By Tobin Barnes
I have a confession to make.
You may remember—it doesn’t matter, I’m not proud of it—that some weeks ago I went on a rabid-dog rant against texting on cell phones, saying all kinds of nasty things about this latest technological waste of time.
Well, it so happens that in the intervening days—yes, mea culpa—I have texted, maybe about ten times in two months.
Of course, that’s nowhere near the 80 times per day of the average teenager, thank goodness. I still cringe to think of that much thumbing through phone keys.
But as I said, I have found some opportunities where texting someone rather than talking to him seemed like the better thing to do. In those cases, I just wanted to relay a bit or two of information and didn’t want to go through the rigmarole of engaging in some stilted conversation of who knows how long to do that.
Yeah, I’m not the big gabber type who enjoys gabbing just to be gabbing. Not that there’s anything wrong with it.
However, on one thing I stand firm. Shoot me on the spot if you ever see me texting while driving a car. That’s just perversely negligent.
So yes, I now see a place for responsible texting. And I’ve also converted on another piece of technology I had previously sneered at: Twitter.
Okay, I can already hear the moans and groans.
“Barnes, how could you cave on that one. You’re tweeting, for crying out loud? You’ve finally gone over to the dark side?”
Um…yup.
But only some of you are moaning and groaning. According to a recent survey, about two-thirds of adults know little or nothing about Twitter, let alone Tweets.
For those of you in that category, Twitter is a free online service that gives you a maximum of 140-character to—at any given moment and over and over, if you’d like—answer the question, “What are you doing?” And your answer goes out to the rest of the world. These little messages are Tweets.
In actuality, the rest of the world could care less what you are doing. You have to have “followers” to generate much real caring as to your daily minutiae. And to have followers, you kind of have to be somebody—at least a minor celebrity or maybe a good tweeter who manages to be fairly interesting in 140-word chunks. Yeah, it’s not for everyone.
As for me, I don’t have many “followers,” although I’ve had a number of potential followers who were trying to sell me something (you can imagine what), so I’ve just blocked them, which is easy to do. I doubt if I will ever have many followers, and that’s okay.
No, what I enjoy about Twitter is being a follower. It can be a good thing. Right now, I’m following 30 different Tweet senders from all walks of life.
For example, I’m following The White House. Yeah, they send out 140-character Tweets regularly on what Obama and his administration are doing. (By the way, Twitter makes it easy to send links to other web pages in the Tweets, which happens all the time.)
I’m following the PGA Tour for the latest tidbits on golf, and I’m following David Pogue, the gadget and technology god who writes for The New York Times.
On the other hand, if you know me at all, you know I do not follow Sarah Palin, a reportedly prodigious Tweeter.
But I do follow Rainn Wilson, who plays the overstuffed character Dwight Schrute on the TV show “The Office.” Turns out he seems about as loopy on Twitter as his TV character.
However, one of his Tweets led me to a fascinating TED video (TED.com is a column in itself). The video was about crows and how smart and potentially useful they are.
Some crows are so smart that they drop nuts on a busy street so cars will run over the nuts and break them open for the crows to eat. But that’s not all. The crows wait for the light to turn red so traffic stops and they don’t get run over themselves. Now that’s smart.
Well, who would have known that about crows? Not me; that is, unless I followed Rainn Wilson on Twitter.
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