Refusing To Be Old

I read an article last year where they interviewed one of my girlfriends from graduate school. She was talking about the changes in online social networks and made the comment, “The younger generation thinks email is for old people.” (Okay, not exact quote, but something like that.)

This statement struck me as odd. Then what are they doing? As I read the article, the only answers I got were from people in their twenties saying young people were doing things even they can’t understand.

I was at a loss. I had always remained aware of the myriad of technologies out there, but I didn’t think people were actually using them to any meaningful extent. It left me perplexed, and slightly feeling left out of some secret high school party.

The first thing that came to mind was texting. It is much more common for young people to text, but I was using texting on a daily basis as well, and saw it very similar to emailing, and not that different. Of course, there are some texting short hands out there that I still don’t fully understand. For example, “@TEOTD,” and “1174,” but you can easily look all those up at http://www.netlingo.com/emailsh.cfm.

The second thing I thought of were online social networks, places like MySpace and Facebook. I knew of them, I knew of some of their functionalities, but I didn’t use them. In fact I had recently confessed to my college students that social networking online was what officially defined me as “old.”

Ahha, so maybe the article was right.

I visited Facebook, where I had set up an account a few years ago upon reading a New Yorker article about the site. As I logged on, I was faced with the confusion all first-time users encounter.

What is a wall? When would I post on a Wall and when would I send a message? Wait! What is this Superwall thing? Why would I poke you? Why is it so uneventful when I get poked? Isn’t this just moving email to a different website? Why are people sending me beers? Am I really saving a rainforest by watering a friend’s garden? Why do people take all of these online quizzes?

(Of course this was “Old Facebook.” I have another set of questions still to be answered regarding the “New Facebook.”)

I dove in.

I threatened my friends to log-on because if they didn’t, they’d be old. I took quizzes, I sent beers, I raked gardens, I poked people, I updated my status every hour or so, I commented on other’s status. Slowly, VERY slowly, I began to understand the difference. People were not emailing me direct messages with information, but rather people were putting information about themselves “out there.” And I was gleaning it whenever I wanted to, and ignoring it too.

Through social networking, I saw pictures of my sister’s new house; I learned an old friend went back to work; I learned another friend was pregnant; I viewed witty comments from an old professor; I was introduced to new media, including a hit dance song in India. All of this I learned from my online social network. None of this would I have learned through email, texting, snailmail or my iPhone (well unless I was using my Facebook application.)

I understood. I was beginning to see the meaning of the article and why the youth of today view email as formal and old-fashioned.

But I also know I am only on the surface of this interpersonal communication revolution. So now I’ve begun to Twitter (the status updates site, not the verb).

Through Facebook, I had seen friends “twittering” online, and again, was clueless. I had heard about it theoretically in the news, but again, I still didn’t see its functionality.

So here I am, jumping into another new technology, with the same confusion, fear, and anxiety that met me when I first began on Facebook. But, if I don’t do it, I am old.

And, apparently, my fear of being old is still greater than my fear of learning a new trick.