SOCIAL media is a wonderful thing and it can also be a curse. One of its advantages is that it enables lost friends and relatives to make contact and share news and memories without costing a fortune. It also shares delightful posts and interesting blogs and websites and broadens horizons.
It becomes a curse when night owl friends don’t realise that many people sleep during the wee hours and the beep-beep of an incoming message is not welcome and is liable to cost them a friend or two.
And like most good things, our cunning crooks of the world have turned social media to their advantage and have become extremely adept at parting the gullible from their funds, or even worse, their identities.
Social media is an interesting companion for lonely singles and housebound oldies. For grandparents with grandchildren far away it is a connection that bridges the sea and brings precious darlings into the homes of heart sore family.
So why is it that so many over a certain age shun this fascinating communication tool as if it were something to fear rather than something which will open up a whole new world?
I have a relative in her 70s who has never owned a computer, has never worked on one and refuses to even contemplate getting to grips with one. This is a woman with a university degree who ran a large, famous hospital but is afraid of a cell phone and a laptop. I love her dearly but wish she would acknowledge that there is nothing to be afraid of and everything to gain.
The reality is that the world has changed and unless we all become proficient in new technology we will be left behind. Not having a basic working knowledge of new technology is the equivalent of being illiterate. Technology is not the prerogative of the young, although they would like it to be. This is an appeal to pensioners to get with it and change their lives. Once on line you can log on to our title sites and read all the latest news too.
If it were not for social networking I would not have had a memory jog last week that had me reminiscing about my childhood.
I happened to find on a group site I belong to a general message from a distant cousin in Australia. He is a lot older than me so not one of my close childhood allies so I had not heard of him or from him for at least 40 years.
Correspondence flowed back and forth, instantaneously, and he reminded me that my grandmother had a budgie which could recite almost the entire rhyme “Georgie Porgie pudding and pie …” . It would also walk around the tea table helping itself to the sugar. I had forgotten Grandma’s budgies. She always had at least one down the years.
This second cousin is now about to supply me with the family tree he has been working on and I have been able to fill in some missing bits for him. All this within 12 hours on line. He was also able to tell me that down the generations there was someone with my name and here I was thinking I was an original.
The disappointing thing about all these exciting developments in IT is that I will not live long enough to see what’s new in the next 50 years. Imagine, perhaps we will not need to speak, but communicate telepathically by means of an electrode wired to our brains.
Now that’s scary.
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