The Wide Angle: Tweeting to an epic playlist
Published 6:30 am Saturday, September 11, 2021
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I got a rather unique message in my inbox the other day. It was from Twitter and it was different from the messages that say, “so and so just tweeted something extraordinary,” urging me to go see what I missed.
Which I most certainly did not miss. Do you honestly think, Twitter, that I have enough going on in my private life to not mindlessly scroll through my feed?
I think you overestimated my social standing sir.
This particular message let me know that one of my tweets had been viewed by 575 people and I thought, “wow people are really bored.”
But I was also curious. Rarely I just post pictures from what I’m shooting that night in hopes the kids still find me cool.
I have very depressing goals.
It turns out these 575 people were looking at my tweet from last Friday night when I launched this gem:
“I know a ton of people are focused on football tonight, but in my world I’m having a significantly hard time keeping up on all the @NCAAVolleyball going on tonight.”
While I’ve always been something of a football fan, it wasn’t until my first job where I really came to love volleyball, so I tend to follow the sport a little closer that I would football.
However, one of the things I was curious about is why this particular stat mattered. After a moment of thought to the harmonizing of one Gordon Lightfoot and his song “Carefree Highway,” it occurred to me it was probably because of the tweet being at NCAA Volleyball.
But as my thoughts carried into the Bee Gees “How Deep Is Your Love,” [It’s from a seriously epic playlist I created of songs from the 1970s and 80s on Spotify] I began to doubt the legitimacy of the tweet and that I was very much not on the cupse of Twitter superstardom — like a Kardashian (The humans, not the Star Trek characters … or maybe the Star Trek characters. How much of a nerd are you?)
So I gave it a little bit of a closer look just to see where we were and as it turns out, long story short, I’m still not that cool.
I’m not entirely sure what view exactly means other than perhaps people clicked on it to see what some tool working late on a Friday night was going on about.
But deeper than that is the simple fact that I’m just not as versed on social media as I once was. Oh, I was a master of Myspace, but since those early days of Todd friending everybody, I’ve kind of dropped off the whole social media thing.
So I tweet when I cover something and watch to see what reactions I get. Then I pretty much put it on a shelf until the next thing.
It doesn’t help that social media — mostly Facebook — has become filled with things I’m not that interested in. Twitter does allow me to scroll quicker though and has a lot more of the things that really interest me. Also, it caters to my limited attention span.
But all of this does bring up a rather existential question I’ve been avoiding for awhile now. Am … am I old?
I’m 47 currently, and like Buster, our devil in fur at home, I feel pretty good for my age, but just the other day I found myself daydreaming about a nap and there again was the question: Am I old?
Uggg, I do need a nap. The Marshall Tucker Band, take me home.
Seriously good playlist though.