Who said I’m old and technology-impaired? (Just because I don’t know how to text…)
This is actually kinda like texting, only you can do it on your computer (like any sane person would — phones are for talking, duh!)
My nieces aren’t even hip to it. (Should I worry that no one else I know is either?)
Anyway, I joined Twitter.
It was actually easy enough for me to figure out. And it’s a lot like IM’ing.
(If you don’t know what IM’ing is, who am I to scoff? It means Instant Messaging — a way to type short messages to people so you can talk back and forth. I remember when we got the capability to IM each other over our internal network at work, like 14 years ago — oh the messages that were flying (Cindy). Even though we only sat 2 desks away from each other.)
Anyway, to me, IM, Twitter, texting — it’s just the fancy, tech-y equivalent of passing notes in class — and God knows I did plenty of that!
Twitter prompts you to answer the question, “What are you doing?” and gives you 140 characters to do it in. Some people get “Tweets” to their cell phones, but that would be like texting and involve paying for it and such. Not me, I just Tweet up there in cyberspace. You can set up your Twitter page to follow whomever you like, and their Tweets and yours appear on the page. You can respond to particular Tweets if you like, or just sit back and see what your friends or fellow bloggers or even colleagues — some people use Twitter for business — are up to. Oh, and you can keep your Tweets private if you want, so people can only view them if you give permission.
My tweets are now in the sidebar on the left. As you can see, it’s not earth-shattering stuff. But for someone like me, working solo, chained to a computer, stir-crazy from the lack of human contact, it’s just another little way to feel connected.
And maybe even a little hip.
We live in a society exquisitely dependent on
science and technology, in which hardly anyone
knows anything about science and technology.
~ Carl Sagan
Writing by Ear 