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Tag Archives: twitter

Daily Discomfort: Goldilocks and The Two Eighty Two’s

25 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by koehlerjoni in email, Essay, Facebook, Social Media, Twitter

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

email, Facebook, social media, twitter

Hilary Clinton and the email kerfluffle

Hilary Clinton and the email kerfluffle

I am in the doctor’s office with my mother-in-law. She’s talking to me about Hilary Clinton and the email kerfluffle going on right now.  My mother-in-law says in a not soft voice that while she never cared for Hilary Clinton, she heard that Hilary never had an official email issued to her, so that’s why she was using her personal email.

I looked at her.  “I’m pretty sure she had a work email.  Everyone has more than one email account.”

“Oh,” she said, “I thought it was pretty hard to get one.”

“I opened an account for work at the beginning of the year.  It was easy.”

She seemed surprised. “I don’t know anything about that email.  My prescription company keeps calling me and asking for my email, and I keep telling them that I don’t have that, and they just call me again the next month.”

two eighty-two year old perspectives in one day- what are the chances?

two eighty-two year old perspectives in one day- what are the chances?

Then, I’m sitting in the waiting room alone, waiting for Mom-In-Law to have her testing done, and another elderly woman sits beside me and strikes up a conversation.  Why people always come up to me and start talking is a topic for another blog.

She’s 82, like my mother-in-law.  She lost her i.d. and was late for her appointment.  She is nervous about her appointment, afraid the doctor will find something she will need to be treated for. She is hard of hearing, but her hearing is better than her husband’s.  He is practically deaf, and she doesn’t know why she shouts at him, because it just makes her hoarse and he still can’t hear her.   She has two daughters and two sons.  Her daughters are going through menopause, and she has grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.  She was looking on Facebook this morning, and her son posted the cutest picture of his grandchild on there.  She is a proud mama.

I stopped her.  “Wow, you’re on Facebook?  That’s great.” I said.

“Yes,” she said, “But it takes my time, you know?  I start looking at stuff, and before you know it, I’ve wasted the whole morning.”

“Don’t I know.”

“Are you on Facebook? “ she asks.

“Yes.  I have a facebook account and a twitter account.”

“Twitter?” She looks at me like I just gave birth to the Christ child.  “Wow!  I could never do that twitter.”

Am I truly to be admired for figuring out how to have a twitter account?  Surely not.  But I think this conversation with two elderly women, both the same age, points out the differences between their generation and mine.

Yeah, I’m part of the Goldilocks generation.

I am too old.  I didn’t grow up surrounded by technology like my children did.  We didn’t even own a typewriter.  I remember when fax machines, and beepers, and the earliest version of the home computer came into being.  I remember when my husband got his first phone, and then passed it down to our son.  One day, Ultra Son came home and said, “I really need a new phone.”

“Is yours broken?”  I asked.

“No, Mom, it’s too big.  All the kids are teasing me.  They say it looks like a dildo.”

As fascinating as I might find technology, as easy as it has made my life compared to that of my grandmother, I still have to navigate it from a different perspective than my children do.

For my children, use of technology and social media is natural, and the push to find the next new and better tech product is a given.  Not for me, because I’m too old.

But I’m also too young.  I am part of the workforce, therefore I must use technology.  When I worked full time I was issued a desktop computer, a laptop computer, and an i-pad.  I used all three.  Now I work remotely at least one day a week, and I have to keep up with my email and scan and send documents.  I’ve had to learn word processing, simple spread sheets, and presentation formats like PowerPoint and Publisher.

I have no excuse for not learning this hugely important part of the world that is social media. That’s part of the reason I started this blog.  I started the blog to learn about social media, but I’m also learning about the world.  Two years ago, I’d never have noted the different viewpoints of the two eighty two year old women I was privileged to share a Monday morning with last week.  I never would have used their comments as a springboard for writing.

Now that I’m not swirling in the rat race/raise your family/bring home the bacon vortex, I have time to think about what’s happened during my day.  I have time to write about it.  I still have a few cogent thoughts, and the brain cells and skills to lay them out on paper.  And that, I’d say, makes me not too young, not too old, but just about right.

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Daily Discomfort: Understanding Tw!##@r Symbols, or What the !##@!

28 Wednesday Jan 2015

Posted by koehlerjoni in Essay, Humor, Social Media, Twitter, Writing

≈ Comments Off on Daily Discomfort: Understanding Tw!##@r Symbols, or What the !##@!

Tags

sentence construction skills, social media, twitter, twitter party, twitter symbols, understanding social media, writing

I know I’ve come to the twitter party late.  I know I’m a gate crasher because I’m over thirty, but I’m trying to understand, I really am. I’ve had an epiphany.  Twitter represents another language.  While we tweet some words in our native tongue, the construct, the mixing of symbols and short bursts of texts, and the way a person could meander through the maze of links, like a spider web, like 7 steps from Kevin Bacon, is a new form of communication.  When I approach my exploration of Twitter with this in mind, I feel much less intimidated.

I’ve been most mystified by the use of Twitter symbols.  Here’s what puts me off:

  • I don’t understand what the symbols mean.  I understand the definition of the “at” symbol and the hashtag; I could recite the definitions to you.  But that doesn’t indicate a deep enough grasp of meaning to enable me to use the symbols with confidence.
  • Tweets are difficult to read.  They are all unsentency.

This is an example of a tweet that was in my feed recently.  It was written by a respected literacy expert.  Before I can read this sentence (is it a sentence?  I don’t know) my thinking about language has to detach itself from my cerebral cortex.   I comprehend this tweet at the speed of paint drying, which is diametrically opposed to my usual way of reading—think Speedy Gonzalez.

