Social media
12/10/24 01:10
I have never been on the cutting edge of media. I worked for a few years as a small market radio DJ. Our station broadcast at 1,000 watts and covered approximately 100 miles in southwest North Dakota and northwest South Dakota. The station is now owned and operated by Schweitzer Media, but when I worked there it was independent. That was a long time ago before live-streaming. I used to drive across the west changing radio stations as I went. There were a few stations with larger transmitters and sometimes at night you could drive for hundreds of miles on the same station, but usually we tuned the radio as we went.
We were slow to get a television at our house. It simply wasn’t a priority. When we want to watch a television program these days we do so on a computer monitor. We don’t subscribe to cable or satellite television.
It was a bit different with computers. I have long been and continue to be a bit of a gadget person. In the early days of email before there were internet browsers, I had a 300-baud modem that worked over the telephone. I took the telephone handset, which was hard wired, and inserted it into a cradle where the modem generated tones to dial and to communicate over the phone lines. It was very slow. I uploaded and downloaded messages only once per day and read and wrote messages offline. I continued to acquire gadgets, obtaining a digital assistant that kept my address book and calendar before cell phones existed. I wasn’t among the first adopters of cell phones in part because I didn’t feel I needed one. I eventually got one. I was a bit quicker to switch from a flip phone to a smart phone but Apple was already on its 4th model before I got an iPhone because service was limited where we lived.
As a pastor, I tried to keep up with social media somewhat. I reluctantly opened a Facebook account to follow the travels of a nephew. It seemed to be his only method of communicating with us. I began to follow a few friends who lived far away. I was, however, slow to post on the platform until the pandemic. When we were forced to cancel in-person worship, I moved fairly quickly, live-streaming our worship services over Facebook, setting up meetings over Go To Meetings, and posting videos daily. I still do not link my address book or my photos to Facebook, preferring a bit of privacy and having a desire to retain ownership of my creative work.
Along the way, I opened a Twitter account, but became disillusioned with the platform as it rebranded to X Corp. I posted worship services and daily prayers one YouTube and still watch a fair amount on that platform. I have an Instagram account, but don’t post often. The account is linked to my Facebook account so occasionally I will post a photo to Instagram that shows up in my Facebook feed. Messenger is also linked to Facebook, and I used to use it a fair amount because it was a preferred method of communication with or Lakota partners in South Dakota who live where cell phone service isn’t always reliable and often do not have land lines in their homes. I have a LinkedIn account, and occasionally connect with colleagues over that media, but will go for days without paying any attention to it. I feel that being retired I no longer need to sell myself online. I experimented with Discord a bit when I served as Interim Minister of Faith Formation at First Congregational Church in Bellingham, but I never clicked with the platform and have since been inactive.
Of course I maintain my website and publish my journal daily. So I’m not completely ignorant about media, but don’t look for me on WhatsApp, TikTok, WeChat, Telegram, Snapchat, Weibo, Reddit, Pinterest, Quora, Threads, imo, Twitch, Piscart, Vevo, or Tumblr.
The reason I am thinking about social media today is the experience of the last couple of days. With the solar cycle reaching max and eruptions sending ions toward earth where they collide with gasses in our atmosphere resulting in spectacular Aurora displays, a lot of friends and colleagues have had fun experiences looking at the Northern Lights. I keep thinking that we might be treated to a good display since we live right on the 49th parallel, but the combination of bright lights from the city of Vancouver and frequent cloudy skies mean that we haven’t yet seen displays that rival what we used to see when we lived in North Dakota. On Thursday evening, however, we could see Northern Lights from our home and I took a few pictures.
Yesterday a colleague posted that she had spent two hours driving in rural areas in Northern Michigan expressly to see the lights and had seen nothing. She had seen a lot of pictures posted by others but had not experienced the Aurora herself. Another colleague jokingly posted a picture of a cloudy sky across which lines had been drawn in crayon colors, commenting that he hadn’t seen the lights, either, but wanted to join in with all the folks who had. I tried to post a picture I had taken for my colleagues, but since my photos and Facebook aren’t linked, I struggled to remember how to post a single picture. Finally, I posted the picture to my Instagram and it showed up on my Facebook feed. It wasn’t what I had intended and instead of being displayed to just those two colleagues, it went out to everyone who is one of my friends on Facebook. Comments began to appear in my various feeds. It was fun to think of friends who commented on the picture. Then I received a message with a comment on Messenger from a woman I have known all my life. I don’t know her exact age, but she is in her 90s. While I was struggling to remember how to conduct a conversation over Messenger, she was clearly active online, adding regularly to the conversation. I suspect she was juggling multiple conversations at the same time.
