Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Musings on the 21st Century

Well, I did it. I'm hip again, at least in my own convoluted mind. Not only do I have a blog, a facebook account, I've dabbled in LinkedIn, but I tweated. For those of you who don't know, tweating is basically the ability to use a computer to send random thoughts to the entire populace with a quick push of a button. It's pretty frightening.

I tweated on a white paper I copyedited for a rocket scientist at NASA who uses my company's software to perform space optimization. Okay, so I don't know if he's an actual rocket scientist, but it makes me feel smarter. Anyway, you post 140 characters (ack!Good thing I'm usually at a loss for words!) on whatever you feel like and it gets sent into the cybersphere. In about 5 seconds (the amount of time it could take you to think "OMG, what have I done?!?") you can see that many unknowns out in the world have read your tweat and indeed, clicked on any info you included, like the URL to said whitepaper.

When I say unknown, I mean unknown. It tracks and categorizes the trackers into 'HUMAN' and 'BOT'. Yes, Virginia, we are living in a TRANSFORMER/TERMINATOR world. I never thought I'd have to worry about robots tracking my information in cyberspace. Perhaps I should move.

That may be scary, but I am finding that these new fangled technologies can be a boon to my life; for example, now that we have secured a mobile phone for our preteen boy, I've never had so many conversations with the kid in my entire life. And I don't mean by communicating via voice, like we 20th century folks would assume you would do, especially using a PHONE; I'm letting my fingers do the talking - I've done better parenting through texting in the last three months than I have in the other 12 years of that kid's life.

We've had in depth conversations about everything. I'm finding that I can do virtual parenting from virtually anywhere in the world. Who needs a babysitter when you have a rule oriented, bossy 12 year old in charge (or so he thinks) of everyone in his domain. I've been distracted in many meetings at work by texts such as "K ate 16 poptarts - is that okay?"and "Z is calling me names, can I hit him?", "Can we watch JAWS?", and "WHERE R U?"

Woops. Gotta go. I think there is a BOT at the door texting to get in.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hahaha! Wow I don't even have a twitter account. But I do believe its tweeted not tweated. :P

Unknown said...

I so hope the Bots didn't get you. It's not secret info. anyway - unless you're not telling us something.
LOVE the fact that we moms can get in on the cool technology and use it for our good - BWA HAHAHAHA.
I feel quite hip, too - that I can text. But I've yet to experience the funny messages you get during meetings. SIXTEEN Poptarts! High five to that kid!