I get social media.
It’s pictures of cats on keyboards, what folks ate for lunch and an occasional sunset.
I don’t get tweeting.
I don’t understand why people do a minute-by-minute announcement of their daily life.
We all know people who think Twitter is used solely to tell the world where they ate lunch or what else they did recently.
That’s because there are lots of people who use Twitter to solely to tell the world where they ate lunch and what else they did recently.
“I just went shee-shee”
“Going to the gym”
“My hair is a mess today”
As an expert in having done things recently, allow me to look at this scientifically.
There is evidence the term Twitter comes from the Latin “A group of twits”.
It was first used by an elderly lady in 1864 who said, “My heart is all a-twitter” when seeing Abraham Lincoln at a social.
She then was helped to the nearest chair as someone announced to the entire room, “Ethel has the vapors.”
The first tweet was born.
From that humble beginning it has grown into a place where people can stay on top of someone’s current events in real-time, which generally means reading some 12-year-old’s commentary on Justin Beiber acting bad and where Miley Cyrus has her tongue this week.
We now have a communication problem.
If someone doesn’t write about it – how can you know it happened?
An example:
The network was shut down recently at work.
It was going to be out from noon to 5 pm while they fixed some doo-dads and misguided electrons.
People got all twisted up wondering how they were going to do any work.
They were coming into my office, “Can I go home early? I can’t get any work done.”
“So what did you do before there was email.”
“I don’t know, use the phone I guess.”
“Lucky for you there’s one on your desk. Might I also suggest you walk 20 feet and actually speak to the person?”
This, naturally, leads us to a discussion of how do we still have babies?
This may explain the recent lack of young children in my neighborhood at Halloween.
You may find this surprising, but birds, bees and six Margaritas have little to do with it.
Maybe except for the Margaritas because they can affect the navigation of the stork trying to find your house.
Scientists and doctors know you have to actually be in the same vicinity with someone at the time, and yipes, you have to touch and do some other things that just aren’t compatible with a cell phone or the Internet.
Well, for most people anyway.
We’re ignoring things like test tubes and petri dishes for the moment.
This whole thing is giving me a headache and making me grumpy.