Post-Traumatic Skype Disorder “There Goes Mommy Twittering Again”

Image by Damien Basile via Flickr

I’m using my Skype phone to find a therapist who can help me with my addiction to all the best tools Web 0.0, Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 have offered up to me. Coming from a technology journalist background, I was for years circumspect and slow to the social media bandwagon, but now, I’m forever plugged in.

If  truth be told,  I’m still an awkward dancer at what I term, “The Blogger’s Ball,” where much more adept bloggers twirl their blog rolling partners to a crescendo of demonstrative pings, “Pownces”, Twitters, digg(s), all the while admiring each other through the lenses of Squidoo.

But yes, I confess that in the carpool line, ensconced in my Ford minivan, the exclamation, “Oh no, Mommy’s driving and tweeting at the same time,” has oft been shrieked with fear by my children sitting in the backseat of the car.

And just recently my husband did discover me in my office on the floor, hair askew looking beaten and defeated. This particular condition brought on from a brutal hour spent reading tweets of people much more clever than I, while I lay paralyzed and unable to even invoke the smallest of twitter-esque wittiness back to them.

My heretofore excellent auditory abilities are weakening as well. I’m having significant trouble hearing people clearly who insist on reaching me on landline instead of via Skype. Damn, I wish my 90 year old grandmother would get with it and plug-in like the rest of us! Instead, she insists on relating her homemade okra canning recipe, bit by bit, through her crystal clear landline. I miss the echo that comes with Skype and I miss the infrequent yet prized mangled words that can only happen during a lengthy Skype call. In the virtual world, does it really matter the exact amount of vinegar one really needs to can effectively?

I’ve been LinkedIn™, Facebook-ed, Pownc-ed upon and Twittered so often I finally feel “popular”, as though I’ve been at a virtual prom for geeky, shy girls who now have everyone asking them to dance. Those girls, like me, finding a rebirth in a digitally connected world that even offers a Second Life for us to become a better, stronger, faster geek girl who can outrun, outtwitter, outSkype, outPownce the best of them!

Go Geek Girls GO!

(Originally published in Age of Conversation)

You Just Might Be A Social Media Junkie If…

You Just Might Be A Social Media Junkie if…

 1. You keep dropping a note in your collection plate at church instead of a donation. The note says, “Dear Reverend Hill – why have you not yet started a Facebook fan page for Jesus?”

2. Your wife wants you to be in therapy with her, but you’ve told her you will only do it if you can find a therapist who can dispel his/her wisdom in 140 characters or less. (length of a Twitter)

3. You’ve told your immediate and extended family that the best place for them to find out what you’re up to is on Tweetdeck.

4. Instead of an emergency phone number on your children’s school information – you’ve posted your TwitterID account and told them that is the best way for them to reach you. (The school secretary in particular does not seem hip to the tweeting.)

5. You volunteered for the Parent Teacher Organization group but only on a virtual level and have promised you will send tweets during the school carnival when the principal is dunked.

6. Your Mom closed her Facebook account, because she was getting too many Fan messages from you asking her to join your Fan page.

7. Your husband has a Google alert set up on your name and occasionally searches Google images so he can see what you looked like before you became part of your office chair.

8. Your neighborhood bunko group has unfriended you on Facebook because they don’t much cotten to you sending status updates like, “I just kicked everyone’s butt in bunko. I’m the bunko queen and these women can’t roll a triple six if it killed them.”

9. You tell people you and Barack Obama are very close virtually because you joined his Facebook Fan page.

10. You found your Honors English teacher (Mrs. Whitley) on Facebook and you’re sending her blog posts to redline for you (because after all once a teacher, always a teacher.)

11. Your husband has banned twittering, facebooking, linkedin-ing from the bedroom.

12. Your pug starts a very high pitched noise when he sees you reach for your iPhone.