Friday Five (Yes, it's Sunday!)

RevGalBlogPals is a network of women blogging about ministry and life and on Fridays, we play Friday Five where someone chooses a topic and we “play” by blogging our answer. I didn’t make Friday’s deadline but I'm posting anyway.

Inspired by increasing movement from wired devices and even laptops to mobile devices, this week’s questions asked how we’re using the internet. (Here’s a snapshot of the trends from Pew Internet)

You can play along too and leave your comments with your answers.

Here are the questions:

Q1. Do you use social connections, like Facebook, Twitter, Linked-in or whatever else there is? Describe how you use it/these.
Q2. Do you text on your cell phone? Work, friends, family?
Q3. Do you play any games? Which ones?
Q4. How do you predominantly use the various electronic devices you possess?
Q5. How do you feel about blogging? Are you as involved in blogging as when you first started? What facilitates your blogging?

A1: Social media opens the corner of my world, forging connections with people in other parts of the U.S. and even across the pond.

On Facebook, I am friends with people I can recognize on the street but I can interact in groups or on pages with people with whom I share something in common – parents at a school or club where my children are involved, classmates at seminary or alumni from my high school or university. A decade ago, we might have been connected through a bound paper directory but social media keeps us up-to-date in real time.

Twitter makes conversations possible with an even broader group of folks. Often, I have not met the people I talk to on Twitter, and most of the time, physical geography makes it unlikely that we ever will meet in real life. We might talk about churches and social media (#chsocm), climbing (#climbchat), or Asheville (#avl). We might have a Lutheran connection or a ministry connection or they might be associated with someone who does. Beyond niche topics, Twitter delivers breaking news as quickly as Google News or traditional broadcast channels. While I don’t look at what’s trending on Twitter, but, unfiltered, Twitter reflects a pulse of what is getting people excited, angry or otherwise engaged with the world around them.

For the ways I use Twitter, Hootsuite  lets me create streams that I can follow for any topic I want to follow and when I’m in a chat, I can see the thread of conversation in a single column, making it easy to keep up and contribute. Someone recently joked with me that researchers say if you’re over 38 you cannot manage social media multitasking; I answered I would go and crawl back into my cave then, but I won’t. I like hearing voices from different corners of the world and hearing opinions I might miss if I was only in conversation with locals.

Linked In creates connections to people in the workplace. Again, I generally know everyone in real life – we have worked together in nonprofits, on projects in seminary or they are alumni from the school where I work. Through our shared relationships, we have opportunities to again engage more voices in conversation, whether I need advice about a solicitation strategy, best practices or researching a new vendor.

What surprised me is that as active as I am in these channels, I usually use them from a desktop computer in my office or from my laptop at home. Mobile for me remains the domain of texting, email and phone calls. I think that has as much to do with my eyesight as my age, but I guess those could be related. The notable exception is when I need information quickly. For googling information and maps, my phone is the most convenient device and is indispensable for finding out a store’s hours, what a word means, or discovering where I missed a turn.

A2: I rarely text for work or socially, but it’s the primary mode of communication for our immediate family. I think one of the reasons I don’t use it for other interactions is that I have email synced on my phone, so I can silo external communication on email accounts and preserve my privacy. That’s another sign of my age – I think privacy is being redefined, or maybe deconstructed, by youth today. Opinions about what belongs in public conversation are widely varied,

A3: Games are great time sinks for carpool lines, and I am easily addicted to backgammon and bubble games while my daughters like Temple Run and Unblock Me, but if we get tired of those, here is a top 50 list. What are your favorites?

I’m out of space and time so I’ll save the other questions as food for thought and hope you share how you’re using social media and devices to enrich your learning and life.