I blog, tweet, face book…therefore I am.

I’ll bet Descartes had no idea how many incarnations that quote of his would take. Even though it's been a while since my blog runnith over, I still continued fancying myself as a blogger. That was before I got talking to my geeky near and dear ones. What an eye opener that was. I am the long tail of the social media universe. I am a....laggard….how I hate that word. That's the down side… for me. But the up side is for all women-kind and makes up for the beating my techgo (tech +ego) has taken.
It was a bit of an 'Alice in wonderland' moment for me when I accidently walked into this wonderful alternative universe filled with so many articulate, intelligent and accomplished women from every walk of life and part of the world, blogging about everything from climbing the corporate ladder with kids in tow to 'bitch slaps' http://www.redheadwriting.com/
What was even more heart warming was reading some of the responses to the blogs. The humor, good naturdeness and empathy shared by us women (and a few men in touch with their female sides) was all pervasive. There's definitely a community out there with the same hopes, fears, ambitions and dreams. And it’s open to everyone, there’s no red carpet or closed door policy.
The story began some years ago with the birth of ‘My space’. It still hadn’t permeated our collective conscience back home in India that there was a slot in cyber-space that could be uniquely yours; We were still digging face-to-face communication, phone calls to ‘foreign’ and snail mail. We were used to sharing our personal space (or lack of) with the billion others that were fighting for it.
The next chapter came around sooner than expected and it was called Facebook we laggards took up the banner pretty rapidly albeit slower than the technological savvy generation of the time aka 'ipod generation' who’ve now graduated to the 'always on' generation (I can still remember generation X and generation Y…. that date’s me dammit!) We’ve started living, breathing, talking Face book. I know my aunt does, and probably for the same reasons we all do, because whether we like it or not we Homo sapiens cannot function without our pack, our community. We love passing judgment, showing support, feeling important in the live’s of those who matter, stalking the lay of the land, keeping tabs, showing off, professing allegiance... we’re nosy bastards, the lot of us!
Then came twitter and that upped the ante, we had to cram the complexity of language (pauses, umms, ahhs and all) into 150 characters including links. I remember claiming that I’d never get on twitter because quite frankly, I had nothing to say.... boy, that came back to bite me in the ass like with most things I claim I’ll never do ( like ‘Googling’). Now I can't get off the dam thing, At first it was to read about the latest and greatest, now its become social currency, it's about collecting 'followers', being in the 'know', being the first to share something news worthy or witty. Re-tweets are the epitome of this, I have to say I’m guilty of checking how many of my tweets have been re-tweeted (not many). Why? Apart from the fact that I’m a navel gazer (there I said it!) unlike face book its more than the 150 real life friends (who give a shit about what you have to say) that’re listening to you. With twitter, re-tweets and all there’s millions…thousands…ok… well, hundreds then, of user names out there who feel you’re interesting enough to want to listen to and sometimes pass on your golden 150 characters! Guess what folks! I'm a celebrity in my own little virtual world! …Right! Maybe it’s time for my 'bitch slap' after all.