Toiling in the Land of Twitter

Being a writer, I’ve been counseled to take advantage of social media. The translation for me is that I need to figure out a whole host of social outlets; none the least is Twitter.

I’m supposed to network through Twitter to link to my blog, then get people to follow my blog, especially if they’re Twitter people. “Netiquette” requires me to then link to their blogs and tweets and follow them around.

What?

How do I link, why do I care, and why don’t people get paranoid when strangers are following them? Could I lead them off a cliff?

But, I signed up.

The next thing I knew, some guy from San Francisco was following me, along with a radio show host from Cleveland. Someone from a communications company, a member of a race car crew, a greenhouse owner in Florida, and a grandmother of eight in Kansas were suddenly interested in what I had to say.

My own family doesn’t pay that much attention to me.

Now I’ve got to come up with clever things to text so I don’t embarrass myself and incite a virtual revolt among my new friends in my new universe.

You can’t just enter the Twitter world and speak English. They have their own language. Swell. Not only am I supposed to post clever updates, now I have to learn the correct lingo.

I have a knack for butchering my native tongue, so learning to speak Twitter should be an exercise in futility. My 11th-grade French teacher would love a ring side seat to what was sure to become a language debacle in my hands.

The first thing I had to learn was that I no longer had a name. I had a “handle.” In the Twitter universe, you put the @ sign in front of whatever name you’re going to go by. That makes no sense to me, as you now have a superfluous keystroke to make. Wasn’t technology supposed to be more streamlined?

There are no people in Twitter land, they’re called “tweeple” and you don’t have friends, you have “tweeps.” Then you get into the hash tag, the tweet deck, the mentions, the retweets, and the DMs (direct messages). And, from what I can tell, this is just the “twip” of the Twitter iceberg.

As I’m typing this, my word program is going crazy trying to correct all my supposed misspellings.

But, who knows? Maybe I’ll get a handle on this brave new world. Probably not, especially when you consider that I put the twit in Twitter.

You can follow Tamara Kells, The Brunette Lucy on Facebook.