After dipping my big toe very tentatively into the worlds of facebook, linkedin, twitter, and the like, I have decided to make a U-turn and head in the other direction.
No doubt that those in mid-career find use in these online experiences, and no doubt that teen-agers relish their 2700 messages a month as a proxy measure of their popularity, but persons of my age cohort ought to have different and more productive priorities.
Frankly, I am surprised when I am invited, cajoled, emailed, contacted, to acknowledge electronically that someone over 70 - like me - wants me to "friend" them. We should be doing volunteer work, weeding the garden, reading a book, canning peaches and not fretting about how many online "friends" we may have accumulated purposely or accidentally.
We're already friends, and thus far we seem to have managed to contact each other regularly or irregularly as circumstances require through more traditional means from telephone to the very occasional written note.
I have enough trouble with all the damn telephone solicitations which arrive daily from just after 9 am to just before 9 pm...so much so that sometimes I forward my phones to a completely fictional Mary Margaret McLain, an older Scottish woman, and - miracle of miracles - she takes virtually no messages, except from old friends who know that underneath that old lady's voice is nothing more than me.
It is not that I wish to be a hermit...just that I wish to have some sense of control over what's left of my life. So you might find me on Facebook or LinkedIn, but even I won't be paying attention to me.
Thank heaven.
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