It’s inevitable: new technology catches up with you no matter how old school you try to remain.
Until recently, I swore I’d never show my face on Facebook. Seo was the last name of an up-and-coming activist named Danny, blackberry was my favorite Kool-Aid flavor, and CSS … wasn’t that a TV show about crime in Miami? Email was instant enough for me. In the good old days I had IM-less relationships where we held hands, looked into each other’s eyes, and even (gasp) called one another. Just last year, a successful internet entrepreneur I worked for thought LOL stood for “lots of luck,” and I played Scrabble on a board.
Yet tonight I tutored a student from Korea learning English using a NYT article about Facebook.com. This Saturday’s lesson: create a profile for her, complete with an arm’s-length pic of herself looking thoughtful. She’ll be throwing sheep in no time. (And maybe, since she’s younger, she can help me figure out what that’s about.)
And then I helped my daughter create a “blob” on WordPress. She had overheard me on the phone with a friend (and gifted writer) about her new blog, and suddenly she had to make a “blob” too. (My answer, of course: “You already have one. It’s called your room — go clean it up.”) Hers became one of the 120,000 new blogs created today, the 10th anniversary of the coining of the term “weblog.”
It is ironic to me that I helped two younger people — one of them from the most wired nation in the world — still learning how to write and speak in English utilize technology that will very soon pass me by me at break-bandwidth speed, leaving them to teach me.
In the mean time, Facebook just announced they’re teaming up with Match.com for a Little Black Book dating application . . . wish me LOL on finding someone who doesn’t know what that means either.
