon Tabernacle Choir: Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing
12. Kurt Vile: Childish Prodigy
13. Girls: Album
14. Atlas Sound: Logos
15. Ganglians: Monster Head Room

Five EPs:

1. Neon Indian: Psychic Chasms
2. Abe Vigoda: Reviver
3. Deerhunter: Rainwater Cassette Exchange
4. Animal Collective: Fall Be Kind
5. Bon Iver: Blood Bank

A Trio of Great Rock Albums:

1. The Dead Weather: Horehound
2. Dinosaur Jr.: Farm
3. Sonic Youth: The Eternal

Two Magic Albums:

1. Here We Go Magic: Here We Go Magic
2. Memory Tapes: Seek Magic

A few other albums I feel are worth mentioning:
(alphabetical by artist)

• Crystal Antlers: Tentacles
• Dan Deacon: Bromst
• Bob Dylan: Together Through Life
• Harlem Shakes: Technicolor Health
• Heartless Bastards: The Mountain
• Little Dragon: Machine Dreams
• Mos Def: The Ecstatic
• Small Black: Small Black
• Wavves: Wavves
• Wilco: Wilco (the album)

Enjoy.

Disclaimer: Of course, these lists are only a frozen instance of my musical taste at this moment in time.  I reserve the right to add to or take away from them at any moment in the future, as I discover new music that came out in the past year, or discover upon repeated listens that an album is much better than I thought it was, or much inferior to what it initially sounded to me.

Tip: A great place to listen to virtually any album for free (completely legal, too) is lala.com.  They will let you stream a song or an entire album all the way through one time to try it.  I’m not bothering to link all these up there, and there are of course many other ways to check out new music, but I just suggest it as a great way to test out music.  You can buy perpetual streaming rights there for super cheap, as well ($ 0.10 a song, or $ 0.80-1.00 an album).  I don’t receive any compensation from lala.com, I just think it’s a great web site.  I hope that Apple/iTunes doesn’t ruin the things I like about them.