Rewind – replay –

Do you ever get chronological linearity confusion? Do you undergo the illusion of being able to re-order events?

When something dreadful happens I have felt the imperative to skip back to the moment just before and play the events that should have happened, instead. And don’t you sometimes want to fast forward through the nasty bits of life?

People living earlier than the video age must have experienced the same thing to a different metaphor. Hard to imagine how they expressed it without the rewind image.

WordPress hasn’t helped me eradicate this muddle. One feature I use quite a lot is being able to schedule, and reschedule, a blogpost. In Twitter you can’t set the tweet time earlier than now, but in WP you can change history. I could write a post tomorrow that came into existence last century, as far as its system attributes show.

I woke up this morning wishing I’d thought of followfridaying @Nanoism.

If you don’t tweet you won’t know #followfriday. A hashtag # identifies a word within your tweet to make it easier for others to find it in searches; for instance, if I chance on an article about characterisation that I want to share, I’d link to it and include the #writing hashtag. That way a lot more people will see my tweet than the few dozen who follow me. (Believe me, a hell of a lot of tweeple search on #writing.)

Certain bandwagons rumble past asking to be jumped on and #followfriday is one. There’s a tradition of suggesting, on a Friday, other people worth following, using the #followfriday or #ff hashtag. It’s a friendly means of give’n’take publicity.

Well, when @Nanoism published my twitfic yesterday, I did put out a tweet about it and so (I hope) friends will have noticed. But had I thought of putting out a #followfriday – on Friday, of course – then complete strangers might have come across it. And @Nanoism’s next tweet was mine.

(If the jargon’s getting to you, let me know in the comments.)

In my early-morning half-emerged consciousness, I thought: I’ll schedule a #ff tweet for last week. I thought that by inserting that event into the timeline of events that have already happened, I would be making people notice @Nanoism before the weekend and thus read the tweet that went out yesterday.

Insidious, this technology malarkey. It was a sophisticated version of pointing the remote control at the kids to turn the volume down. I expect this kind of muddle is something of an epidemic. – Surely? Don’t say it’s only me…