That twitter thing
I've never really got the hang of it. Facebook as well. You can find me in both places, masquerading under the pseudonym Sir Benfro (or @sirbenfro if you must), but to be honest I don't do a lot of twittering or facing the book. My last tweet was almost a month ago, the one before that a month earlier. I had a brief flurry of blip.fm tunes as tweets, but got bored of that. Facebook simply parrots my twitter page these days (or should that be 'squawks'?), which is why it took me two weeks to realise I'd been sent a concerned message by one of my friends wondering where I was.
None of this should come as any great surprise to those who have met me socially. I'll admit it - I'm very shy. I also find it almost impossible to hear anything in a crowd, so I tend to sit on the edge, smiling and nodding at what I hope are the right parts of the conversation, and ever so often adding my own comment when I know there's absolutely no chance of embarrassment whatsoever.
Then there's the problem of recognising people. I'm brilliant at it - if we've met once at a busy event twenty years ago, and since then you've dyed your hair, grown a beard and are sporting an eye-patch, I'll still recognise you. But there isn't a hope in hell that I'll remember your name. I need to be reminded at least a dozen times before that crucial piece of information sticks. I can be introduced to someone and have forgotten their name by the time they've finished their first sentence. You know, the one that goes 'Hi, I'm Jonathan.' As soon as they say something else, that name is gone. It's not that Jonathan is boring, or not worthy of my attention. It's just the way my brain doesn't work.
Oddly enough I can easily recall the names of people's dogs and cats, but not what they call themselves.
So, unsure exactly what the names are of the people engaged in conversation, and unwilling to make a complete tit of myself by getting something so obvious wrong, I tend not to participate all that much.
And the same is true of Twitter and Facebook. It doesn't help that I'm not at my computer twelve hours a day like I used to be, either. But when all's said and done, the biggest reason for my failure to engage fully with the social networking generation is that, quite frankly, I can't think of anything to say.
Except this, of course.
None of this should come as any great surprise to those who have met me socially. I'll admit it - I'm very shy. I also find it almost impossible to hear anything in a crowd, so I tend to sit on the edge, smiling and nodding at what I hope are the right parts of the conversation, and ever so often adding my own comment when I know there's absolutely no chance of embarrassment whatsoever.
Then there's the problem of recognising people. I'm brilliant at it - if we've met once at a busy event twenty years ago, and since then you've dyed your hair, grown a beard and are sporting an eye-patch, I'll still recognise you. But there isn't a hope in hell that I'll remember your name. I need to be reminded at least a dozen times before that crucial piece of information sticks. I can be introduced to someone and have forgotten their name by the time they've finished their first sentence. You know, the one that goes 'Hi, I'm Jonathan.' As soon as they say something else, that name is gone. It's not that Jonathan is boring, or not worthy of my attention. It's just the way my brain doesn't work.
Oddly enough I can easily recall the names of people's dogs and cats, but not what they call themselves.
So, unsure exactly what the names are of the people engaged in conversation, and unwilling to make a complete tit of myself by getting something so obvious wrong, I tend not to participate all that much.
And the same is true of Twitter and Facebook. It doesn't help that I'm not at my computer twelve hours a day like I used to be, either. But when all's said and done, the biggest reason for my failure to engage fully with the social networking generation is that, quite frankly, I can't think of anything to say.
Except this, of course.
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