When I walked into the conference room, I was the only one that looked under 40 years old.
A white-haired lady in a matching pink blouse and pants struggled into a plastic chair. Another woman, with thick spectacles on the bottom of her nose, gave a start when my macbook gave the ominous “ohmm” of turning on. A man crossed his arms in an elbow-pad jacket, and a cane rested near his seat.
The woman holding the workshop was a petite, young literary agent.
“Now today I want to give you a few ways that you can use the internet to promote your book and gain readers,” she said. “Let’s start with blogs.”
My face relaxed, I might have given a small smile. Oh, blogs, that’s what we’re talking about here. This was comfortable territory for me.
By the perplexed faces I saw around the room, it clearly wasn’t for everyone else.
“A blog?” whispered a woman.
I leaned forward. “All you do is create a blog on some kind of blogger forum. And you can blog about anything really--gardening, fashion, fiction, whatever you want. And you can follow other people’s blogs.”
“So you look at blogs?”
“Yeah, lots of them,” I said.
“But how do I find them again after I see them?” The woman was so blank faced and confused. It dawned on me how some things don’t click with the older generation. For them, the internet is something that you can get lost in and never be able to retrace your steps. You only have one chance to look at an interesting website because who knows how you will ever find it again amongst the millions of websites on internet.
“On blogger, you just click follow and every time you log in there are updates on who has posted. Personally, I subscribe all my blogs on google reader, but you need a gmail account for that.”
“Oh honey,” she laughed, “I have no idea what you are talking about.”
Then we moved onto twitter.
A woman near the back started talking. “You know, I tried to make a twitter thing the other day. So, I made an account, but then I sat there for two hours trying to figure it out. And I just couldn’t! By that time, I needed to make dinner, so I handed the computer to my husband, and he’s really good with internet stuff. And you know what? He sat there for another two hours, and he wasn’t able to do a damn thing.”
By the tone of her voice, she was making twitter out to be utterly unworkable. No hope, completely futile.
“You know,” boasted the woman in the matching pink blouse and pants, “there are classes you can take for twitter. My senior center has offered them.”
I then realized another thing about the older generation on the internet: they treated the internet like it is something that can be broken. If you tweet incorrectly, if you don’t hashtag correctly, you run the risk of breaking twitter. For them, the internet is like a car. You need driving lessons or you’re likely to crash. There is no manual on the internet. I treat every social media site with absent-minded curiosity. I play around with it, and if it strikes my fancy I will stick around.
“A niece of mine got a twitter and she had 10,000 followers in a week,” said the woman in thick spectacles.
“If she has 10,000 followers, she is at least following 30,000 people,” I said. “Because most people just follow you back.”
“But I don’t know 30,000 people.”
The literary agent couldn’t help but give a small laugh.
“On twitter,” she explained, “you just follow anyone that interests you. I personally follow celebrities I like. It’s interesting how the barrier between celebrities and everyone else has broken down since twitter.”
“So these people you follow just write little things?”
“Yeah it can be anything like a joke, news update, a picture, question.”
“Well, I don’t have time to read all that. I have better things to do with my time.”
“I agree,” said the woman next to her, “I’m not going to be spending all day doing that.”
Mumbles of agreement swept the room. I wondered what was so important in their days.
My third realization came with their collected pride. They thought all the information offered on the internet had to be read. That is, you have to read every single tweet of every single person you follow, every single status update on facebook, every single blog post. Us, the younger generation, can recognize that it’s impossible to absorb all of the internet’s contents because it’s constantly multiplying. Thus, we skim through what we can. I’m never burdened about the hundreds of updates that pile up every hour.
A few days after the workshop, when I was fooling around on google+ for the first time, my mother peeked over my shoulder.
“What the hell are you on now?”
“Google+. It’s newer than facebook.” (which my mother had been acquainted with only a few months ago)
“Ugh,” my mother sneered.
“What can’t handle it?”
“Maybe I don’t want to expose everything on the internet. Maybe I understand the consequences of the internet. Maybe I have more dignity than that.”
It’s no use trying to explain the internet to the old.
my twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/carmella_mingo
