Learning curves . . .
In 8th grade Power Mechanics class, I learned the nuts and bolts of gasoline combustion engines. It took almost half of a school year, but by the end I could take apart a 4-stroke Briggs & Stratton lawnmower engine, put it back together, and tune it with relative ease. Later, when I developed type 1 diabetes, I was faced with a much more complex task. But over several years, I worked hard to learn what was going on biologically within my body and how to manage my diabetes and keep my A1cs in optimal range.
So why is it that I can’t foresee such a positive outcome with learning social media? I mean I’m an upbeat, positive, can-do kind of guy. And, as far as I know, I’m not educationally challenged. I only got one C in college, and that wasn’t my fault. The professor was great—he just failed to recognize the depth and value of some of my bigger assignments. We all make mistakes.
But this social media thing has me constantly scratching my head (or pounding it against a wall, or for that matter, any inert matter that I can thrust my cranium into). It’s just so . . . what’s the word? Oh, yeah—BIG!
And, thus, overwhelming.
To be clearer, it’s not all social media that drives me bonkers. Posting personal pictures on Instagram or thematic ones on Pinterest is pretty straightforward, yet sometimes grossly narcissistic, stuff. Same goes for connecting to other business professionals through LinkedIn.
My primary social media adversary, my true nemesis, is Twitter.
I get lost in strings of text that include so many @ references and hashtags that I’m not sure whether to read it as a sentence or try and decipher it as some type of secret code. Then there are the Twitter chats or conversations where multiple questions are being discussed all at once in a chaotic fashion that makes my linear-thinking, structured mind want to explode.
And how can a 3rd grade schoolteacher in Hoboken who has a fascination for entomology have 22,437 followers? Are insects that intriguing?
And who has time to tweet 270 times every single day? It’s as if in Matrix-like manner, a USB cord was connected to the base of their skull to allow the perpetual download of every single thought to Twitter. It goes something like this:
Tweet #1: “I walked outside just now, and the sun was very bright.”
Tweet #2: “I walked back inside, and by comparison, it was much darker.”
Tweet #3: “Maybe I should buy a new lamp.”
I suppose these revelations can have some deep personal meaning, but for the rest of us, isn’t this overkill? Twitter limited the character count of a tweet to 280 to eliminate the long-winded and verbose. But the same painful effect can be created with 106 short consecutive tweets.
Oh, alright. I know that it’s not all bad. Social media—and yes, Twitter—will be the starting point of discussions that will ultimately bring great and positive change to our world and our lives as diabetics. I truly do believe that.
I will figure it all out eventually. In fact, I just discovered that someone replied to one of my tweets 12 days ago. Now I know how to find out right when that happens. There’s hope for me.
Give me a choice, though, and I’ll take good old diabetes self-management any day. For now, there’s this Facebook thing I’ve got to look into.
–Tad