What are you doing?  You can find out what I’m doing by clicking on http://twitter.com/Agridome.  The world recoiled last week as social media sites Twitter and Facebook had a bit of a meltdown.  However, things seem to be up and running again and for those of us who depend on such social media, the world is right again.

As many of you know I’ve never been shy about technology.  If I can get something done using computers, I use them.  In fact I have been known to tear apart a computer box simply to get a column written on time.  So when social media became all the rage over the last couple of years I must say I was inquisitive.  However my inquisitiveness never got the best of me and I didn’t sign up for either Twitter or Facebook.

That all changed about six months ago. As many of you know I have several editors strung across North America.  Most of my editors are younger than me and because they are younger than me, “computer technology” is so much more mundane to them.  “Social media “is also a vehicle for them to communicate with each other within their generation.  So even though I have been very technologically gifted through the years, I am not of the generation who thought twitter and Facebook have any value.  So when one of my twenty-something editors strongly suggested that I get a twitter account I took her advice.  The rest as they say is history.

Twitter to me is a resource.  Basically you tell people what you are doing and you try to get people to follow you.  In isolation that is one of the most bizarre notions I could ever think of.  For instance why would I want people following me and why would I want to be following anybody?  So I started out by following my twenty-something editor and after a little while I found people on twitter were seeking me out because I was a voracious writer.  It seemed everybody that wanted to know something about agriculture was trying to follow me on Twitter.  I quickly found out that most of these people were interested in the same thing, which happened to be good agricultural economic research and that is something that I needed also.

At the end of the day that means that I follow almost 100 people on Twitter and there are about 70 people who follow me.  Twitter has become a big resource because all of these people post information that I find very valuable for my work.  It has also contributed to many page views on my website.

I still don’t quite get it.  For instance many of the big movie stars and sports celebrities have Twitter pages.  Some of these people have over 1 million followers.  It’s like a race for these people, trying to get more and more followers to make more and more news.  I even find that for people who are not famous in any way.  They like to get somebody following them simply because it boosts their twitter resume.  That leads to more mundane use of Twitter, which I really don’t get.  In my mind Twitter is a good resource if you have a small band of people you follow or follow you that give you good information.

Of course the questions is should we forget about all this social media stuff and actually call somebody up and talk to them?  That’s what I believe.  For instance the company that I work for in Omaha Nebraska had an online poll last week where they ask farmers what social media site they used.  2% of the respondents said they use Twitter.  I wrote in and said Twitter was a good resource for me and my writing and a good way for me to keep in contact with my editors but other than that I thought maybe we should write a few more letters and call each other on the phone and engage each other in good conversation.

For instance the other day a guy that follows me and I follow him tweeted that his head hurt.  I’m sorry but I think that is so stupid.  He has about 700 followers and he’s a nobody just like me.  Knowing that his head hurts doesn’t matter to me and it smacks of wasting everybody’s time.  However maybe that’s why social media is currently the rage, people can do whatever they want just for lack of it.

So what am I doing? Well, you can checkout my Twitter page and find out.  Is this an Internet fad or is it here for the long haul.  Maybe it is a generational thing.  Younger people get it and older people like myself are wondering why they tweet and why the world cares why they tweet.  Maybe, just maybe this whole twitter tweeting thing is a comment on how society has evolved.  If that’s the case, I shudder to see what we will be doing next.