Connecting through social media and the iPhone

I was having a lot of fun with the experience of connectivity from my sister’s house on the north shore of Lake Superior. Here, during a not-the-usual December storm, I was happily tweeting and emailing and Facebooking, although I could not connect to WiFi and the iPhone was using Edge rather than the 3G connection. What a tool, huh?

Something happened in the evening just after I’d received an important voice mail about my new website. The iPhone told me it just had to have its iTunes connection or it wouldn’t receive or make any more calls.

Suddenly taken out of the picture, so to speak, I went to bed disappointed. In the morning I became fully aware of the new brain habit I’d developed in the short weeks since I got my iPhone. I couldn’t instantly check my email. I couldn’t send pics of the front porch thermometer weighing into the big 20-belows. I couldn’t see Twitter.

So I sat down to do what I am really wired to do. Write. I wrote about what I missed, already, being blocked from my online family. While they don’t know me, (yet), I missed Chris Brogan’s newest tweets about how people won’t hold up their end of a debate. I missed Ursula Kauth’s good-citizen ideas. I missed Brian Clark’s Santa hat in his holiday photo. I missed Valeria Maltoni’s always-deep musings on the culture of conversation. I missed my friends. They’re part of my brain.

Pondering the absence of what is already familiar to me, I came to recognize a threshold. People who embrace social media and stay out there, playing, experimenting, discovering, are the ones who have managed to use the tech tools well enough, long enough, to make some connections and find their “hive mind” out there on the web.

Until you reach that point, you’re shouting in a vacuum and it’s really not much fun. But keep playing, okay? If you’d like a friend out here, you can come follow me on Twitter. That is, if you don’t mind hearing about my sister and her rich Duluthian life, alongside my web wanderings and all the brilliant people I’ve come to love. Even the ones who don’t know me. Yet.

Suzanna

Follow me as “brainmaker” on Twitter