A Twit’s Eye View of the Internet

Today I had a very strange cyber experience. I logged onto my hotmail account and found an email from ‘me’. Well, from someone with my name. It was actually an invitation to join this person’s Facebook account as a ‘friend’.

Intrigued, I clicked ‘accept’. I assumed this other person was probably just someone who shared my name and had decided to make contact.

But I was wrong. This invitation wasn’t from another ‘me’ somewhere else in the world. It was actually from ME me!

How did I get this account? I wondered, as I opened the Other Me’s Facebook and realised it had all my own personal information plus some links to my own blog etc.

Then it dawned on me. My son has been helping me set up my blog. Being quite techno savvy he has been waxing lyrical about the possible benefits of linking my blog – which features articles previously published in my Kitchen Philosopher column together with info on my book – to other social networking sites.

His idea is that if we link the blog to Facebook and Twitter, we can increase the number of ‘hits’ on the blog and thus (hopefully!) the number of book sales. Well, that is the theory, anyway.

He’s even linked me to the blog analysis website so I can view my blog activity. This includes seeing how many visits I’ve had, where they are coming from and how long they stayed. It’s all very high tech.

This got me thinking about the way the retail world is changing. Where once upon a time businesses relied heavily on snail mail, word of mouth, newspaper ads and the bush telegraph to advertise their products, today its all about tweeting, blogging and posting. Even our former Prime Minister ‘twitters’ (although I’m not sure what he’s selling -- or if anyone’s buying, for that matter!)

But recently some downsides of these instantaneous communications have been exposed. First there was the newspaper columnist who twittered some highly inappropriate comments while watching the Logies and another whose very public online argument with a uni student culminated in unkind remarks about her foe and his (alleged) fondness for ‘gerbils’ (I’ll let you fill in the gaps here).

All this makes me nervous about the technology that allows us to publically blurt out every inane thought. At least with snail mail, we had some time between the envelope and the Post Office to consider the possible ramifications of our ‘rant’.

But even when you try to be careful about what you say on the internet, you never quite know where your musings might end up or what they might lose in the translation along the way!

I recently discovered this when an article I had written was published online. From it’s original website it apparently attracted quite a bit of attention, both nationally and internationally – judging by the site I later found it on which was clearly of Asian origin. I’m not sure, but I assume my article had been translated into an Asian language, then translated back into English. Consequently, it made for hilarious reading with some very funny misinterpretations of my phrasing, including one reference to ‘haemorrhoids’ which was certainly not in the original script!

While at first I was highly amused, I realised later that the article still bore my name which I found less amusing. But the really disconcerting thing is that I have absolutely no control over what anyone does with my words once they hit the web.

In fact, I feel like a bit of a Twit (erer)!

On the upside, at least I didn’t mention ‘gerbils’.