a stranger in these parts

I am a newcomer to what are now known as the social media. As silver surfers go - and I'm still partly a pepper and salt surfer, thank you very much - I have a fairly limited mastery of the various technological means of communication. I use my five-year-old computer, which now makes even me look sprightly, for emails, web searches, writing on Word, this blog and, tentatively, Facebook. I say tentatively because I have only a few 'friends', all of whom invited me to join their list. I issue no invitations of my own, give little information away and refrain from the common practice of telling the world how I am feeling every five minutes. In a way, I suppose, I am not playing the game; but isn't that the point? We have a choice. Similarly, I use my mobile phone only rarely, almost always to make a call when I am out, and very occasionally to send or respond to a text. I do not use it to surf the web, take photographs, play games or do any of the other things I could choose, and pay, to do. In short, it is used only on the most important occasions, such as when, on holiday, I texted from St Mark's Square, Venice (yes, that one, not the one in Milton Keynes) to find out the result of an Arsenal match. Some things really matter.

As in an earlier post on my attitude to English 'accuracy', some may see me as a dinosaur, others as a bit of a groundbreaker (What, he's sixty-eight and is on Facebook?), and a few may see my abilities as about right for a crumbly, although I do have my own teeth and hips. What I do find annoying is the assumption I have heard from several people of my age that all these media will never be more than trivial timewasters. There is every scope for bombast and self-indulgence, but why should we measure the worth of something by its least welcome uses? Now that we live in Chomski's global village, these media enable us to gather around the parish pump for the purpose of relaying the phatic, the fatuous or the fateful, as we choose.