Write or Wrong

When I was a child, my father would drive with the radio turned to someone talking ... 9 in 10 times it was a sport-talk station.  And, as a child, I never understood why someone would have the radio turned to ANYTHING but music.

I am no longer a child.

(By the way, ^ that up there ^ has no tie-in with the rest of this stuff ... it's just something I've noticed.)

My current commute (with morning coffee stop) is about 45 minutes.  My radio is either off or it is tuned to the local public radio station.  Since I don't subscribe to a local newspaper and generally don't watch news broadcasts, I enjoy a brief catch-up on the world as I go to or from work.  I'm introduced to books I may want to read, ideas I may want to explore ... in short, I feel a little more informed than I would have if I'd been listening to the local music stations.

Increasingly, I find myself agreeing with individuals and reporters who, I imagine and judging only by their voices, are older than I am.  And, even more increasingly, I find myself rolling my eyes at opinions expressed by individuals and reporters who, I imagine and judging only by their voices, are younger than I am.

Today was such a day.

In the report I listened to, an individual who had started a blog "a long time ago in their Junior year of high school" and who was now preparing to go to college in the fall.  (That was my first eye-roll ... "a long time ago" equals two years.  Gotcha.)

This person originally started their blog as a way to communicate with their friends and loved the conversational-side of the method of writing that blogging provided her.  ("Conversation" and "blogging" is a tough connection for me to make.  "Conversation" for me means an exchange of ideas, which doesn't really involve a laptop or, at least, not a blog ... but maybe that's just me.)

Anyway now, as she was moving out of state, she found herself at a loss to develop that same sense of communicating with others.  She didn't want to move to any mass-means of electronic interactivity, but she got the sense that no one was "listening" to her anymore.  Her solution was to move her blog to a different host and that, she claims, has made all the difference.  Within a few days, people had signed up to "follow" her writings, which made her VERY happy, and the sponsor company even held occasional meets in local areas where other hosted bloggers could get to know one another.

And I realized as I smirked and guffawed and eye-rolled through the report that - using ONLY the above as the method to measure against - the current generation seems to believe one has to be listened to to be heard ... that one can count their friends as they do any other tangible item ... and, most depressingly, that they require a keyboard to converse.

This place, for me, isn't about being heard or followed or counting friends.  It's my diary.  Which, I suppose, is fast becoming a term that will need to be "Googled" to understand.

How sad.