Sunday, June 20, 2010

Twiittering

It was tough for me, a private person, to join a social media site - Facebook. I got on it because way to many people I care about were communicating that way: wife, kids, relatives. I joined and I post every once in a while. It is interesting to me how it took a while for me to overcome a sense of guilt if I didn't post religiously, but I succeeded. When the mood strikes and I have something that I deem worthwhile, I post or respond.

Today, with considerable prodding and for the greater glory of the Cronkite School of Journalism at ASU, I lost my Twitter viginity. I posted my first tweet and followed the masses. This to shall pass. I just don't like feeling that the umbilical is still attached. Oh, it is great to talk to friends and family once in a while, but to paraphrase that great American thinker, " Fish and continuous social cyber contact both smell after three days."

Joining Twitter and Facebook, and having a cellphone, and a laptop that I can video call/conference on, makes we want to go live on an island sometimes. It is bad enough that there are now cameras watching us in so many places, so that others can watch over us? Must I impose my feelings on so many so often? Must I allow others to feed their need to insinuate their feelings upon me? Oh sure, you just don't check your Facebook and Twitter accounts. That's like walking down the halls in public school and ignoring everybody.

There is a price to pay for social media. That price is time which you never get back. It's like Our Town when the young woman returns in Act III to her youth and realizes she lived, mistakenly, like she had all the time in the world. We don't. I don't.

I cherish my time at this great experience we are all having. We are all blogging, and we are all working hard during our vacation and we are all loving it. Soon we may all be tweeting, but then how much will this take away from ourselves as we feel compelled to blog, tweet, IM, phone, photo, video, . . .

Oh well, it would seem that if the trajectory of technology continues we will all be assimilated anyway.

JH Appel
5 of 35, Cronkite Renolds 2010 node

5 comments:

  1. You and me, both. I do wonder how often I'll use it as my day is really too full to spend reading a lot of stray thoughts. If anyone really needs to reach me, it is so much better to try email or the phone. However, I can now say I've caught up with the 21st Century. At least I've caught hold of the railing and am fluttering precariously behind that train.

    Nunn Winship
    Warden H. S.
    Warden, Wash.

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  2. Sorry, Jerry, resistance is futile. Great hallway analogy -- most of life's experiences can be compared to the high school hallway. Obsessively checking your Facebook and Twitter accounts is like walking that hallway and hugging everyone you meet. There has to be a happy (or at least sensible) medium.

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  3. Nunn, I love the "fluttering precariously' image. Very apt metaphor and well said.

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  4. Jerry,

    Our generation nailed pinball, table tennis, foosball and pool. We came in kind of late for video games, and I can still remember waiting for a certain number of rings on our party-line phone so that I did not pick up on the neighbor's call.

    With computers, however, I doubt if any classroom teachers had better reasons to be on top of technology than those of us who advise publications.

    That first TRS-80 required CLOAD and CSAVE commands to use the cassette recorded that doubled as a disk. MacPaint, MacDraw, and MacWrite were my first apps, and Photoshop and Pagemaker soon followed. Now, my first year students are faced with InDesign, Photoshop infinity and Illustrator just to begin the process.

    I am not sure I would want to start over again, even knowing what I know now. But our students are a flexible and adaptable bunch, and with their shared learning styles, they always end up teaching me something amazing.

    Sam Bidleman
    Bloomsburg High School
    Bloomsburg, Pa.

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  5. BTW, 2142 tweets on my account.

    Sam Bidleman
    Bloomsburg High School
    Bloomsburg, Pa.

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