House of Eratosthenes

So sometime a few months ago, I caved in and set up a Twitter account just to see what all the fuss is about. Like many others out there…I’m still waiting to find out. I think.

Some of my blogger friends seem to have gotten a lot of meaning out of this thing that I can’t quite see, and some of them have even taking to blogger-bitching that I’m not using Twitter properly. I concede this point by default. I’m pretty sure I’m not doing it right. I’m a bad twit.

So I hole up in my little cave and continue to do my blogger thing, and meanwhile the Facebook invitations are piling up and piling up. My girlfriend was getting into Facebook pretty heavy, getting into some kind of cartoon farm planting contest with some other bookies. I don’t know what this thing’s called or where it is, I just know it has this annoying virtual cow.

One night I figured it out: It’s the chat. “My God!” I said to her one night, while she chatted away with her sister-in-law…or girlfriend from New York…or whatever. “Is that what the fuss is about? You people are discovering chat?” And she nodded. “Do you realize I’ve been arguing with liberals over chat since 1986? You non-computer-people are just learning about chat now that it’s called ‘Facebook’?”

“Pretty much,” she said. My gal. She has such inventive ways of saying “stick a cork in it, putz.”

Then my kid got into it. I got an e-mail earlier this week from his mother saying he was chatting with his cousin and grandfather (on my side of the family). So I sent back this bit of snark:

Wow, so my entire extended family is filled with Facebook bloggers. You computer people, drifting around in cyberspace with all your puffed-up opinions…

I’m as obnoxious as I can possibly get where Facebook is concerned — or at least, I was. It was my way to stop people from inviting me. It didn’t work. And then when your kid sends you an invite, of course you have to accept. So now I’m on it.

I have not been an overwhelmingly successful twit, and I have strong doubts against the supposition that I’ll be a super-cool bookie. On both sites I’m just kinda…there.

It came up in the staff meeting this morning, this phenomenon called Facebook. There were a bunch of knowing nods around the table among the older set, as I explained that you have to join when your kid invites you. But in this “live” round of “social networking,” I came to learn about something else going on: As the gray-beards (me) slowly come trickling into the Facebook pool, the younger crowd is making a mass exodus out of apparent revulsion toward the invading Metamucil set.

I guess it’s part & parcel of being forty-three. I have my first set of liver spots, and the minute I do what everyone else has decided is “cool,” by definition it ceases to be cool. Still waiting for the eyeballs to turn to mush like all the older folks keep telling me should’ve already happened by now. Friends and family insist my hair is thinning more than I’m willing to admit though…so it looks like the next stop is senior discounts at Denny’s.

Well, facebook to me is an easy way to almost interactively, but still on my own time, keep in touch with family and friends flung far and wide. I rarely use the chat, though I do occasionally because sometimes it’s convenient.

I don’t play the stupid games for the most part. I usually regret it when I do. I ignore most requests outside of friend requests, and if I don’t know you I don’t accept. No “mob wars”, no “I sent you a candy bar” (mmmm, that tastes good), no stupid rain forest gardens or whatever. I do the status, some links, lots of pictures, and comment on other people’s stuff when I feel like it.

If you keep out of all of the stupid “applications”, it’s actually pretty cool.

Most kids, I think, are kind of embarrassed to have their parents on it. ‘Course, me, I’d insist on the friend invite. You’ll be surprised what you find out what’s going on in their little lives when they’re not neccesarily thinking “hey, dad’ll see this”.
- philmon | 07/17/2009 @ 19:47
I also TEND to stay away from political stuff on it, outside of countering other people’s repeating progressive echoes. I try to politely let them know others think differently. Other people they know. And supposedly like.

I mean, it’s a social network. I treat it as a cross between a family picnic and a class reunion. Similar social rules apply. At least I make them apply for me anyway. Usually.
- philmon | 07/17/2009 @ 19:51
For what it’s worth, Twitter is all about short and pithy.

In the list of bloggers I know who do short and pithy, I cannot find an entry for Morgan Freeberg.

QED.
- karrde | 07/18/2009 @ 07:21
In the list of bloggers I know who do short and pithy, I cannot find an entry for Morgan Freeberg. QED.

Right you are. Someday I must sit down and produce a treatise explaining all the things that are so right about that…
- mkfreeberg | 07/18/2009 @ 09:58
Heh. I deactivated my Facebook account a couple of months ago. Note that you cannot delete a Facebook account, you can only deactivate same. Facebook is for-frickin’-ever. That’s worrisome, innit?

All three of my kids are on Facebook, both my ex-wives, most of my friends, yadda, yadda. But I found it exquisitely boring… probably because I don’t “chat” any longer.

Twitter, OTOH, is VERY useful for keeping up with the hockey bloggers I follow, a couple of politicians, and a few friends. I myself don’t tweet much, but I monitor the feed through TwitterGadget that sits in my G-Mail sidebar. The Iran feed during the recent unpleasantness was just frickin’ awesome, too.

Finally: karrde has a point, Morgan… you absolutely, positively NEED an editor, not further treatises. There are times when your pearls of wisdom are buried in the muck of endless and oftentimes useless verbiage. Just sayin’. 😉
- bpenni | 07/18/2009 @ 13:27
You are also right.

I’m going to jot down a few paragraphs about that as well.

Villager #1: Why should I break my head about the outside world? Let the outside world break its own head.
Tevye: Well put! He is right. As the Good Book says, “If you spit in the air, it lands in your face.”
Villager #2: Nonsense. You can’t close your eyes to what’s happening in the world.
Tevye: He is right.
Villager #3: He’s right and he’s right? They can’t both be right.
Tevye: You know, you are also right.
- mkfreeberg | 07/18/2009 @ 14:42

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