Sites and Sounds

Like a lot of people these days, I speak a language I still don’t understand, and I visit places I am not quite certain really exist. I am powered (empowered?) by search engines, I blog, and I travel more often than I care to admit to a place called Facebook where I can keep up on the private lives of people I barely know. This morning, my odd vocabulary just got bigger, and my list of intangible must-see destinations has expanded. As long as I stop at a place called Twitter (where I can speak in a strange tongue called tweet), I have a free pass to enter a place called Medium, where nobody seems to care that I usually wear a small.

Acclimating to new places is always a bit difficult for me. There are unfamiliar faces, unspoken rules, unwritten expectations. Medium is virtually unexplored, exploding onto the land of virtual “look at me, look at me” destinations like an undersea cyber quake. It beckons even the most introverted among us to venture onto its primitive shores, promising to be something other than your average social media site. A place called Medium that is anything but average. Almost as strange as the idea of a species called blogger publishing private diary entries to the world at large.

It should be no surprise that I struggle as I continue my journey through novel Internet terrain. At fifty-three, I am still reeling from my trip last summer across the International Dateline to a place called Japan, where people cross within marked crosswalks and stand waiting forever for lights to turn green even when there are no cars in sight and would consider taking an extra candy bar that accidentally falls into the retrieval bin of a candy machine immoral if not felonious. At least in Japan I was on terra firma, no matter how small and vulnerable and utterly disconnected the place appears to be on the map.

I take comfort in knowing how far I have come, even though it is clear I still have a long way to go. After more than six hundred blog posts I feel as if I am inching closer to finding my voice. There is no reason to think I can’t flex and stretch my imaginary vocal chords and figure out how to “tweet.” Or at least chirp. And there is no reason to think, after several years of keeping up with the outermost secrets of friends and their friends and friends of their friends on Facebook, I can’t acclimate myself to a new culture of folks in a place called Medium, a place that no amount of crisscrossing the International Date Line will get me to. No matter where it is, I feel certain I will be among friends. And their friends, and friends of their friends.

       This morning, I thought nothing of picking up my pocket sized phone and tapping in a few letters to find out how long orthodox Jews wait to cut their sons’ hair. Or check to see how many people out there liked the photo I posted of me and my dog on Facebook. Gone are the days of lying awake all night pondering the answers to bizarre questions or carrying around cumbersome albums on the off chance you run into someone you know. Or someone someone you know knows. Or knows of.

       So, armed only with my laptop and a charger (and maybe a change of underwear just in case the Internet connection goes down) I am off to check out Medium. With a brief  layover in a place called Twitter.