Staying Connected

When I was growing up, as a child of the 60's and teen of the 70's, we had fewer options for communication and entertainment.

Fort Wayne had 3, then 4 TV stations. Today over 70% of our market subscribes to some form of cable or cable like service.

I still remember my home phone number, 483-3818 which my parents had for over 20 years, then for some reason changed it.

Every member of my family and step family have their own personal phone numbers now due to the cellphone revolution.

I usually don't text, it is a pain without a qwerty keyboard on my phone. And I don't have a smartphone yet, no need for one, because I use my laptop for my internet connections.

I am on Facebook and have a MySpace account and LinkedIn Profile, a few blogs, a couple of email accounts and use Twitter daily.

How do I keep track of all of these? Mostly through email. I have alerts sent to my email from all these other online sources. So why do I have these online sources? Because it is not about me, it is about how the people I want to stay in touch with, want to stay in touch.

A couple days ago, I got a message from a client via Facebook. I had an inquiry for services via Linked In. And it works.

Last week I met about 50 new people face to face who are on Twitter and when I added them to people I follow, most of them did the same. Which resulted in my taking the next step in organizing my Twitter activity with Twitter Lists.

Is all of this connectivity to much? Sometimes I wonder. Like this weekend at church. There was a young family sitting in the pew in front of us. The Dad had a Bluetooth earpiece stuck in his right ear, that kept flashing. Next to him, his 4 year old son and 8 year old daughter both had cellphones that they were looking at during the service. I watched the Mom, and she acted as if this was all normal.

What's normal these days depends on who you are I suppose, what about you?