I have realized that as progressive and current as I would like to perceive myself, I am a steadfast traditionalist at heart. I not only enjoy writing things down on lined paper with a number 2 pencil, but I actually find it compulsory if I’m to have any chance of remembering my thoughts. Occasionally, I ditch the gray lead and opt for colored ink, but only if I’m feeling frisky.
I desperately struggle to keep pace with technology and the rapid-fire social media universe that swirls around me, but that party has long since started and I have barely crossed the metaphorical threshold to the cocktail hour. I succumbed to joining Facebook a few years ago, and while I have a Twitter account, I have only used it once with little success. Tweeting or being Tweeted at seems to suggest that I’d be engaging in some kind of illicit activity that obviously involves some form of ritual sacrifice for which I am grossly ill prepared. Not to mention the 140 character limit is nearly impossible for this woman of many words.
I’m not completely backwards, however. At least, not to the outside observer. Like many of my contemporaries, I have outsourced much of my life to Apple. I wear an Apple Watch (although I truly don’t take advantage of even half of its functionality), I carry the latest iPhone Plus and I typically travel with my iPad Pro in my purse. Siri and I are super tight and talk all the time. Typically, I say “Hey, Siri,”and as if she is falling in step with my children and husband, she tends not to answer my questions or do any of the things I have asked her to do. I soothe myself by accepting that she is simply playing hard to get.
In spite of my best efforts to embrace modernity, I just can’t seem to come up to speed on being or even feeling truly relevant. Take my new blog, for instance. My website www.momcanwrite.com may give the air that I am web savvy and have embraced new media, but I do not know this world, not even a little. I am a novice blogger, and I am mainly taking a stab because I am told by those in the know that I need to finally enter the 21st Century. So, here I am, attempting to plot an unfamiliar path as a writer, even though my traditional self yearns to see my name in either matte or glossy ink instead of intangible cyber letters.
A long time ago in a kingdom not so very far away, I was a hard news junkie who read 3-5 national newspapers by the time I finished my second cup of morning coffee. I began my career in broadcast journalism fresh out of college. I first went into the field because I had an immense appreciation for my old-school newscaster idols—Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, Cokie Roberts, Dan Rather, Ted Koppel (whom I actually had the immense honor of working with on Nightline). Actually, that’s not completely true. I also went into journalism because I was trying to cure my childhood fear of “the news.” I recall being so frightened by the evening news that I would plug my ears, close my eyes and spew loud gibberish so the “bad” news would not penetrate me.
The ‘80s and ‘90s were fraught with scary, somber news stories: the space shuttle Challenger exploded, Pam AM flight 103 was brought down by a terrorist bomb, Tylenol capsules laced with cyanide killed several people in Chicago, The First Gulf War took place, Genocide and Civil War in Rwanda took the lives of more than 500,000 people, domestic mass school shootings yielded shocking death tolls in Jonesboro and Columbine, just to name a few of the major events. I naively reasoned that if I worked on the other side, the news would somehow feel less frightening as a gatherer than it did as a consumer.
Needless to say, while I loved being a journalist and working for ABC News, I by no means cured myself of my news fears. The scary stories of the ‘80s and ‘90s got even scarier after the millennium. While I was stationed in Washington, D.C. in September 2001, I happened to be in New York on 9/11 and the scary news was once again ignited into a crippling phobia. Whether is was the many Americans we lost that day or the aftermath of being swabbed to the depth of my brain for suspected anthrax poisoning or the ensuing War on Terror and the subsequent growth of ISIS, I lost the will to tell stories. It simply felt too scary and too sad.
I have realized years later, however, that I let sadness and fear dictate what I love—writing and telling stories. After a week like this one, the news is heartbreaking, tragic, downright horrific, but the stories must be told. I cannot, more aptly, I will not bury my head in the sand and refuse to engage in the great dialogue, even if I’m not sold on the new media platform. As a storyteller, I think it’s even more important that I attempt to find the stories of triumph amid the horrors, the stories or observations that might otherwise go untold.
All Aboard the New Media Train
So I’m going to try to make sense of all of these alerts and dings that now invade my life and take my seat at the blogosphere table. I don’t think I will ever master the art of writing for search engine optimization (SEO to all the cool, more tech savvy folks out there), but to heck if I’m going to let a new challenge beat me. I’m going to wing it here and hope that you readers that have made it this far will have patience for this pseudo youngISH traditionalist. It may take me a while, but I hope to earn my seat at the modern table.
Perhaps this adjustment to the blogosphere is no different from the struggle my mother had when the microwave oven came into fashion. She worried that nuking food might be the equivalent of serving up a plate of radiation for dinner (turns out she may have been right, but man does it speed up dinner preparation). I want to embrace technology, but I often find it an overwhelming time suck that takes me away from actually living.
Sydney J. Harris had me pegged when he spoke about our love-hate relationship with change: “What we really want is for things to remain the same but get better.” The new media world is not remaining the same, but if I don’t participate, I can’t make it better, and I most certainly can’t complain about the players if I’m not willing to be one of them. So cheers to attempting to bring my craft to the new media world. My fingers may have to go modern, but for now, my heart will stay traditional.