I have not been online in a social/professional manner much since I started as Acting Branch Manager in late May, but its only lately that I have really started to feel a loss. Much of my day to day work still involves computers, but it is so all over the place. One moment it is filling out a maintenance request, then its doing payroll, checking email, writing a report and then a quick bit of web editing, etc, etc.  Because of this wandering computer use, I am finding it hard to remember to get on Twitter and post on a regular basis and Facebook has been relegated to one check a day, unless I get notification of a comment.

isolation

Uploaded to Flickr on January 18, 2005 by loufi, Attribution 2.0 Generic

I was managing to live with that to a certain extent, as I was still communicating with my online friends in a lot of instances via email. But now I am experiencing problems there. I don’t know if people are just as busy as I am and havent’ been able to answer, or whether emails are disappearing into the ether, but I am only getting limited email now and I am beginning to feel digital isolation.

What do I mean by digital isolation? Feeling out of touch with my online friends. Being able to see what is going on with them in the odd times that I do get onto Twitter, but not being involved in the ongoing conversations that are happening there and so feeling more like a spectator than a participant. Have you felt the same way in the digital world? What was your situation and if you dealt with it, how did you? For me, I am going to work out if my email really is an issue at present and be more proactive and thought-filled about my online interactions – work harder at making it work for me. I guess it is like any relationship, it takes work. And BTW, its Happy Blogiversary to me. On the 29th July 2005, Connecting Librarian was born. When I first started this blog, Facebook and Twitter weren’t around and email was the only way to communicate with my online peeps. Thank goodness things have changed!