My mom discovers Facebook, asks why people are posting about stupid stuff...

BLOT: (08 Dec 2010 - 01:40:55 PM)

My mom discovers Facebook, asks why people are posting about stupid stuff...

My mom is not a technophobe nor a luddite nor a backwoods bumpkin. It is just plotting her need of new technology on a scale of 1 to 10 in which 1 is someone on an South Pacific island monestary with no electricty nor generators and a vow of solitude and a 10 is your average Apple addict, she is somewhere about a 4. She once used a Sega Dreamcast to surf the net for a couple of years* and now, perhaps with an inate sense of irony, plays game using her TV satellite box. She comes into things late, and often at odd angles. I recently joked somewhere on this blog - lo but I am lazy and will just repeat rather than seek out - about her sending out the text: "Doug, I've finally figured out how to text." The response she got back? "This isn't Doug, so not quite."

Recently, she has started using her cellphone to browse since her package includes 30mb or so of data per month and she was barely tapping 1/100th of that, and solely through sending picture-laden text messages. After a few tries, she got Wikipedia to load, and some weather stuff, and some other things. Somewhere in here, she went to Facebook and browsed. Now, I'm not sure if she made a profile or if she just used someone else's profile, or which-what, but in a phone call to me yesterday she summed this up as...

What was my response? I gave her a link to my Twitter feed. And my website. Heh, which means she might get to read this. This was my own dash of irony, since my posts range from indolent to well researched, from functional to esoteric, from inane to profound, and every flavor in between. The sum of which has to be a bit odd to those fresh to the fold and not unlike reading of some strangers day-to-days or commonplace happenings. Though I rarely talk about cleaning house and all the time talk about what characters are doing, wrong, in horror movies.

There you have it, my mom's summation of Facebook (and by extension, all social media). And my smart-ass reply, but she won't realize it was smart ass until she goes to see the link and sees three or four tweets in a row about me stubbing my toe or something. Love you, Mom!

* This makes my mom cooler than your mom.

LABEL(s): My Family, Social Media

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 49
BY MONTH: December 2010