I feel like such a dumbbell. I just don’t grasp what I am reading. I can see that a young person (a millennial?) who is just starting out in the techno-geeky world of the electronic media has an incredible ride ahead of him.
I am what is called a late adopter. You see, that means that I’m still excited with the many different things I can get out of a Google search—web pages, images, shopping, maps, earth, translations, etc.—it is incredible to me. Emails are a bane and a blessing in so many ways. I get more than I know what to do with. I’m drowning in all the emails I get from Kim Komando and The Wall Street Journal.
I not too long ago got a FaceBook page (I think it was FaceBook . . . maybe it was MySpace . . . I can’t remember which one because I use it so seldom. I can’t remember my login or password. I can never remember where I put them. I am always changing the password because I can’t remember the old one, and when I suggest a new one, they tell me it was too much like the old one) and here were some people I knew who were on it. They linked up to me. I had a nephew who wrote and told me that now maybe I was cool, that I had at least gotten to the 20th century. But hold on, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Now there’s Twitter (which I have but don’t know how to use—I follow my son-in-law and my son with their various tweets) I even try to tweet back, but I get the impression that all my tweeting goes out into the ether somewhere.
But it gets better. Now there’s FriendFeed, Linkedln, RSS stuff, Qik, Minggl, LiveMesh, Flickr, TechMeme, Dopplr, and I am freaking lost.
I try to have one of my sons explain it to me and put it into context, but he gets so frustrated. "I teach you everything I know, and you still don’t know anything. I mean come on, Daddy . . . you’re not that dumb!"
Wanna Bet?
I feel like the Russian military back in the 70's who got hold of some of our military electronic secret stuff and they could not make sense of what they were seeing. They knew it was valuable, and powerful, but what did it do? How did it work?
One thing I will say for this electronic village is that you find out about stuff waaaay faster than you will ever hear about it in the popular media. I just wish I knew or could comprehend what I was reading. I remember my boys’ grandmother before we grasped that she was getting Alzheimer’s had some notes on her desk where she was trying to balance her checkbook. There was scribbling everywhere with numbers galore. Finally there was this plaintive plea underlined: THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE . I know it’s all supposed to be good, but maybe I have more than reached the Peter Principle with respect to this medium. It’s swell to read about, and listen to the heat of discussions, but what it all means? Well, have you ever asked a physician to describe your condition to you? He was using the English language, he was born in America, but the words that came out of his mouth made no contact with any kind of meaning that was in my vocabulary. That’s sort of where I am, folks.
