Old Fashioned or Old Fogey

More and more, I am feeling very old fashioned.  Not Little House on the Prairie old fashioned, although I have daydreamed of living on my 140 acres off the grid, but old fogey old fashioned.  I like my news 7 days a week in my paper box on the street, listen to "oldies" from the 90's, and watch TV shows on Netflix way more than broadcast TV.

But it wasn't always this way.  I got my first computer when I was 17, a Zeos that only showed orange on the screen.  I used shareware to type things up for school and I jumped onto the 'net  a computer or two later with dial up about 1994.  I had two VCR's (both 4-headed!) for dubbing tapes and a camcorder that used VHS-C so you could stick the tapes straight into the VCR.

Today, I am a die hard fan of email, am subscribed to over 20 email loops, and spent two hours this December just to organize my bookmarks.  I started blogging in June for TOS and I joined Facebook reluctantly in November, after finding out it was the way to find out what my 27 first cousins and all their offspring are up to.  While I have a cell phone (I know homeschool moms that don't), the only smartness my phone has is to call the people that I tell it to.

So I guess my whole point here is that even though I don't Tweet and Facebook my every move, I am still in the loop.

Using my old fashioned methods, I am in touch with thousands of homeschoolers, locally and internationally.  I can suggest a curriculum or answer a question, without a stat counter or a blog follower.  I can tell you what worked and what didn't for us and our learning styles, tell you about new books, sites, and products I have heard about and who liked/didn't like them.  I can answer questions precisely and in real time, without you having to subscribe to something that might talk about everything else except what you had a question about.

Today's world is so full of people wanting to tell me what they think before I even ask. With 20 minutes of commercials in every hour of programming, news channels that blow everything out of proportion, reality shows about anything but reality, web ads targeted to you, and a mailbox full of things I supposedly need, I cannot be the only one who values being able to ask before I get an answer.
   
In other words, don't discount us old guys and our old fashioned ways.  We may snoop out the latest, and network it with thousands of people, quickly and concisely, in ways that cannot be measured by the latest google gadget.