I have been comfortable not being able to keep up with folks the ages of our children and grandchildren. I am, after all, old and retired. But I really need to be able to keep up with friends of my parents’ generation. The mother of one of my childhood friends has motivated me to become more attuned to social media. I don’t expect to be cutting age, I just want to keep up with those who are 20 years older than I.
We were slow to get a television at our house. It simply wasn’t a priority. When we want to watch a television program these days we do so on a computer monitor. We don’t subscribe to cable or satellite television.
It was a bit different with computers. I have long been and continue to be a bit of a gadget person. In the early days of email before there were internet browsers, I had a 300-baud modem that worked over the telephone. I took the telephone handset, which was hard wired, and inserted it into a cradle where the modem generated tones to dial and to communicate over the phone lines. It was very slow. I uploaded and downloaded messages only once per day and read and wrote messages offline. I continued to acquire gadgets, obtaining a digital assistant that kept my address book and calendar before cell phones existed. I wasn’t among the first adopters of cell phones in part because I didn’t feel I needed one. I eventually got one. I was a bit quicker to switch from a flip phone to a smart phone but Apple was already on its 4th model before I got an iPhone because service was limited where we lived.
As a pastor, I tried to keep up with social media somewhat. I reluctantly opened a Facebook account to follow the travels of a nephew. It seemed to be his only method of communicating with us. I began to follow a few friends who lived far away. I was, however, slow to post on the platform until the pandemic. When we were forced to cancel in-person worship, I moved fairly quickly, live-streaming our worship services over Facebook, setting up meetings over Go To Meetings, and posting videos daily. I still do not link my address book or my photos to Facebook, preferring a bit of privacy and having a desire to retain ownership of my creative work.
Along the way, I opened a Twitter account, but became disillusioned with the platform as it rebranded to X Corp. I posted worship services and daily prayers one YouTube and still watch a fair amount on that platform. I have an Instagram account, but don’t post often. The account is linked to my Facebook account so occasionally I will post a photo to Instagram that shows up in my Facebook feed. Messenger is also linked to Facebook, and I used to use it a fair amount because it was a preferred method of communication with or Lakota partners in South Dakota who live where cell phone service isn’t always reliable and often do not have land lines in their homes. I have a LinkedIn account, and occasionally connect with colleagues over that media, but will go for days without paying any attention to it. I feel that being retired I no longer need to sell myself online. I experimented with Discord a bit when I served as Interim Minister of Faith Formation at First Congregational Church in Bellingham, but I never clicked with the platform and have since been inactive.
Of course I maintain my website and publish my journal daily. So I’m not completely ignorant about media, but don’t look for me on WhatsApp, TikTok, WeChat, Telegram, Snapchat, Weibo, Reddit, Pinterest, Quora, Threads, imo, Twitch, Piscart, Vevo, or Tumblr.
The reason I am thinking about social media today is the experience of the last couple of days. With the solar cycle reaching max and eruptions sending ions toward earth where they collide with gasses in our atmosphere resulting in spectacular Aurora displays, a lot of friends and colleagues have had fun experiences looking at the Northern Lights. I keep thinking that we might be treated to a good display since we live right on the 49th parallel, but the combination of bright lights from the city of Vancouver and frequent cloudy skies mean that we haven’t yet seen displays that rival what we used to see when we lived in North Dakota. On Thursday evening, however, we could see Northern Lights from our home and I took a few pictures.
Yesterday a colleague posted that she had spent two hours driving in rural areas in Northern Michigan expressly to see the lights and had seen nothing. She had seen a lot of pictures posted by others but had not experienced the Aurora herself. Another colleague jokingly posted a picture of a cloudy sky across which lines had been drawn in crayon colors, commenting that he hadn’t seen the lights, either, but wanted to join in with all the folks who had. I tried to post a picture I had taken for my colleagues, but since my photos and Facebook aren’t linked, I struggled to remember how to post a single picture. Finally, I posted the picture to my Instagram and it showed up on my Facebook feed. It wasn’t what I had intended and instead of being displayed to just those two colleagues, it went out to everyone who is one of my friends on Facebook. Comments began to appear in my various feeds. It was fun to think of friends who commented on the picture. Then I received a message with a comment on Messenger from a woman I have known all my life. I don’t know her exact age, but she is in her 90s. While I was struggling to remember how to conduct a conversation over Messenger, she was clearly active online, adding regularly to the conversation. I suspect she was juggling multiple conversations at the same time.
I have been comfortable not being able to keep up with folks the ages of our children and grandchildren. I am, after all, old and retired. But I really need to be able to keep up with friends of my parents’ generation. The mother of one of my childhood friends has motivated me to become more attuned to social media. I don’t expect to be cutting age, I just want to keep up with those who are 20 years older than I.
