A Tale of Two Centuries, or My Head is Exploding

My head is exploding. I have unwittingly posted duplicate updates on my group’s Facebook page. Thanks to me, the group also has two YouTube accounts. One is enough. Two is too many. And, now, I’m supposed to start Tweeting for the organization.

Can I be trusted with new media?

I ‘m doubtful with this track record. Before I retired last year, I half joked (what my husband calls “kidding on the square”) that I was faking it in the 21^st century. Most of my colleagues were years, even decades, younger than I. My Generation X boss ran a communications shop that tactically and artfully exploited new media. I faked it as well as I could – after all, a message is a message however it is delivered, but, thankfully, I wasn’t the one live Tweeting and uploading photos from a crash site.

My entire career was in communications. And, boy, I saw changes. In 1973, I started as a newsletter editor writing, editing, and proofreading articles; taking, developing, and cropping photographs; sending copy to be typeset and then doing paste-up using a drawing table and a T-Square.

Typos were hell. Wite-Out became my generation’s revolutionary development.

Maybe some of these words and terms are as foreign to Millennials as their terms are to we Baby Boomers.

I know I am a digital immigrant. Our two grown daughters, who would help if they lived nearby, are digital natives, a term coined by Marc Prensky in 2001.

Even more native than our 20-something daughters is the 18-year-old I met with the other day to get coaching on social media. OMG. I was floored with her high tech savvy and skills and better yet, for me, her ability to communicate her abilities to me.

Watch out, world.

I have two goals in learning to use new media. One, I must if our organization is to reach young people (or we need a Millennial to step up and work with the old farts) and, two, I believe those articles about how you can retain cognitive abilities if you make your brain do new things. I gave up doing Crossword puzzles; they weren’t new and I was so bad. Now, my new-brain activities include online games, like Words Free and Scramble, and, oh, social media. And, yes, I frequently feel like my head is exploding.

Yet, maybe that exploding feeling is all those underused neurons firing and forging new pathways. Here’s some solace I found on the Internet this morning. I took an online quiz on  “HowMillennial Are You?” and scored a 68. Millennials come in at 73 and Baby Boomers at 11. If I went out today and got a tattoo and a non-earlobe body piercing, maybe I could inch closer to 73.

But, would a nose ring and Taurus zodiac tattoo help me delete that extra YouTube account?

Not likely. It’s probably time to use the time-honored “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” approach.

Or, follow W.C. Fields’s advice. To that bromide he added, “Then quit. There’s no need to be a damn fool about it.”