Progress

So I joined Twitter. Not sure why now, maybe deep down I yearn to be pilloried in the popular press. Most likely I thought it was about time I engaged with some form of social media. Those who know me know I am not on Facebook, nor am I ever likely to be: I kind of missed the boat on that one. However, I realise that I exist in an age where many of my friends will not even email me to tell me of the birth of their child because they assume I will have become aware through the various social media. To be fair, before the invention of social media I probably would have heard by word of mouth anyway, so nothing has really changed for me. However, unless I am incredibly sociable, there will always be the nagging feeling that I am missing out on an exciting and socially active life, underpinned by receipt of the occasional email to 'my friends who are not on Facebook'.
This lack of internet socialisation betrays a greater trend: I fear that I am not a good user of the internet in general. I suffer terrible Google-blindness* and as a result tend to restrict my internet usage to reading emails, shopping research, solving arguments using Wikipedia and creating websites. You probably think that this last would require me to have a good understanding of the ways of the web, and I fear that it does, and that this is my one shortcoming in this area (a fairly important one I'll admit): I understand how it works better than how to use it. Again, when faced with the great white searchbox, I feel that there is a whole world out there that I am not privy to due to laziness or simplicity of approach. So I've joined Twitter in the hope that it will assist me in formulating a more sophisticated approach to the internet. If that doesn't work, at least I'll be able to find out what Katie Price had for breakfast.

*a condition whereby a user is rendered bereft of the memory of all the things they wanted to ask the internet the minute the Google homepage becomes visible.