Friday, August 15, 2014

The End of Twitter?

A friend wrote me about the "coming death of Twitter".  He does use email and he does use the telephone but refuses to try Facebook or Twitter, and often emails me about "Problems"  Facebook and Twitter are encountering, their "growing uselessness" and "accelerating decline in usage".  This is my answer to him.

Well, I don't see the same problems you do.  I Text and Tweet and Facebook and e-Mail and Blog and Message and Face Time and Linkedin and Telephone and Cell phone.  I even Mail things still, sometimes.  (and the cell phone can involve talking, tweeting and texting too - all [more or less] at the same time.)  I even still read newspapers, magazines and books!  Personally, I think this is great.  And I often encounter different "friends" in each media.  I enjoy communicating with people in Greece, Great Britain, Germany, India and Japan – not constantly, but occasionally.  I have found "friends" in all the various social media that range from foreign countries, all over the United States, and include people I met years ago in different roles of life, even three whom I went to high school with – and met them 64 years ago.   In a way this choice of social media reminds me of the game of golf.  I quit golf 48 years ago - my handicap was 5 (which is great).  I quit because my third child was born and I was stuck in recurring assignments to Vietnam.  The golf bag I played with had 14 clubs (max allowed) and each one served a different purpose.  My assortment was pretty standard except I did not carry a Brassie, but carried two 5-irons instead, one right-handed and the other left-handed – that left-handed one was for a bad lie up against a tree or other structure that required a penalty drop.  I practiced with the left-handed 5-iron and could make a mean get-away of 50 to 170 yards.  Which of my Social Media corresponds to my left-handed 5 iron?  Probably all of them!  But I try to seek in my own way, a degree of literacy in these new opportunities.