Friday, August 31, 2012

Crazy Social Media

So August has come to an end and with it my goal of going batshit crazy with social media.

I've still go one YouTube video to get out that I'm going to try to do later today.

But here's what I learned:

I hate Twitter...Okay, that's not true.  I think that if I had more time, I'd use Twitter more and enjoy it.  But my time is so scheduled and so valuable that I don't have that time.  Being on vacation showed me how much of our empty time we fill with these phones we carry.  When we see things that are cool, we don't reflect on them, we think of how to share them in 140 characters to get us more followers.  Twitter is for carrying on conversations, and the truth is that there are more than enough people in real life I'd like to talk to that I don't have time for heaps of people I don't know.

Of course, that sounds so horrible and anti-social.  But the thing is, I'd love to meet those people.  There are a lot of on-line friends that I'd love to know in real life, and I think that easy access to social media allows me to constantly manufacture excuses not to do so.

I'm over Facebook.  I actually deleted the app from my phone.  I still check it on my computer, but it's not real.  Most of the people on there aren't "friends" in the honest sense of the word.  I want them to be, but reading posts on Facebook doesn't make it so.  I'll keep Facebook because it's a great tool to keep track of people and what they're doing, but I won't be chained to it, and I'm going to make a concerted effort to take those relationships from Facebook to real life.

I've rediscovered how much I love blogging.  It's mostly a time thing, but also, I feel like it's a journal the world can read.  I love replying to comments and I'm going to continue to make an effort to develop a community here.  I'm going to try to bring a little more structure to my posts so that I'm not just rambling, but adding something to the overall discussion.  I think blogs are on their way out, but I've never been one to glom on to fads.

I like vlogging but think that if I'm going to continue to do them, I need to do them better.  More professionally.  I sort of half-assed them and it shows.  But I did like doing them.  I had an idea to maybe start a vlog roundtable, where we'd come up with a topic and post videos responding to the question and to each other.  Might be stupid, but it might be fun.  If anyone's interested, let me know.  Maybe we could talk books or publishing or why Joss Whedon is a genius.

I mentioned Donnie Darko a couple of posts back, and I was thinking about social media when I remembered the scene where they're describing the Infant Memory Generators.  The idea was to put glasses on babies while they slept to feed them positive images.  The teacher in the movie questions whether they'd considered that babies might need darkness to develop.  We fill so much of our down time with facebook and twitter and all these other things.  When we sit in waiting rooms or while we're driving, we're feeding our minds information.  Audio books, facebook, twitter, Reddit.  We're constantly filling the spaces between moments.  And this anti-social media and mega social media experiment has led me to question whether we, as writers, and creative beings, and people, need those quote moments for self-reflection.  For day dreaming.  For pondering shit that needs pondering.

If, as they say, it's about the journey and not the destination, what does it mean if we never let our minds roam free?

I will very likely be taking the rest of the weekend off to regroup.  Have a good one.

3 comments:

  1. I think there are benefits to both sides of the information question. I mean John Muir wrote some great stuff while just pondering, you know? But then Hemingway really had to live.

    I think I've lived enough, so now I prefer to ponder.

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  2. LOL. Great point. But I think that whether you're a liver or a ponderer, you have to put down the phone in order to do them.

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  3. Oh, definitely. I hate phones. I refuse to be shackled to a leash. I just mean I'd rather climb a mountain, and breathe a while these days, than be sweating my ass off in a warehouse at 5AM on a Sunday, you know? I'm pretty sure this means I'm old as dust.

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