Filed under: art, Creative Process, space, technology, theatre | Tags: audiences, audio, podcasts, theater, theatre, Zoom
A friend of mine has developed a show to be performed on Zoom. It’s an innovative concept and she’s doing that innovating in a form where people don’t necessarily expect to see innovation. She asked someone to attend this show and they said, “I don’t do Zoom,” which understandably got under my friend’s skin a little bit. It’s a little like someone saying they don’t go to the theatre when you give them a postcard for your show in a theatre.
Now, the truth is, I don’t do Zoom either (if I can help it) but I would never say that to someone inviting me to their Zoom show. They don’t need that information or need to have it delivered like that. For me, I wish it were not so, but almost every Zoom I’ve ever had has ended with me sobbing on the floor, or in bed with a migraine. I’ve been in Zoom shows, watched Zoom shows, had Zoom rehearsals, Zoom meetings and Zoom parties and the experience has always been more or less the same. And weirdly, the more fun the activity is, the more acute my response. I wish it were not so but it is, unfortunately, the case for me. Everyone thinks their show or their meeting or their rehearsal will be the exception but unfortunately, it’s not the content for me – just the format. It’s weird. I know it’s weird but a pattern is a pattern. I’ve probed it, investigated it and the pattern tends to hold.
But the fact that I personally cannot happily engage with Zoom doesn’t mean I don’t notice when someone is doing extraordinary things with the form. Making stuff on Zoom is hard! It’s like making a movie (or multiple movies!) and a play at the same time! It’s very difficult! But I still think people should do it. Not me, of course, I get enough migraines as it is – but I do think it is incredibly important for artists to take hold of new forms and make new art out of them. I’m incredibly proud of my friend. I’m an advocate for it, even if I can’t watch it myself. (Check it out! She MIGHT have an encore show in the works and if you join her Patreon, you might be able to see it.)
Creating work on Zoom opens up space to a radical accessibility. It can include people who are not able to leave their homes, which is something, historically, theatre has been unable to do. (Side note: Back in the early days of my theatre company, we used to joke about doing something called PJ Theatre where we imagined we’d go to someone’s bedroom to put on a show so they wouldn’t have to leave their beds. Zoom is pretty close to that!) Zoom can also reach beyond geographical boundaries and connect with people around the world. It’s a means to create a global theatre. I love that. But, of course, even the most inclusive format can still exclude some people. Not everyone can stomach Zoom and for some it triggers some pandemic PTSD. But I feel like people like me are probably in the minority and it’s important to innovate in this form and to serve the people who AREN’T like me. It is important and meaningful work to do.
I feel like I can relate to my friend’s experience of the “I don’t do Zoom” person because I get similar responses when I tell people about my podcasts. There are a lot of people out there who have never listened to a podcast and a lot of them are not likely to. Only 38% of Americans have listened to a podcast in the last month. It may seem like everyone has a podcast but not everyone is interested in listening to them. I have taken several people’s phones and physically subscribed them to my podcasts and still, I suspect that they haven’t listened. There are people out there, people I love, who just don’t listen to audio. It’s not just that they don’t know how to listen to a podcast, they don’t listen to the radio, either. Or even music. They just don’t love to engage with stuff through their ears, I guess. They are never going to listen to my audio dramas, no matter how much they love me. I’m learning how to not take that personally. It’s not me, it’s the format.
In recent years, I’ve mostly been making audio, though, so I thought, hey, for our next one, we should do it live so that the people who prefer the theatre bit can come and have the live theatre experience. But so few people came, I’m not sure I believe the “I prefer live theatre” people anymore. In the four performances, spread out over four months, we sold maybe ten tickets? I had two friends come out to see it. Contrast that with the 673 podcast plays we’ve had on the audio drama so far. One of these things has a much larger reach than the other.
