Twitter and me go a long way back. Okay, not too long. I’ve been tweeting for about four months. I turned to Twitter out of an encroaching boredom with the other social networking giant–Facebook. I had grown accustomed to Facebook, then familiar, then pretty much blind to everything I did there. Online became a substitute for television–long minutes, then hours, of passive dithering.

Then I discovered Twitter. Back in the day, I had been an IRC devotee, spending long, late-night hours conversing with strangers. The conversations ranged from the banal and forgettable, to the profound and life-changing. Sometimes, I would run the gamut from mind-numbing silliness to philosophical rapture all in one evening. With Twitter, I started feeling some of the attraction to the same sort of online activity I had truly enjoyed with IRC chat almost a decade ago.

The familiar # sign (called hashmarks in Twitter parlance) were familiar, and denoted channel names on Twitter, much the way they did with IRC. The content of Twitter, too, ranged from ordinary to intellectually challenging. And the elegance of using 140 characters or less–characters not words, mind you–I found fascinating, and still do.

The challenge of expressing oneself, let alone conveying very basic information, micro-blogging style, was a craft that I became hungry to practice. Even as I learned more about the technicalities of Twitter, I became more and more enamored of the discipline of being in the information stream, and responding to its ripples and torrents, as I once was with conducting multiple calculations on many IRC channels simultaneously. The information overload was transfixing and transforming.

This evening, after I  blog, I will go back to Twitter briefly. It’s Thursday evening, and I always try to do my #FollowFridays on Thursday night. If you have Twittered for more than a couple of months, you have probably learned about #FollowFriday.  It’s a Twitter activity that several hundred thousand Tweeple (Twitter+people)  engage in every week. It consists in tweeting “shout outs” to all your followers, usually your new followers. You’re nothing on Twitter if you’re not Followed and Mentioned, so the #FollowFriday mentions of your new followers is an end-of-week ritual that many play. I always feel on “FollowFridays” (which I do on Thursday, as I mentioned), like I’m paying it forward. A FollowFriday mention is like a random act of kindness. I always try to mention someone in my group of followers that’s just starting out on Twitter, and perhaps doesn’t have many followers of their own.

I encourage any of you that is looking for a new hobby, and especially those that love computers and technology–give Twitter a try! There’s a bit of learning curve, but Twitter is pretty intuitive. So, even if you don’t get the engineers perspective, and don’t have the patience to learn the peculiar system that is Twitter, you should enjoy yourself, and in the process have many enjoyable  new friendships, virtually.

I’ve been playing with so-called social media now for several months. I started with LinkedIn, oddly enough. That probably isn’t the vendor of choice for most social web mavens. But I was out of work, doing the odd contracting gig, and LinkedIn seemed useful. Like most adult learners, I tend to go with functionality over window dressing, and LinkedIn, though not the prettiest networking site, leans towards the professional. So it suited me fine at the time.

Now that I’m more gainfully employed, my social media interests have taken me first to Facebook (around 1000 friends to date at https://www.facebook.com/wieder) and then to Twitter (currently around 6500 followers on the busiest of my Twitter accounts at http://www.twitter.com/GerryWiederRN)

I’ve also started blogging more. My blog at gerrywieder.com used to lie fallow for months at a time. While don’t spend hours blogging every day, I do make more frequent entries, and I’ve started to pay closer attention to what may be good topics to write on. My writing is getting better over time, and although I don’t have the flair of a Perez Hilton or the mass appeal of Aston Kutcher, I imagine someday I may attract a small leadership.

Am I on my way to financial independence with my web hobby? Hardly. I have yet to find what might be commercially appealing about my little passtime.  Perhaps someday. For now, I’m happy to indulge myself in getting out a few small sentences of drivel every other day or so. I suspect after awhile, I will prune my blog site. I’ll keep the best and hide the worst. Maybe I’ll put up a couple of advertising banners, to lure the unwary into my Google Adsense trap!

Ah, what fun. Time to go to my day job. Hope you enjoyed the read. Comment often.

Doreen Martel, a writer and regular on Twitter (@doreenmartel), posed this question in one of her recent tweets. I love Doreen. She asks questions that on the surface seem so benign. But if you even start to consider them seriously for even a moment, Doreen’s musing take on a life of their own. I’m sure she is not the first to pose this question, but such questions are one of her hallmarks, and this one stopped me dead in my tracks.

I am a nurse by profession. The enterprise I am engaged in, and have been for the last several years, is improving systems in health care organizations. For me that mostly means taking such organization from archaic paper documentation to computerized physician ordering and documentation systems. Very challenging, and for me, intrinsically rewarding.

Often while I’ve been doing this work, I have asked myself, “Am I really making a difference?” Is what I’m doing ever going to change the world?

When I was going to nursing school the first time (I got a nursing diploma in the early 90′s and went back to school in 2000 to get my BSN), my grandmother supported me both emotionally and financially through nursing school. I was in my late 30s at that time, and to anyone else that knew me then, my life might have looked like a real mess.

I had just broken up with my girlfriend. My career was in a shambles. And nursing school seemed as much like a way out to me, at that time, as a step up. Not that I disliked nursing school, and the prospect of becoming a nurse. It was just that I was so mixed up at that stage of my life that I felt indifferent to the wonderful opportunity going back to school should have meant to me.

My grandma believed in me though. I think she must have seen through the murky swim my life had become, and she offered me a deal. I think she may have thought this bargain might in some way contribute to the world, and the way things work. This was her deal: she would help me through school, if one day I returned the favor to someone else. This was her contribution to change the world. Send a nurse out to do good.

My grandma died a couple of years after I graduated in 1994. She was at my nursing school graduation in Saskatoon. I could tell she was just as proud of me as if she were graduating herself. I know I thanked her, probably many times, for what she did for me. I think though that for her, quite possibly, the prospect that I might help end someone’s suffering, that I might change the world, meant more to her than anything other good (and I’m sure there was much) that she might have done in her life.

So, Doreen Martel, when you ask “can one person change the world”, I think, “Yes, I might.” I also think that my grandma certainly did.

Gerry Wieder also regularly posts on Twitter @GerryWiederRN. Follow him there for tweets on healthcare and on life.