Indispensable Connections
I’m not what you’d call “an early adopter” of new technologies.
For example, I never texted on my conventional cell phone – largely because finding the letters required an acuity of vision I no longer possess.
And I’m sure it’s a measure of my terminal unhip-ness that for a period of several weeks, I believed that sending flirtatious email messages to my husband constituted sexting. (I’d heard sexting was a mainstream phenomenon, and couldn’t believe that only 20% of teens were doing it. It didn’t immediately occur to me that the phrase “doing it” was more relevant than I’d realized.)
I also read in one of the country’s more serious newspapers (yes, I’m aware that newspapers are so 18th century), that “Twitter” is now THE source of must-have information. (This is puzzling in the face of other reports about devoted “Tweeters” having been the first to learn the indispensable news that Ashton Kutcher refers to Demi Moore as “Wifey”, and that the real reason Jennifer Anniston dumped the serial cheater, John Mayer was because he was addicted to this form of communication, the constraints of which almost guarantee banality.)
But to prove I’m not a complete luddite, I’m going to start twittering myself, just as soon as I’ve finished responding to all of last year’s email, backed up my 1998 files, and clarified one thing: I’m told Twitter’s technological sophistication allows its users to block followers. But as I understand it, limiting the number of people with nothing better to do that to read your thoughts 140-characters at a time would be completely contrary to the point of the service.
I did recently re-activate my Facebook account after a two-year lull. I had initially signed up at the urging of several colleagues, but when I discovered that the social networking site was really a competition for friends, and I was already behind 329, I logged off immediately.
Then I turned 50, and couldn’t remember my password. Like every other institution that has required me to come up with a random collection of impossible to guess numbers and letters, Facebook had forbidden me to write the creaturing thing down. Twenty-four long months later, confronted by an insistent demand for my secret code, I tried all the obvious possibilities: time2waste, 2old2learn, and f#@*this. Then I just gave up and got back to work.