I seem to be something of an all or nothing blogger, and to anyone who is kind enough to read this habitually, I extend my most sincere apologies.
To make an impact using social media, this simply doesn’t do. People get bored, they soon forget, they are prey to the million other distractions, including other more faithful and diligent bloggers. So, perhaps I was somewhat ahead of myself when I decided to join the ‘twittersphere’ and thus indulge in my usual pattern of starting out completely obsessed, checking tweets every minute and blasting off witty retorts only to culminate in a complete dearth of interest a couple of weeks later.
I blame my phone - the sim expired and due to the vagaries of dealing with a mobile phone company named for a particular citrus fruit I was without mobile phone communication for a week. Just sufficient time to wean me off checking Twitter regularly and turn me to the Dark Side of pointless daily battles of splatting zombies, lining up sweeties and popping bubbles via the iPad.
It’ll be OK, I thought, as I do about this blog when I haven’t touched it for weeks and the stats chart is flatlining drastically. I’ll get back into it, modestly, this afternoon .... tonight ... tomorrow ... Then my daughter - whose other role is the household i-media guru - showed me an article in Wired magazine about ‘How To ... get more followers on Twitter’. Just how many url-rich, fascinating tweets are optimal to keep your follower numbers over a century? My guess? Ooh, let’s see, two - no, three a day?
One an hour!
An hour!
For someone who has to remind myself to go to the toilet because there are so many other darn things to do, I found this troubling news. Perhaps the solution is to combine the two activities - trips to the loo and tweeting. It’s not a practicable solution for a man ... but for a girl, there’s a necessary handsfree few moments that could be more fully utilised...
But, then I think to myself, if I am tweeting away to nobody in particular whilst sitting on the loo, that really does give new meaning to #pissingyourlifeaway.
Yet I found myself examining my latent resistance to acting on such well-meant instruction. I put it down to contrariness or at least old-fashioned Luddite tendencies that have me yearning for the days of mix-tapes and post restante. But then I caught Wade Davis’s thoughts on a BBC Radio 4 broadcast of The Digital Human, and understood that it was something more.
I’ve mentioned Mr Davis before in relation to the Haitian zombi legend, he’s an anthropologist and works for National Geographic, and on the radio programme he was talking about making a journey with another traveller to encounter vanishing cultures. From my own reading I am aware of how deeply Wade Davis immerses himself in his work, and so it was in complete contrast to him that throughout their venture his companion remained in touch with the outside world via Twitter and his blog.
Davis’s feelings about his fellow traveller’s circumstances interested me because they struck a cord with my ambivalence towards my blogging and tweeting. Davis expressed pity for someone having to continually feed these ‘monsters’ that demanded constant updates, daily reports and relentless commentary on the trip. He had created cyber beasts that refused to lie quiet and let him be apart from the rest of the world and be completely absorbed in the journey.
So, perhaps my perpetual nostalgia for old technology isn’t entirely divorced from this idea. I can hope that rather than smashing the machines that carry on the manifest destiny of a digital age, the Luddite in me can keep alive the desire to experience life in analogue.
