100 Days of Social Media

In Brooklyn, Bushwick’s trees were wiped out by the tornado that passed by in the fall. I was afraid it would be a barren city scape in spring here. But city workers planted new trees all along my street and in Maria Hernandez park, just before the winter snows. Walking home today I see the little trees survived the transplant, clusters of their flowers dancing in the late afternoon sun in jubilant full bloom.

I’ve just passed 100 days in my experiment with social media, and it feels like a tree full of new blossoms too.

It seemed strange that I avoided joining even Facebook and Twitter until 2011, but certain types of technology have always baffled me. Although I can sequence DNA and clone genes in the lab, I have a really rough time changing printer ink, for example.

Now 16 Blog posts, 17 poems, 586 tweets, 2 travel logs and 2 videos later, what started as an experiment has become an adventure. Sometimes I walk around saying little things to myself in 140 characters now, my family tell me. I’ve stopped wondering if it was going to be scary to get involved with social media sites, and started tinkering with optimizing ways to share ideas within them. I’m enjoying being part of communities of souls sharing everything from philosophy to photos.

An unexpected pleasure is that keeping the blog and yes, even singing on twitter, has improved the flow of my creative writing. The most recently short story I wrote fell onto the keyboard like pouring a liquid, instead of like something I have to excavate. So from the blossoms, fruit.

A few of my favorite things:

• Facebook’s groups, like the “Verses in Motion” poetry group
• LinkedIn groups like “Women 2.0”, and their discussion pages
• Uploading and sharing my first video to YouTube and creating a channel of favorites
• Visiting writer’s blogs
• Sharing thoughts back and forth with readers in comments sections