First there was Y!360

No, that is wrong. First there was the head injury. And my cognitive trainer had encouraged me to get back to my journal keeping. But books and pens and writing seemed so beyond me. But I knew that all that was very important for me.

At the time I wrote two columns for a local newspaper. Typing on the computer seemed easier so I began what was at the time called an on-line journal. It at least had spell check. And the newspaper had an editor. Y!360 was the platform for my on line journal. That was in the early days of January 2002. Y!360 was a technical training ground for me as well as cognitive exercise. And it was the beginning of on line friendships. I made friends I still have today. Friends I did not have to dress up for and walk right to impress.

And it was a support group. In the early days it seemed a lot of those on line were like me in being house bound or house limited. Getting dressed and going to doctors' appointments was the extent of outside adventures. My friends were a mixed bag of physically challenged and emotionally abused. And it turned out that even our platform was unstable. Yahoo had not built Y!360 on the most stable of platforms. And as it began to sink, like rats from the Titanic, we escaped to places like Multiply (doomed from its inception), Blogspot, Google+, and Facebook.

In the beginning I settled on Blogspot because it was most truly an on line journal. But after some time all my friends wandered over to Facebook. I viewed it as a cocktail party. All relevant communication was limited to 400 characters, which was admittedly better than Twitter's 120 at the time. But I am not a chit chatter. So, as this blog indicates, I still have my presence on Blogspot which I link to more limited forms of communication. (Part of that growing technical expertise.)

And Facebook gets me locked in because I also have a fanpage there where I can showcase my photography and painting. But at times like now I just want to walk out of the endless party of misunderstandings and rude chatter. And if I didn't have that group of loyal friends from the Y!360 days I might be long gone.

But progress has trashed all the local newspapers without providing the connection to a local radio station. And Facebook can be a form of local communication in a rural area. But one without an editor. And, this astounds me, without use of a spell check function. Annoying because somewhere in the recovery process I learned to spell, most days. And Facebook, as Russia has taught us, has no easy way to verify the information you receive. 

So I am taking a break. Tired of the chit chat. Back to blogging for a while.