Theatre has become more and more expensive to make. It is prohibitively difficult to produce as an indie maker. On top of that it has become vastly more difficult to get audiences to come out for things. I had two friends come to see our show (Thank you friends!) but most people involved with our show had zero friends come, even with the most liberal comp policy you can imagine.
Part of the reason that my friend turned to Zoom to produce her show is that it is affordable. You don’t have to rent a theatre to put a show up on-line. Theatres cost a lot of money to rent. The affordability factor is true for me and audio, as well. Putting up shows that very few people are going to come to is very expensive and involves a lot more annoying fundraising emails.
Theatre is my first love but, at the moment, it is almost impossible to make in its usual form. For theatre to work, you have to have an audience and when audiences stop coming, you have to expect that makers are going to migrate to other forms, some of which you (or journalists) might not like. I was told by a theatre journalist that theatre journalists won’t cover podcasts. I’d be upset about it except that theatre journalists rarely covered my theatre in recent years either, so…no real loss there.
Anyway – when someone pitches you a show in a new form, maybe applaud them for it, even if you know you’ll never go there. I understand the impulse to try and explain that it’s not personal, that you just don’t do whatever the form is but I’m not sure telling me you don’t like audio or telling my friend you don’t do Zoom helps much. In the big scheme of things, most people don’t come to our shows and they never tell us why. But people who do come to our shows, who tell us why they came and (if we’re very lucky) tell us they enjoyed it, those are some adventurers in new media and our arts heroes.
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Filed under: art, community, technology, voting, writing | Tags: clicks, Ezra Klein, Internet, Jezebel, journalism, local news, New York magazine, Rebecca Traister, Search Engine, tech, The Onion, weird quirky websites
The podcast I was listening to was about the crisis in journalism – about how so many news sites were disappearing, how so many journalists are losing their jobs and about how the landscape was changing so dramatically and not for the better. (This country has lost one third of its newspapers and two thirds of its journalists since 2005 and it is accelerating.) I was only half listening – truth be told. I was still pretty wiped out from COVID and I was dozing a fair amount. But then – after a history lesson in how journalism was funded and then how that landscape shifted and then shifted again – I sat bolt upright at a concept the guest (Ezra Klein) brought up. He said we should not think of ourselves as consumers of the internet but as generators. His feeling was that we are all rather passively engaging with the internet, without realizing that we are creating it while we do that. Basically, the idea is that we are creating with our clicks. What we engage with and look at and pay attention to is the internet we create. If I want to see local news, I have to subscribe to local news – or at the very least – visit local news sites. If I want more independent media, I have to read independent media. I can’t just wish for these things to exist.
I recognize my own behavior in this. When Jezebel was shut down, I was pretty upset! RIP the last popular feminist media! But I hadn’t visited Jezebel in ages. Truthfully, since they were bought by G/O Media – they were starting to fall apart. But even before then, I wasn’t over there much. I appreciated that Jezebel existed but I didn’t do anything to help continue its existence. (I learned while researching for this that it is coming back via Paste Magazine. Hooray for Zombie Jezebel!) As Klein said, if you want the publication to continue you have to read it. If you want the podcast to continue, you have to listen to it. If you want an internet with blogs and independent media, you have to read them. We create our own internet.
In other words, wailing about the evils of social media while continuing to scroll through it for hours, doesn’t help create alternatives. If we go through the portals of social media to get to our media, we are enforcing the need for social media to filter our media for us. I do this. And I get the internet that I create – a world filtered by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Bsky, Mastodon, etc. If I like something, I can’t wait for it to show up in a feed, I have to go directly to it. Additionally, Facebook has been showing people less and less news in their feeds. This has throttled traffic to news media which has, in turn, lost them a lot of advertising dollars and threatened their existence. Or killed it entirely. If I want it, I have to go to the thing and click there.
