TeXting1 )!

I am convinced there is a tech brick wall for each of us...the place at which we will all confront a technology that we can't or won't adopt. For my parents it was the VCR...anyone who has tried to explain over the phone how to record one show while watching another knows what I mean. Eventually they would watch a tape if someone was there to start it and turn the set back to live TV afterwards. Texting is not quite my wall, but I can feel a tinge of what it will be like when I hit it. SPLAT!

(Speaking of keeping up, why is it so many spell-check programs don't recognize "texting" or "Blogger"? Aren't those words the children of the whole computer generation?)

A friend is replacing his cell-phone this week because he has become fond of, er, addicted to, texting. And his old phone has only an alphanumeric phone keypad to work with. The new phone has a miniature keyboard with keys so small I fully expect some surgeon to begin specializing in an operation to sharpen the fingers of the text-generation.

I also replaced my phone this week, but my texts tend to be 1) very short, and 2) impossible to read. Example: "Meet me at sturent" or "Where si she giog". There is no punctuation in my text-world, since finding those symbols on my keypad involves digging several layers down into the sub-basement of the phone's programming. When I went to the store to get a new phone, the salesperson wanted me to get a Blackberry, like the one she was clearly addicted to (There's a reason they call it "Crackberry"), and was appalled when I chose instead to use the insurance I've been paying for all these months to get an almost free replacement for the same model that had served me well for about four years. I'm not a complete Luddite...she also tried to convince me that her phone company's DHL service is faster than my cable connection.

Among the hours of CNN that I can not abide is a new hour long show they've stuck in at 2:00 each afternoon. It's not just a question of the abrasive host, but he's also apparently part of a CNN experiment testing the willingness of viewers to accept "Twittering" as part of their daily news diet. Despite the very best efforts of several younger more tech-savvy friends, I'm still not sure what the difference in between Twitter and IM or, for that matter, texting.

"Josh Techno is twittering from Santa Barbara about the economic meltdown.." Rich Sanchez will intone, trying desperately to sound all cool, as the camera captures a monitor showing dozens of people...what? Twittering? Chatting???

President-Elect Obama twitters...there's an entire webpage devoted to it. Somehow I'm not sure I want to see our Chief Executive having a conversation with some other head of state while he's looking down to "twitter" about what he's thinking or feeling.

At APT we're putting together an economic show for early 2009 that will include calls and e-mailed questions from viewers...and something like Twitter...a kind of message board viewers can type in their questions and we'll read them out for the guests. It's a good thing I'm the host and not a viewer. Otherwise my contribution would look like this: "is the terimnt prolm wit pr-tex mony feir?"