Tweety Bird Tweeting Twitter
For those yet new to Twitter, let me start by introducing a word that I desperately hope makes it into the Oxford English Dictionary as soon as possible: “twittergasm.” Coined by a woman I’ve paged through but can no longer find, thanks to the proliferation of “tweets” on my Twitter page, I find the term charming and titillating – and perfect to describe the feeling you get when something you read on Twitter really works for you.
If you haven’t heard of Twitter, then stop reading this right now and turn instead to the page of this blog titled: “Elizabeth Williams Bushey is making fun of you.”
Maybe you’ve heard of Twitter, though, and you just pretend at parties and other gatherings that you know what it’s all about – you know, the same way that you pretend that you know what “CPU” and “RAM” means when people who DO know what it means talk to you about it. You get that faux-confident head bobble, like “yeah, man, I know…”
Maybe you even have a MySpace, but your only friend is Tom. (If you don’t get that, see above: “Elizabeth Bushey is making fun of you.”)
Then again, maybe in reaction to your ignorance, you’ve taken a pretend stand against all this “dang” technology, and protested that all this “social media” really “keeps us apart.”
Maybe you lumber up on top of a soapbox and proselytize for the days of old, when people had to proselytize from real soapboxes, on real streets, hassling flesh-and-blood passers-by, getting arrested by flesh-and-blood police officers.
You poor thing. If you haven’t gotten the hang of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Skype, etc., you’re missing out on some cool opportunities to expand your network of some very cool people you’d otherwise never in a million years meet.
For instance, I just did a “virtual” school visit with a sixth-grade class in Alabama. I’m in New York, but I was able to answer all their questions, see their sweet faces, and play my guitar and sing for them – all from my studio at home. We used Skype, and it cost us nothing. And it was easy – for the teacher, and for me. (I pretty much just sat there, worked in between classes, and waited for the “calls.”)
Via Facebook, I’ve connected with some old college buddies that I haven’t talked to in years.
Via Gmail’s new video conferencing, I can see and speak with people – just like Judy Jetson – instead of devouring minutes on my cell phone.
Coolest of all: I’ve been struggling my ass off to build two sites using an open source technology called Joomla. Everyone in the known universe, every page I’ve Googled, says how easy it is. Somehow, though, despite changing web hosts, even, I haven’t been able to get it to work. Which is weird – since although I can’t do everything really well, the one thing I DO do pretty well is build web sites, and work with software. No matter how many times I installed and reinstalled it, at least one major thing went wrong.
As in, REALLY wrong. Like: the registration page would fail. Something particularly catastrophic like that.
So I called an old friend of mine up – she’s the web diva at a college, and I used to be, which is how we met – only now I’m an artist, and she’s now a SUPER diva. She listened compassionately to my problem, and went straight to Twitter. She has something like seventeen bazillion fans following her on Twitter.
Within the hour, I had at least four or five experts offering me help. People who didn’t even know her personally – let alone ME. I hooked up with this TERRIFICALLY fun guy – who has a charming gift for cussing, which totally works for me. Never would have met him without Twitter.
Talk about Twittergasm.
Talk about social media.
If you haven’t gotten on board yet – you’re gonna miss the train. Wave, though, from the platform. We’ll miss you!
Everything you read on this blog is actually true. As in, this is a genuine, non-fiction blog. Generally, I don't name names when the parties concerned are (a) related to me and/or (b) under the age of majority, and therefore no matter how funny they are, unable to give their informed consent to have their hilarious but true commentary on the ridiculousness of life publicized globally. I do, however, skirt the issue of crediting them by admitting it was not ME who came up with their jokes, but "some kid." (Works for most of us.)
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