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Friday, April 10, 2009

 

TWITTERPATED

Twitterpated: to be completely enamored with someone/something.

A blogging buddy, whom I admire greatly, invited me to join up on Twitter. Another good blogging buddy, whom I also admire a great deal, convinced her to get started. I’ve been told by several PR people who have helped me set up interviews for articles that “Twitter is the way to go, very important in this market Carine”.

Ahhhh, I was just getting the hang of being on Face Book! Yes, I have 148 friends and over 53 followers to this little old blog here. I’m having fun over there too. I’ve reconnected with a few high school friends, several of my interview subjects and I have become “close cyber-buddies” and numerous PR people, editors and other social site members and I are checking up on each other.

I put the meaning of twitterpated on top because I want to say: I AM SO NOT TWITTERPATED WITH THIS LATEST AND GREATEST FORM OF SOCIALIZING!

Now I get twitterpated when my husband walks in the door. I get twitterpated when the furry ones do something cute and I get twitterpated when I see my grandsons. I even get twitterpated when someone leaves me a comment on an article I’ve written, answered a question I’ve posted on the magazine boards I moderate or on the newspaper section that I agreed to start discussions on-but as for Twitter itself? No.

I don’t know how many more social sites I can join-How many can one person follow?

A friend from high school asked me that-“Carine, is it our generation, or are we the only 2 not getting this?”

My reply-“Penny, you’ve known me for close to 40 years now-you know I’m the girl who got a 15% on her mechanical reasoning test in junior high-how can you ask me if it’s us??? I know for sure it’s definitely me-at the very least!”

Don’t get me wrong-I enjoy finding long lost friends, making new ones and learning about just about anything that will help me in my journalistic endeavors, but Twitter is giving me palpitations, just not the kind mentioned in the definition!

I will certainly keep trying to catch on to Twitter, Plaxo, ShesConnected, Face Book and several other sites. But I see myself getting way too involved in the “checking” rather than the “living”!

The other day-rather than call a “real, live girlfriend” and ask her to meet me for coffee-I found myself checking our Linked In pages to see if she was in town first!!! Whoa!

My high school friend who wanted to know if it was just the 2 of us who weren’t sure if all these online social sites weren’t “all that” wasn’t even sure if she had signed up for Twitter! She had to go check her own status!

As for me-I realized that all of the social and professional availabilities made it possible to be a working journalist without ever talking to a live human being! Yes, many of my articles in the last 18 months were researched online, subjects were interviewed via e-mail and appointments were made the same way-even pictures were sent to me via one of my two addresses!

I’ve never been a party animal and I’ve always been a bit old-fashioned, but I’m sure there must be several “modernists” out there who also feel that all this new found anti-social/social behavior is hardly giving them the human interaction we all so desperately need to rediscover.

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