This is me laughing at myself...
I'm not really laughing. I'm wondering whether I'm riding the wave of social media-blogging-pinteresting stumbling, tumbling youtubing infomedia - as a 51 year old overweight male, enjoying a freedom of information, trawling the 'net in an awesome horizon broadening knowledge download. Or am I just going through a midlife crisis?
I was born in the 60's - and if I wanted to send my cousin in the USA a picture of me on holiday I whipped out the Kodak, reeled off 24 or 36 pictures - the quality of which would only be revealed by my local Boots chemist after I'd jetted back from wherever (never to return). The photograph would be accompanied by a handwritten letter on the thinnest of thin paper, slid carefully into a thinner blue envelope and posted Par Avion, to arrive a few weeks later (if at all).
But now, I can snap the moment on my smartphone, and if I don't like it I can snap it again, and I can edit the picture, and I can email or SMS is to anyone in the World close to instantaneously - or I can upload to my social media site and tag to my hearts content. I can check in, and hey, in a years time I will be reminded of where I was, who I was with and what my political leanings were. I might even have a picture of what I had for dinner!
Once upon a time, if I needed to find out how to strip down a lawnmower I would either ask my granddad, find a friendly lawnmower repair shop tucked down some alley way off the High Street, or I'd go to my local library and look in the reference section. No longer do I have that inconvenience! Just as well, because granddads are a dying breed now - soon to be replaced by "why don't you Google it?" The little shop has closed down because people will now throw away the defective mower and buy a new one, and I am amazed we still have libraries!
I have embraced this new technology with open arms. I love my laptop/tablet/smartphone. I play Scrabble on my smartphone. On my own.
If I thought I was antisocial before the advent of this technology, Lord only knows what I am now!
When I was a kid, if you wanted a moving image in a notebook you drew little stick figures in the bottom corner on every page, making each one a little different, and flicked through them to form a flick-book. Now, my daughter asks if she can do her homework in PowerPoint so she can animate it!
My worry is am I a geek, a nerd or just a sad middle aged man trying to be cool?
The upside of this however is things like this blog. I'm just writing my thoughts down, some random chatter that's meant to be funny. If I wanted to do this years ago I'd have to have a job with a newspaper or a magazine - publishing my byline fortnightly. I would need to have studied, qualified, acquired references, developed a portfolio, networked at parties (ugh! sorry, there's my antisocial side showing again) and made connections - but now I just ramble on here and if I'm lucky, people will read it.
The downside though is, the internet is full of this stuff. That journalist went through all that malarkey for a reason - to weed out the dross, so that articles were only written by accomplished writers, who checked their facts, who researched their subject, who were accountable for their plagiarism, slander and such. The veracity of some of what you see on the internet cannot be guaranteed, and posts on social media get shared and liked and bandied about without anyone checking if what they're publishing is true or not.
I like this new world that I'm a part of, where so much of what you want or need is at your fingertips. It's what I dreamed about in the 70's - being a part of the world, and not just a part of my street. If I wanted broader horizons I certainly got them!
