MediaJoltz

I wasn’t sure what I was going to write about today but I got inspiration from my mother. I love my mother very very much, but she is very behind the times. The only thing she uses a computer for is email. Her phone needs to be the type that has “dial” and “hang up” as the only buttons.

Because she is looking to move out here to Utah to be by her kids, she has been staying with me for the past 8 days. I found myself explaining things that had always seemed really easy to me. Instead of typing an address in the URL field of a website, she always went to Google to type the business name in and then just clicked on the link in the search that came up. She didn’t know where she was suppose to type the url.

We took some video footage of a beautiful place here in Utah called Cascade Springs. My mom wanted to know if we could take still pictures from the video footage. I told her we could, or we could just put the video footage up online so she could watch it there too. She was puzzled that we could do that-which might have been understandable, except for the fact that for the past 5 years she has watched footage we’ve shot of Christmas and other holidays over the internet. She said she wasn’t sure if there was a special camera we shot with in order to get it online.

This morning she was going to some classes designed to help with the job search. As we were walking out the door she remembered she needed a pencil and so I got out a mechanical pencil and handed it to her. She looked at it and then back at me then back at the pencil, shook her head and then with panic plastered across her face said, “I don’t even know how to work this. You don’t have just a regular pencil?”

Something as simple as a mechanical pencil to me, represented a contraption of panic to my mother and thats when I got it. We all have different levels of understanding in the world. Some things click and someone might understand the first time, while it might take a while for others to take hold and embrace something new. New Media is not suppose to be scary or frustrating to anyone. It is a way to communicate easier, but it doesn’t mean you have to get it right the first time you do a podcast, or your blog will be set up perfectly and ready to go on the first try. Everything takes practice and time and this doesn’t exclude media.

I guess the lesson I want to let others know that I learned is that if you don’t understand something, thats okay. Don’t panic, take your time.

Tip of the day:  Go to Blogger.com to get your feet wet on blogging, give it a try, don’t be scared of it, you can’t mess it up or ruin anything. If its not for you right now, thats okay too.