Lisa Scottoline: She's an iPhonatic
William Wordsworth said the world is too much with us. I bet he was talking about his smartphone. Because I have an iPhone and I'm iObsessed.
William Wordsworth said the world is too much with us.
I bet he was talking about his smartphone.
Because I have an iPhone and I'm iObsessed.
In the past, I never approved of Those People Who Are Always Looking at Their Phones, but now I have become one of Those People Who Are Always Looking at Their Phones, which is another lesson:
Judge not, lest ye be caught looking at your phone.
And what am I looking at on my phone? Not an app, or a game, but social media. Which is a euphemism, because if you're spending all of your time looking at social media, you're the most antisocial person in the tristate area.
And which social media am I looking at?
You would think it's Facebook, but it's not, if only because of the laws of Facebook. I have an author page on Facebook, on which I can post, read comments, and reply to them, but I don't get a regular feed, which might be a blessing in disguise.
Because every time I look at Facebook, everybody is smarter, better-looking, and more remarried than I am.
Facebook can be a Depression Machine.
The social media I'm looking at on my phone, almost all the time, is Twitter.
Somebody said that Facebook is the place where you lie to your friends and that Twitter is the place where you tell the truth to strangers.
Word.
But not many of them.
If you're unfamiliar with Twitter, it's a running feed of short comments, the notorious 140 characters that can make news, offer compelling articles, or make you laugh.
And it can also misinform, enrage, and make you cry.
It can bring people together when a celebrity dies, or it can pull them apart, like when they stand up for something they believe in that others disagree with.
Not a hypothetical.
Last summer, I tweeted at Golf Digest magazine because it had tweeted a photo of a golfer hitting a ball into the ocean. It struck me as a terrible thing for a publication to sanction, given the amount of trash already in our seas, which kills marine life. So I tweeted as much, politely - and in an amazing turn of events, the golfer in the photo was an up-and-coming professional who went on to make a hole-in-one the very next day, in a major tournament.
Which would be my luck.
Because the golfer's fan base exploded in just one day, and every single fan saw my tweet and tweeted back at me, ignoring my point about the environment and calling me names, which for women always begin with B, C, and W.
Of course, they're wrong.
Anybody who knows me will tell you that I am a B and a C, but totally not a W.
You might be guessing that this incident cured me of my Twitter addiction, but you would be wrong.
If anything, it made me stronger.
B stands for Bulletproof.
C stands for Confident, Capable, and Cute.
Twitter is a freeway for geniuses and knuckleheads alike to express themselves, a constantly refreshing comments section, for good or ill.
Which is a recipe for complete and total addiction, if you're me.
And if you're a lot of other people, too, especially in election season. Candidates and their followers are tweeting like crazy, and, as I've already confessed, I'm the Woman in the Philadelphia Suburbs who is obsessed with the election.
So I'm on Twitter.
Fairly constantly.
I can quit anytime.
After the election.
The irony is that as addictive as Twitter is, no other company wants to buy it. Disney, Google, and Salesforce decided not to make a bid on it, which I don't understand.
I would buy Twitter in a minute.
Except that it costs $10 billion.
And all of my money is invested in a garden room.
Look for Lisa and Francesca's latest humor collection, "I've Got Sand in All the Wrong Places," and Lisa's new novel, "Damaged," in stores now.