I have often thought of this from my own perspective of my needs as an artist, engaging with the internet. There are a lot of people who express that they’re glad I do what I do but only a handful that engage with my work and even fewer that support it. This is as true of my off-line theatre making as it is with my podcasts, my blogs or music. I know directly what happens when people don’t engage with my work. (I feel bad mostly.) But there have definitely been times where the direct line of a project living or dying is very clear. Our first season of our first audio drama, The Dragoning, took almost a year to finish because the funding was so slow to come in. We weren’t holding episodes back because we wanted to be withholding – we just literally couldn’t make a new episode until we reached the episode budget. Eventually, we got there. And the show has charted around the world. But it was clear there was a big disconnect for a lot of people between support for the podcast and its ability to be made. And it’s not just about money. If more people had listened to the show, (downloaded the show, even put it on play and walked out to do something else), if we’d gotten more numbers, perhaps we could have found some funding through advertising. But podcast advertising is a numbers game and if you’re not getting a minimum of a thousand downloads an episode, it’s not a game you can play. I had ads on the podcast version of this blog for a week and a half and made a grand total of $1.38. It’s very clear to me, as a creator, how peoples’ investment can make the life or death difference in a creation. I don’t know why I hadn’t really put it together as a user of the internet.
As Klein put it, “If you want Pitchfork to exist, you have to read it.” Anything we want on the internet (and I would argue, out in the world, too) we have to engage with it. Ezra Klein on Search Engine:
“Every time you read one thing over another or watch or listen to our spend time on, you are creating more of that thing and less of other things, right? There is still some money that comes from just, like, your attention. Then a level above that, when you pay for anything, when you become a member or subscriber, then you’re really sending a signal to generate more of that thing and not of the other.”
We turned the vibrant disparate quirky internet into a series of social media sites. And if we like that – cool – that’s what we have. But if we want other things, we have to engage with them and we also have to pay for them. I really want to do this. I want more art; I want to pay for more artists. (I’d love to support my fellow artists on Patreon: like Alexandra Scott, Betsy VanDeusen, Dance Naked Creative, Monica Byrne, Michael Harren and so many more.) And when I start to make a living wage, that’s the first thing I’m going to do. Meanwhile, though, to create the internet I want to see in the world, I have to actually click on my values. I can’t just like the funny Onion headline on Twitter, I have to click on the article and go read it – on the Onion’s website. If I want more Onion, I have to read the Onion.
But this is the thing, though, I used to read the Onion cover to cover when it was a paper publication I could just pick up on the street. Now I have to remind myself to click when I see an article go by on social media. And once I get over there, I don’t read that whole issue. I just read what I came for and get out. I’m guessing we’re not going back to paper but it was a lot better for some things. I currently read every issue of New York magazine because I subscribe to it. It comes in the mail and then I read it. For me, subscribing means I get both local news and a way to voice my support for one of my favorite journalists (Rebecca Traister, who writes there). I know other publications languish because I chose that one. That’s my current vote – since I don’t really read much news on the internet. Which I guess is also a vote. But if I want the old quirky internet full of funky weird websites, I have to visit those!
Oh hey, if you need some ideas on stuff to click on, I put a bunch of links in this piece. Click away!
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Filed under: business, technology | Tags: CMS, digital space, leaves, Not Foliage, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Sexy Elephant Opera, websites
For years I’d been seeing discussions of “SEO” all over my websites. Every company seemed to want to help me improve this SEO business so I eventually looked it up to try and understand it. In case you don’t have six websites the way I do, (I am a maniac. They’re here, here, here, here, here and right here) or maybe you’ve never encountered SEO before or maybe SEO stands for “Sexy Elephant Opera” for you – allow me to explain. In this case SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. It is what you’re supposed to do to make yourself easy to find on the web. People who are concerned about discoverability and visibility on the internet tend to care a lot about SEO.
I am, as someone who makes many things in this digital space, very interested in making myself discoverable so I looked into it. Most of the companies that make CMS (Content Management System) templates give their users tools to optimize their searchability.
