Our newspaper has lately begun encouraging us to tweet.

It sounds vaguely obscene and certainly unmanly, like a verb from the mouth of one of the ladies of the club if a friend does something indecorous at the tea table.

"Mildred! My word, did you just tweet?"

It is not quite that bad in reality, but I'm still squeamish about tweeting, which is what one does at Twitter.com. With millions of daily users, it's the biggest thing to hit the Internet since the last big thing to hit the Internet, whatever that was.

Early last Friday, actor/celebrity Ashton Kutcher became the first to amass 1 million followers on Twitter.com, beating CNN to the mark by about a half-hour and thereby becoming the undisputed King of the Twits.

Of course, Mr. Kutcher may not retain the title long, as Oprah Winfrey sent out her first tweet later that morning. Figure her to catch him a week from Tuesday.

Anyway, at the point Mr. Kutcher made viral history, I was roughly 999,985 followers behind. Why I have even that many, I'm not sure. I've put out only four tweets in about four weeks. The medium's allure is not one I yet understand.

When you post a message, you're restricted to just 140 characters, so you're done tweeting almost before you've cleared your throat. (That last sentence used 132 characters, including the spaces.) It makes the average e-mail look like a term paper.

So why am I writing so much about not writing on Twitter so much? Because I'm grappling with this question: Just because all the kids at school are tweeting, does that mean I must?

For some, this kind of activity is second nature, but not for me. I'm just not a gadget guy. For example, I still see "text'' only as a noun. I have never texted a message via cell phone, and I only got the cell phone a couple of years ago, as a Christmas gift.

The last gadget I can remember being truly excited to own was the "Rock'Em Sock'Em Robots.'' 'Twas a Christmas gift circa 1966, and my little brother, the Incredible Dullboy, and I got 'em and broke 'em before the first robin of spring.

I don't want to be in touch with media 24/7. I don't want a thumb calloused from keyboards. I don't want a BlackBerry or an iAnything. And I definitely don't want you calling me from your cell phone to say you're a block away -- ring the bell when you get to the door, George Jetson.

I came up in the generation of rotary phones and foldable newspapers, and while I don't want to go back in time, hurtling too fast into the hyper-connected age gives me motion sickness.

Do not mistake this for bitterness or for resentment of those more regular in their tweeting. I consider my wariness a service to the generation that is plugged in dawn to dusk. Those of us with a closer kinship to Andy Rooney than Ashton Kutcher should not be mocked for dawdling while others sprint. Without us, no one could be hip because it is the great paradox of hipness that when everyone is hip, no one is hip.

I'll learn enough to get by and yet remain in that space where I am most comfortable, among the chronically unhip. I was trying to explain tweeting to an equally curmudgeonly friend as we watched a ballgame at PNC Park the other day. He kept watching and asked out of the side of his mouth, "If you use only 70 characters does that make you a half-twit?"

Keep your icons. These are my people. Now let's all go outside and play.