AS a social media dinosaur, I admit to being slow to put on my glad rags and join the Twitter party.

Trouble is, up to now I just have not been able to work up the interest, which, as I’m in the communications business, may not be such a great idea.

So I’m plunging into the social media sea, hoping to swim. One great barrier of grief to overcome is that I struggle to cope with the torrents of information swirling around in cyber space.

I prefer the idea of someone sifting all this stuff and presenting it in a thoughtful way, saving me from the task of wading through it all. They could find a name for this idea of bringing together edited content of interest in one place. I know, let’s call it a “newspaper”.

When my brother attracted 90 likes on Facebook at work, he got a pat on the back. Had he made the local press he wouldn’t have won any praise even though thousands of people would have seen it, on regional TV it may have been watched by a million.

All this makes it seem that the social media tail is wagging the press and broadcast dog. Then again the power of social media is sometimes off the scale. There are the likes of Russell Brand with more than nine million followers of his tweety weeties, another of life’s great mysteries.

We are a long way from when I began in a newsroom filled with the clatter of typewriters, well before the birth of the internet – or as younger people view it, back in the Stone Age.

Taking up my hammer and chisel to write this, I also admit to welcoming the arrival of computers and the ability to do invisible mending instead of having to rip up bits of paper and start again after any mistake. I must have saved a forest by now.

Other bits of the revolution are difficult – not least persuading younger Keals to leave phones alone at home if we manage to eat together. Is it just me that wants to take a mallet to mobiles at meals? Instead of talking, there’s tapping. We are in the same room, but some of us are lost in cyber space.

Social media – or is that anti-social media – is 24/7. Anyone once could close the door at some point in the evening and relax. Now there is no door, or it has at least been blown off the hinges. Any time, day or night, there is the seduction of sending a tweet, posting an update, trading messages.

At home, my other half loves Twitter and Facebook.

Looks like I should at last follow suit and make an attempt to step onto the social media stage.

Time is up for my less than splendid isolation – this dinosaur is about to escape from Jurassic Park. Find me roaming @howardhere.