Upon Twitter...

...I am lucky to have a husband who does not mind the technology confounds me. He thinks it is rather lovely that as he sits there synching his online diary with his mobile phone, I am writing important dates into mine with his fountain pen. Some technology I have embraced perfectly well....after all, I blog, I get my groceries delivered and am good at using amazon! But there are other things that well, just pass me by.

Facebook I just about cope with, but I do dislike that for some people it has replaced proper communication. Rather than sharing what is going on in their lives, they shrug and say 'well it was on facebook' as though we are all meant to be glued to it, just watching for when they have news! I am likely to miss any event I am invited to through facebook because I probably wont realise I have been invited! But I do like it for keeping in touch with friends, so it is definitely not all bad.

Twitter..my work has a twitter page (if a twitter page is in fact something you can have!) and I used to get sent all the twitter stats for how many tweets work had made, and how many retweets there were.....well once I got past the first stat, I had no idea what the rest meant! And although one of the girls did talk about retweets and trends...nope, still none the wiser! Part of me likes the accessibility of being able to hear first hand from people in the public eye (I dont really like to use the term star or celebrity for too many people!) but then again....I cant help but wonder if we had fewer interviews and photographs and so on, if they might be better quality. I like that Marilyn Monroe used to score out the negatives of photographs of herself she did not want used from photoshoots. Now with nearly everyone having a mobile phone camera it is so much harder to have control over your image. When that photo of the lovely Christina Hendricks in her swimsuit made headlines, I thought it was so silly. She was caught in a split second, and had it been a split second earlier or later she would have been in a position so you could see how tiny her waist is, rather than all those ridiculous headlines about her size, just because of a bad camera angle. But then again, it is nice to feel that you will hear these peoples actual views and thoughts rather than just what the press agent has allowed to be released.

So, I am not on twitter.....yet. I don't know if I ever will be. I love blogging, but I don't know if I could distill my thoughts down into the character limit. I suspect it is not meant to replace blogging but be an also...but there are so many methods of communication now, it can be a little exhausting. There is the post, in which you so rarely get a handwritten letter or card, and then the mobile phone and texts, the landline and the answerphone, then there are emails, and blogs...I don't know that I want to add to that at the moment. My phone ran out of battery early in the day yesterday, and it was actually curiously nice to be free of it, even if just for the day.

I do think new technology is amazing. I don't claim to understand even a bit of it, but it is wonderful to be able to use it. But when all is said and done, I am rarely happier than with fountain pen and paper, a book and a cup of tea...and so far, I don't think that technology can improve on these!