ShawneeDispatch.com

I may not be what’s known in technospeak as an “early adopter,” but I try not to get too far behind the times. I guess maybe I’m a “not too late adopter,” if there is such a thing.

We got into the personal computer market fairly early. If memory serves, we bought our first computer – if you could call it that; a debatable point, maybe, compared with what we all use today – sometime in 1982, when we purchased a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A.

This was a somewhat temperamental device that used plug-in modules for games and for things like home-budgeting programs. You could also write and record simple BASIC programs.

But the TI didn’t have a full keyboard and couldn’t make lower-case letters, so it wasn’t much use for word processing and never caught on. The company stopped making them and left the personal computer business in 1983.

That was the year Apple brought out the IIe. We bought our Apple IIe in 1986, and we had a complete unit, with full text- and data-processing capabilities, though they were of course rudimentary compared with what everyone accepts as the norm today. Interconnectivity – the Internet, e-mail, all of that – was still a few years in the future.

Sometime in the 1990s we sold our IIe and purchased a Macintosh. This was our first introduction to the Internet. As I recall it came with an America Online account.

We didn’t use it much. It was a dial-up connection and so painfully slow, for one thing, and we were living in a small town then and the numbers we had to call were long-distance, so one always had to worry about the cost.

That problem was resolved after a few years when a local company became an Internet service provider and we didn’t have to dial long-distance anymore.

In the intervening years we’ve moved through several more computers, and moved up to broadband Internet service and so on. My point is, if I’m not the first guy to try out the new stuff, I try not to be the last either.

All of which brings me to Twitter. Everybody loves Twitter. Even the FBI Twitters.

Twitter, of course, is the free social networking and microblogging service that allows you to send messages of up to 140 characters to infinitely variable sets of people. The idea is, you can let people know what you’re up to, 24 hours a day or at least whenever you’re awake.

So this morning I finally decided I ought to check this out. I went to twitter.com and created an account. That started the questions: Who are you? What are you doing right now?

Already I’m beginning to see a problem here, and it’s not a new problem. Back in 1840, when the first telegraph lines were erected and placed in service, backers touted the service by saying that now Maine, for example, could talk to Texas. Henry David Thoreau was moved to ask: what if Maine has nothing to say to Texas?

That’s kind of how I feel. Connectivity is great, I suppose, but I’m not sure I want anyone knowing what I’m doing every waking moment. A guy needs a little privacy.

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