Teaching #NoticeandNote? Watch! http://bit.ly/1y0vNzt  Words of Wiser #Reel Wisdom via @VanderVeldeLori @DrLWalczak @USMBrad @hhreimerz (Sorry-I don’t know enough to maintain all of these great links)

I’ve decided.  I’m an intelligent woman.  Twitter’s Wild West version of language is not going to beat me! Here and now, I’m taking this tweet apart and writing down what everything means.  I will practice reading and writing tweets until I’m able to host my own twitter party, with virtual nuts and cocktails and everything.  Must get out the glue and scissors, because I don’t know how to create a great visual on the computer (yet!).

Here is my thinking about what this tweet means.

This twit is learning!

This twit is learning!

Feel free to let me know if I am wrong. At least I’ve made a start.  In writing about my confusion with twitter, I’ve increased my level of comfort with the format and I think I have some ideas about how I can use it to get some of my words out into the universe.  I “atted” my first person the other day, although I don’t think my “atting” looked anything like the mentor tweet.  My next hurdle is to hashtag something. I also wonder if when you hashtag, you just write whatever you feel like and hope somebody else is thinking about that topic too?  If I wrote #uglycookiejars, would my poor hashtag just float out there in the WWW alone and unwanted?  That’s a topic for further study.

Daily Discomfort: To Tweet or not to Tweet

20 Tuesday Jan 2015

Posted by koehlerjoni in Essay, Humor, Social Media, Twitter

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

humor, social media, twitter, understanding social media

The original tweeter

The original tweeter

One of the personal imperatives I have given myself is to understand social media.  I’m fifty- five years old, and I’ve spent my life like all the rest of you half centurions out there; I worked, got married, had kids, worked, worked, and worked.   Now that I’m on a pause (not retired, just a break) I have the time to investigate the virtual world.  I ‘m turning my attention to twitter for no less than two and no more than four weeks, because twitter leaves me feeling flummoxed, gobsmacked, confused, and downright twitchy.

I have a twitter account, and it is linked to my website. This is only because the instructor in my basic blogging course said it would be a good way to recruit followers.  However, I’ve rarely visited it, because of those feeling words I mentioned above.  In order to gain understanding of how Twitter works, I visited the Twitter FAQS page.  Here is what Twitter has to say for themselves.

What do I Tweet?

It’s only interesting if she’s my grandma.

Twitter says…

“The best tweets share meaningful moments, big and small. Quote your grandma, share a photo of your pet sloth, or make a Vine video of your youngest doing a tricycle wheelie.  If you think it’s interesting, chances are your followers will too.”

I say…

If your grandma is my grandma, I might care about what she says, maybe.  If you have a pet sloth, keep that smelliness to yourself.  If your child can do a wheelie with a tricycle, it’s time for a bike.  If you think it’s interesting, I will probably not think it is interesting.  If the above examples are what you think is interesting. 

Where do Tweets Live?

What happened to the news?

What happened to the news?

Twitter says…

“When you follow people, their Tweets instantly show up in your timeline.  Similarly, your Tweets show up in your followers’ timelines. To see interesting Tweets, follow interesting people: friends, celebrities, news sources, or anyone whose Tweets you enjoy.”

I say…

Do the interesting people have sloths?  I am against sloths.  Also, do the aforementioned celebrities talk about their grandmas?  Do news sources include any real news, or are the Twitter news sources like that television show ET?  Because on ET, I don’t know who any of those celebrities are that they report on. Except for Justin Beiber, and I put him in the same slot as the sloth. Are these “news sources” like the regular network news, how they’ve stopped reporting about local stuff and the wars and atrocities going on in the world and if the spinach you buy at the grocery store has been recalled, and are now focusing on the Octomom and someone in Kansas whose trailer home was destroyed by a tornado?  Besides, all I can see when I look at twitter feeds from news sites like Reuters is a reminder to visit Reuters’ website.  Do I really need that extra step?  Can’t I just go directly to the website?

 I follow 30 different folks on twitter.  They are writers, magazine editors, educators, and all are folks who should have something to say.  However, if my twitter feed were a book, the genre would be a cross between a sorority confessional and an overstuffed first novel by a twenty year old with a little talent and a lot of arrogance.    Maybe there’s a code within twitter’s 140 character message in which the interesting people hide messages, but I haven’t managed to break it.

Why 140 characters?

Twitter- just for the slothful?

Twitter- just for the slothful?

Twitter says…

“We like to keep it short and sweet! It also just so happens that 140 characters is the perfect length for sending status updates via text message. The standard text message length in most places is 160 characters per message. We reserve 20 characters for people’s names, and the other 140 are all yours!”

I say…

What if my name is only ten characters?  Can I have the ten unused characters back?  I usually don’t get out of bed for less than two hundred and fifty characters.  Can we open up some sort of negotiation?  I take exception to your “perfect length,” comment.  That’s your opinion.  For me, something much longer is perfect.  I have things to say. And what is a status update? I looked up the word status in the dictionary.  It means the relative social, professional, or other standing of someone or something.  It also means the position of affairs at a particular time, especially as it relates to economics.  My status is pretty stable, thank you very much.  Just because I post something new to my website, that doesn’t mean my social standing or position of affairs has changed one iota.  I also don’t think that your status changes just because your boss made you work an extra hour on your shift at Burger King.  I also don’t think tweeting fifty messages in a row with the “F” word in them changes your status, even if your tweets reveal your status of being a tool.  All over the world, school kids are getting the wrong idea about the meaning of the word status, and you and the Facebook have something to answer for in this department.

Will I continue my twitter account?  That is the question.  I keep thinking that there has to be more to social media than what meets the eye, so I will continue my hard hitting investigation next week, in which I’ll delve into twitter symbols and the retweet.  Until then this reporter is signing out.

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