WHEN ONE LISTENS and observes, one tends to notice things and learn.
(more…)communication
Pen to paper
WORDS ON PAPER aren’t rare.
Handwritten words on paper seem to be going the way of the dodo bird, which may be one reason there’s such a big market for books of and about them.
(more…)In appreciation of connection
There have been many innovations in communication throughout history.
From the pigeon to the Pony Express, from the telegraph to the telephone and beyond, all of these advances were made to better connect people to each other.
Today, there are more ways to communicate than ever before.
Messages can be sent and received in the blink of an eye.
When I saw Sue’s prompt for today, which is “connect,” my first thought was we live in a time when it is easier to communicate with more people than it has ever been, but all it takes is a look at current events to see we aren’t connected.
Then I thought about things from a more positive point of view.
(more…)About a hashtag
I started my Twitter account 10 years ago. Shortly after I thought I figured out how to use it, I noticed hashtags. They were confusing.
I was frustrated by the lack of spaces between the words in a hashtag, because I was a journalist then.
Once I learned hashtags are used so tweets can be found and seen more easily, I understood and wasn’t frustrated by them anymore.
I haven’t used Twitter much lately, but recently I stumbled upon a new hashtag.
It frustrated me all over again. (more…)
What if my words were gone?
A Randy Travis interview came on the radio while I drove home from work the other day.
It was recorded before his 2013 stroke, which almost cost him his life and has made communication more difficult than it once was for the singer of more than a dozen No. 1 songs.
This is less about Travis, though, than it is about the questions which creeped into my mind when I thought about how quickly things changed for him.
A hundred words on a lost art
Somebody once said letter writing is a lost art.
That’s probably true, considering most of the written communication we see nowadays is on some sort of screen.
I read an article on the Internet — which kind of proves my above point — about someone who had the idea to craft responses to text messages in calligraphy, snap photos of the paper with a phone camera and send the pictures as replies.
The web went wild, as if seeing whole words written out instead of abbreviated brought about a wave of nostalgia it wasn’t sure it could handle.
It made me LOL.
A hundred words about social media
Social media revolutionized communication.
You know what your friends eat breakfast or worse.
I’ve noticed everyone is a photographer on Instagram.
There’s Pintrest.
There’s Twitter, where you have 140 characters to make your point.
Twitter has been wonderful. It’s forced me to learn to cut the crap from my writing.
I used to detest hashtags because there are no spaces, which makes me think everything I know is wrong.
During The World Wars miniseries, I had a change of heart.
Hashtags remove tweets I don’t need, which is what I did to 121 of the original words in this post.