The Electric World

Twittle Dee Twittle Dum

The subterranean world of electronic communication is wedging it's way into our social awareness. How is it going to manifest? Facebook, Friendfeed, and Twitter. Clones of them are springing up all over, like wild weeds. But I am only becoming acquainted with those three right now. And I am reporting the experience to you, here, on my 'mixed review' blog. Twitter is my entry into the other electronic mediums. You join Twitter just by entering 'Twitter' into google and finding it. Sign up for free, and there you are, staring at a rectangular box that begs you to write something inside of it. And you do. Your message to the world is instantly presented to that world. Supposedly, there are three million twits out here, and the number is growing exponentially by the moment. There is a system you learn, on the site, very quickly. You can follow people merely by clicking on their entry (which scrolls down the screen under the rectangle you wrote in). At first, since you have not clicked on anybody to follow, you have to click on 'Everyone' in order to see the whole population scrolling away. Click on some of them to follow. Some of them will automatically click back on you, and you will have your first followers. Then you are off and running. Three days ago I had none, but today I have almost a hundred. Problems abound, as you learn the system. You try to not make friends with advertising (spam) sites. They flood your scroll with ads (unless, of course, you want ads). wonderfully, you are one click away from weeding them from your 'tribe,' as I refer to my followers. I weed carefully, looking for those people who write intelligently, and more in general (rather than simply messaging back and forth to their few friends in strange text code).

People write the most amazing things. I am FromTheChateau on the site. I took that name from the name of my outside blog, which is always written somewhere here in this blog. I live in fear that the Obama people will one day shut the site down, or worse. The worse being that they might just excise me from the blogsite because I can be controversial....don't you know. People admit things on Twitter that you do not expect to see. I laugh like crazy at times. "The cartoons on in early morning are terrible now. They used to be so good in the eighties!" That person did not know she was being seriously funny. Which made it all the funnier, of course. The average I.Q. really is one hundred (that is 100!) and you get to see that, up close and personal. So you have to select your 'tribe' in order to be able to read stuff that has interest with respect to living out here. And so that people can understand the length and breath of your own intellect. If you have any, I mean. But you occasionally meet luminaries on the site. Like Zetazen. She is quite something. A woman for all seasons, and mostly unaware of the fact that she is all of that. A delight. Stuff like that makes you smile. And it is good to look at this screen and smile, once in awhile. Late at night Twitter is inhabited by a different breed of cat, however. The vampires, I call them. At midnight, their coffins open and out they pour. And the Japanese. The Japanese are on the other side of the clock from us, so they sleep when we are having 'normal' Twitter hours. But late at night they are up, wedging their wild Japanese script between Goth texting presentations which you have to be nine years old to understand. That or have metal rings running through most of your facial parts, interspersed with nicely done purple hair. So, watch out for what bumps into you during the night on that site.

Facebook I am just learning. Again, it allows for entries, but I don't know how that works yet. I mean, how much writing can one do, even me, in a day? And it is all about typing. I type really fast, so I do not know what 'normal' people do who are rather limited in that skill. Friendfeed is another mystery. I am on it. I am tied into Twitter and Facebook too, through it. I shall have a report up just as soon as I figure it all out, in which case I willl probably be found by the NSA and incarcerated. Please come visit me....or at least send a few bucks for commissary.

from-the-chateau-dif.blogspot.com