JUST WRITE!
It’s official. I’m a twit.
By Tracey Coveart/The Scugog Standard

For years, I have resisted the inherent evils of social media: the loss of privacy, the loss of modesty; the loss of perspective; the loss of time. On principal, I refrained from joining the global Facebook community. I ignored requests to add my peers to my LinkedIn account. (How did I even get a LinkedIn account?) I refused to tweet.
_But social media is like a chocolate bar. As long as it’s in the cupboard, it’s only a matter of time before I’m gonna break down. And a couple of squares is never enough. Once my appetite is whetted, I have to eat the whole damn bar.
_In this day and age ... good grief, next I’ll be telling my grandkids, ‘When I was your age, we didn’t have cell phones. If I wanted to call home and ask my folks if it was okay to stay out past dinner time - “Your parents still lived together? And they made you come home to eat?” - Yes, but that’s not the point. If I wanted to call home I had to use one of my hard-earned quarters - “What the heck is a quarter?” - Oh for god’s sake. - “God?” - It was a kind of currency ... you know, money ... a coin. - “Like North Americans used in the1900s?” - Yes. Like that. But what I’m trying to tell you is that we had to look around for something called a pay phone...’ and my voice will trail off because my story took longer than the three seconds required to hold their attention/interest and they’re replying to a text message or posting on Facebook or tweeting ‘My dinosaur grandmother is going on & on about the old days & two-parent households & family dinner time & quarters. Somebody make her stop.’ (Yes, there are 140 characters in that tweet.) You see? Evil. Social media turns kids against their grandmothers...
_Evil or not, however, social media is no longer an after-hours indulgence for grownups or a web-based toy for a younger generation hungry for visual stimulation, non-verbal communication and instant gratification. It’s a requisite for doing business. And if you’re going to call yourself a professional, you’d better arm yourself with the tools of a professional.
_So it was that I went kicking and screaming into the black hole of Facebook, where it is possible to become lost for hours gazing at the photo albums of people you have never met and chatting with ‘friends’ who wouldn’t give you the time of day in high school.
_I still haven’t gotten the hang of it; I’m so busy sending and receiving e-mails that I barely have the time to log on to my account. People who ‘leave a message on my wall’ are likely to wait several months for a ‘reply,’ so I hope they’re sending me urgent notifications in another format.
_Worse than Facebook is Twitter, another recent compulsion. (You can follow me on Twitter @ TraceyCoveart.) I think it’s the challenge of saying something - anything - in so few characters that intrigues me, since I am notoriously long-winded. I never use fewer than the allotted spaces - that would be a shameful waste - and I try to form at least one complete, if not compelling, thought.
_It’s a humbling experience. The day I started tweeting I had seven followers and I was pretty pumped. Then I went down to six, which was ego-crushing, and then five, which was paralyzing. What was wrong with me? Was I that uninteresting? And what about the fact that I have fewer than 50 ‘friends’ on Facebook? Does that make me a loser?
_To put my numbers in perspective, Lady Gaga has been ‘liked’ by more than 46,867,560 people. On Twitter, 18,408,934 ‘followers’ hang on her every 140 characters. (Latest tweet: “Just saw first photos of the stage being built. Just peed all the way down to my Chanel shoes!! *sorry Karl* ahhh!!!!!!”) I, on the other hand, have a handful of Facebook friends and I am once again up to seven Twitter followers - four of which I don’t know. Sadly, Lady Gaga is not one of them.
_The fact that I have started to evaluate my merits - not just as a writer, but also as a human being - according to how many friends and followers I have is alarming. Is this why young girls post their nude portraits to social media sites and the less attractive humiliate themselves by uploading self-deprecating home videos? Is it because generating Facebook chatter, tweets and YouTube hits boosts our sense of self worth?
_There are many positive uses for social media. Let us discover and embrace them, and prevent us from becoming victims of our own narcissistic, attention-seeking tendencies.