Friday Five: Internet Connections

Jan, over at the RevGals offers this Friday Five:
I have vaguely been hearing about the coming trend of people using mobile internet devices rather than desktop computers. Having four adult children, I see them using cell phones, laptops, tablets, ipods/iphones/ipads instead of the desktop computer, which I am using right now. So I am asking you to answer the following questions about whatever device you most often use these days, first by telling us what you have:
1. Do you use social connections, like Facebook, Twitter, Linked-in or whatever else there is? Describe how you use it/these.  I use Facebook all the time. It is the primary way I stay connected to many friends and some family members. I enjoy the opportunity to see photos from others and to post my own photos. I like the links to news articles, which I might not otherwise see.
I used Twitter for a short time, but after awhile I disabled most of my twitter connects. I didn't like the one way communication - someone tweets a random thought about what they are doing, the tweets read it, but then what? are we to comment? Or just accept it as a random thought? And, OH my, the tweets would come 24/7...I know I can set the time of receipt and shut the thing up, but eventually it just became annoying. So I stopped. I may start tweeting again, this time for the church, if enough people in the congregation want to tweet.
I ended up with two Linked-in accounts because I could not remember my login and password for the first one. Now I don't remember either one. So I never use it. I'm not even sure how to go back and delete the accounts and restart them. So, I have two random, unused, old accounts that haven't been updated in about three years.
Clearly I am a somewhat socially networked inept. And, I'm okay with that.

2. Do you text on your cell phone? Work, friends, family? Yes. all. I once spent a great deal of time texting with a parishioner who had a loved one in the hospital. This person joked, who would have thought that pastoral care would come in the form of texting? But it seemed to work for that particular situation. My husband, my kids, my brothers - we all text. And I text with a few of my friends and other parishioners.

3. Do you play any games? Which ones? No. I don't play Farmville or any other of the Facebook games. I play a great deal of computer scrabble, but not an online version. I do however respond to a couple of requests from a small group of friends who send me stuff for Farmville. I am okay helping them out. I just don't feel like playing...I have enough distractions, I guess.

4. How do you predominantly use the various electronic devices you possess? Oh, geeze. Totally addicted. I use them first thing in the morning by checking the couple of tweets I still allow from the RevGals and my bank. Then I check email and Facebook on my iPad. Later I may write something on my blog via my laptop. At the church I work on the parish website on my desktop. All day long I do a lot of emailing, iPad, laptop, iPhone, and desktop - all of them are used for emails. In the evening, lately, I loose myself for hours playing Scrabble. Before Scrabble it was Angry Birds, and before that it was Solitaire. Scrabble is usually the last thing I do before turning off the light and going to sleep. It's ridiculous.

5. How do you feel about blogging? Are you as involved in blogging as when you first started? What facilitates your blogging? I am not quite as involved in blogging as I was when I first started, but I have maintained a fairly high level of blogging for years, and reading other bloggers, too. I miss my friends who have stopped blogging or rarely blog.

Bonus: Anything you want to add. You might like to discuss what helps you most in your vocation with internet connections... Learning to work on the parish website is a huge learning curve. It really isn't much different from blogging, once one learns how it works. The website we use is intended to be easy, user friendly - which it mostly is, once I have learned how to add content, move content, and delete. But it is also very limited in what I can do - I can't change the template, I can't change the core elements. I can only add or delete within the highly defined categories. Still I find that keeping the content fresh is worthwhile - people do check out the website and it communicates a great deal about who we are.

Comments

I have one parishioner who texts me at 5:30 AM...to tell me something which is not an emergency and could of been relayed via email.

Now, I put my phone on silent at night since I do have a landline phone if there is an emergency.
Jan said…
It was interesting for me to read about the ways you as a priest interact with your parishioners--even tweeting! I learned more about twitter from you than I've known before. You are much more aware of the changing uses of the internet in your active priesthood. Thanks, Terri.
RevDrKate said…
Lots of parallells and overlaps. Especially that ebb and flow blogging thing. Kind of cool to be thinking about this together and writing commnets on the blogs of some of the people who were my first interweb friends.
goodness you techie addict you! :)

i don't use anything hand held as such. i'm too private i suspect...
Rev Dr Mom said…
My usage is very much like yours, except I rarely blog anymore. And I miss the blogging community ... still there somewhat but not quite the same.

I went to a social media workshop where it was posited that Facebook pages would replace church websites...I didn't know until that workshop that you could personalize a FB url which makes it more useable to replace a webpage.
river song said…
Interesting twitter experience - I'm actually using twitter more these days! I wonder what our internet lives today would have looked like from 5 years ago? Thanks for playing!
Wendy said…
Your experience with Twitter is about what I imagined. It's because of you (and a couple others) whom I know only through blogging who keep me sticking with it when I question it. IU don't want to lose this community. Thanks for sticking with it (writing and reading and commenting).
I recently had a church member in ICU. Texting was perfect for checking in with him and his wife. A text can be ignored if the time is not convenient (unlike a phone call), it won't wake anyone up if they are sleeping (unlike a phone call), and it was quick and unobtrusive. I stayed much more up-to-date with his condition than I would have otherwise.
Katherine E. said…
We are SO similar in all this, Terri. Same experience with Twitter. Love FB. I did leave blogging for quite a while but not do post occasionally. And I'm playing Scrabble at night before bedtime, too! That's so funny -- my sister in S Carolina and I are playing Words with Friends online together -- it's a way to stay in touch.

Popular posts from this blog

The Bleeding-heart: a poem by Mary Oliver

A Funeral Sermon: Healed by Love

Luke: A Mary Oliver Poem