I started in with social media well before I heard the term in use. It was five
years ago when, newly retired and both wondering what to do through yet another long
dark winter, my movie and coffee shop pal, Wayne, suggested we get into blogging about what we’d each come
to believe on our long life journeys. Maybe that big bulge of
Boomers coming up right below us seniors would find our thoughts resonated with them? In those
not-that-far-off days, Booming was still a big new thing, and its zippier
manifestation, Zooming, was just coming into the the world, courtesy of Moses
Znaimer’s media empire.
Wayne came up with an appropriately serious-sounding moniker for this blog, ‘Musings of an Aging
Boomer’, and I our obscure tag line, ‘A Senior Perspective on the Evolution of
Western Values since IBM Selectrics and Rock-and-Roll were young’. Though my partner
dropped out of posting when that winter ended, I have soldiered on,
shifting the blog onto my own domain to highlight the solo nature of its authorship.
We are up to 136 posts now and my
followership goes up and down, but is never a lot. I began this blog with a view to honing a
writing style and to explore content ideas for longer opinion pieces. That is where I presently remain. Ninety-eight percent of blogs
attract a tiny readership and, while this is one of the more durable Boomer
blogs, commentary on everyday life and times is not easy to monetize with cautious late middle age folk who often have only a dim idea or none at all of how to find good writing of interest on the Web. Without readership there will be no sponsorship to pay for spending time on developing well-written and satisfying posts.
These days I manage a couple of
additional blogs. These are not personal but subject related, and content is at
least partly provided by third parties. Their subjects of authorship and heritage
attract a wider crowd than my personal musings.
About a year ago, I realised that I had
better find out what some of the more recently developed social media options than now-mature blogging were all
about. This was so that I could decide where, if at all, they could help my authorial efforts.
What to choose? I had already joined
LinkedIn years ago so I just needed to revamp my profile to fit my state in
life, and start posting again. I added Facebook, Google+ and Twitter, the last at
that point in time still much reviled by many pundits as mindless.
As an older person in an
age category where Facebook (FB) use is still low, my very modest number of thirty-two
‘friends’ who are actual people (rather than an organization) are a heterogeneous
lot, and largely not representative of my personal friendships. In contrast, my thirty-something-year-old kids have pretty well all their real-life acquaintances in
their age group using FB regularly as the primary way they all stay in touch.
In addition to maintaining my own
personal Timeline, I monitor ten Facebook groups that reflect my
recreational interests. Sad to say that the very substantial
memberships of most of these communities (some are well beyond a 1,000 members) are mostly middle-aged.
Having hobbies is becoming a dated concept that may never catch on with our youngest adult age cohort, the so-called Millennials.
