Month: May 2012

“What do you feel like doing this weekend”, asked Tim on Saturday morning.  I had no work on, nothing to catch up on … a free weekend.  I’d even stayed home the day before and caught up with the washing and ironing (now that Mum and Dad have gone home I’ve had to take that task on again).

“I feel like going to Sydney”.

So I did.

I felt the need to connect for real, by pretending that I lived there.  If I lived in Sydney I’d pop in to visit Michelle.  Just because I live in Burnie, in Tasmania, an hour and a half’s plane flight after an hour and a half’s drive to the airport, shouldn’t mean I can’t just pop in.

So I did.

Michelle had been feeling a bit nauseous, a bit poorly.  Well, it was more than that, but that’s her story for her to tell.  She wasn’t well, and I though that popping in to visit would be a good thing to do.

It was.

Hello and welcome to my blog.  It’s a new thing.  I imagine I’ll write one or two posts and then forget about it, but you never know.  I could do something nerdy and schedule a time in my calendar to write a blog entry each week, but I doubt I’ll do that.

This blog is for me to determine whether I have anything to say.  I’ve tried Twitter but haven’t been to see who’s been tweeting for a few months now.  I very quickly became bored with the inanitites and I didn’t really need to know that much detail about what people were up to.  I can survive without knowing that someone on the other side of the world is watching a baseball game, or reading a particular article.

I’m also Linked In, on Facebook, on Academia.edu (a Facebook type thing for academics), and just yesterday I was invited to become a member of Yammer.  I became a member but I still don’t know what it is and what it’s for.  I guess I’ll find out when I remember to log in.

I certainly can’t say that I’m not connected.  But who am I connecting with – and why?  What happens to my other, personal, connections when I’m so busy following this or that academic, or someone who’s been busily tweeting, or commenting on aspects of their professional life in Linked In?  I’m so busy connecting to others outside my immediate known world that I have little time for those within my sphere.

And that isn’t right.  That’s not how it should be.

The other thing is that I don’t really ‘connect’.  I read what someone else – a stranger – says, but that’s not connecting is it?  We claim, newspapers claim, social media sites claim that we’re all more connected now.

But we aren’t.  Not really.  We might clink together like billiard balls, but that’s not connecting.  Not really.

There’s always the phone.  Or a visit.

Novel ideas … I’ll have to write them down where I’ll remember to read them again.  Perhaps I’ll write them on the fridge.

Musings from the cold.