Is it not remarkable you’re making progress on your way to being an internet hotshot while at home you’re still the same old you? The folks at home do not regard you any differently. Well, get over it.
This post is inspired by Diane who commented on my sister’s incredulous remarks, “He’s (meaning me) got a blog? What’s a blog?” This is Diane’s engaging anecdote:
A small group of my very close friends were together a few months ago and one of them said, “Do you guys read Diane’s blog? I read it all the time, it’s great.” Another woman said, “I don’t know how that works.” I started to explain that you don’t have to know how it works, you just go to the web address and read it. Then she said, “What’s a blog?”
It’s interesting to me how the human race can be all over the board as far as technology. We have people who are ultra tech savvy and then people who are living off the land and have no computer at all.
Diane, we have two computers at home. But it is to my sister’s credit she’d rather chat up her beloved potted flowers than swap pleasantries with total strangers in Facebook. Sorry, Matt Zuckerberg, that’s just the way it is.
My other sister – the brainiest in the family – has this ability to startle passersby. No, she’s not arguing with her husband. She’s just being herself – shaking her broom at the mango trees that ring her house – dressing down the hapless trees as if they were belligerent children. Just because they have the gall to make her household chores more difficult. She would have made a fine Dooce this side of Asia, but she will have to be dragged to the computer – to any contraption that requires plugging into the wall socket in fact. Her only concession to technology is receiving a mobile call, which means I press the answer button on my mobile and pass it on to her. Owning one is not her cup of tea.
I find it odd that I keep baring myself before this contraption called the computer and telling it stories as if it were a friend in the flesh. But at least the minute I hit the publish button my readers gleefully sprint to be the first commenter – at least I think so. Even my one-liners get retwitted in Twitter sometimes. At home, I have to work just as hard to get myself heard at the dinner table. It doesn’t matter to them Robert Scoble followed me in Twitter, or that Steve Pavlina friended me on Facebook. Or that Chris Brogan included my blog in his Rockstar links.
It doesn’t matter. I still have to take out the garbage. I still get the honors of opening tin cans and uncooperative lid jars. Family and friends both have uncanny ability to make you grounded. You’re still you – obscure and unheralded. That’s maybe for the best.
So what stories do you have about blogging and your family, relatives and friends’ strange ideas about it?