Many of my websites, including this blog, have given me ample opportunities to improve my page’s SEO. It has little boxes I can fill out and ways to boost. I never bother, really. But one time I did. I was working on one of my many websites and it made what I needed to do to improve my SEO clear. I tried to do it right. I really did. But the more I attempted it, the stupider it all became.
Let’s say I had a webpage about leaves. For it to be useful in a SEO sense, the webpage’s name had to have the word “leaves” in it. Call it foliage and you’re not getting a SEO boost. You need to use the word “leaves” in the title. You need to use the word “leaves” as many times as possible in the text and you have to tag the images with leaves. You have to saturate your page with the word, or the clicks will not come to you.
This redundancy is, of course, the absolute opposite of good writing, wherein it is optimal to use as large a variety of words as you can muster. You will have better SEO luck just writing the word leaves over and over again than you would in writing something interesting or salient about leaves. I’m pretty sure this is a big factor in why so much stuff on the internet is useless trash. Magazines and newspapers have gone out of business over it because they’re bought by people or companies that just want clicks – so they can make advertising dollars or whatever, and they privilege SEO over good writing. Owners would rather have a bot “write” an article that generates clicks than a thoughtful essay by a person that reveals truth. But try and write a thoughtful essay while also trying to include SEO attractive words and you’ll find yourself in a quandary. The SEO likes simple repetitive things. It does not like complex ideas or expansive language. It’s a baby that recognizes a handful of words and can act on them.
Could improving my SEO bring more eyes to my work? Absolutely. But improving the SEO would make the work worth very little when those eyes arrived.
Improving one’s SEO means making the work for robots. Writing for SEO means privileging robots over humans. And robots don’t read. They just select the words they’re looking for and spit out results.
People are now making things for search engines instead of other people. This doesn’t make any sense to me. I just can’t bring myself to do it. Leaves leaves leaves leaves leaves leaves. Not a leaf! No. Leaves leaves leaves.
This post was brought to you by my patrons on Patreon.
They also bring you the podcast version of the blog.
It’s also called Songs for the Struggling Artist
You can find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are on Spotify, Apple Music, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer, Bandcamp and Amazon Music.
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Filed under: art, podcasting, technology, writing | Tags: AI, algorithms, bots, congratulations, Goodpods, grant writing, podcasting, promotional text, robots, technology, writing
When I heard (in an Audio Drama group), about the AI descriptions taking over podcasts on Goodpods (a podcast platform), I headed straight over to see if my audio drama (The Dragoning) had been subjected to this treatment. It was not, so I moved on with my week, not thinking much of it. Then another audio drama group began to talk about how outrageous and wrong these descriptions were and how they were pulling their shows from the platform. So I went back to check and, still, The Dragoning was unaffected. But this time, I thought to check my other podcast, the audio version of this blog, and lo and behold, there was a whole bunch of text I’d never seen before.
There was a description of my podcast, a paragraph about who should listen to it and a summary of three episodes. And unlike the descriptions of my colleagues’ podcasts, it was pretty accurate. Actually, it sounded like a PR person got ahold of my work and went to town. It sounds like a pretty nice review. If a person had written it, I would be flattered. But a person didn’t write it so it just made me confused. Does the AI who created this text really think I’m insightful? No. It doesn’t think. Period. It doesn’t even know what insightful means. It’s likely just using predictive text to write a reasonable sounding bit of copy.
A lot of my podcasting colleagues were pretty upset about having their podcasts saddled with text generated by AI that they didn’t ask for or choose, and understandably so. I find myself more flummoxed by it.
The AI “wrote” these things in a very particular style. It says many things that I would never say about myself that I would, nonetheless, like to be said about me. It feels like Goodpods got me a publicist who makes me feel a little uncomfortable but who I wouldn’t complain about, if they got me more visibility. And I already have three times the listeners on their platform than I did before they added this made-up description. So…I’m very torn about this new development. When I read it, it feels as though this AI has made some interpretative choices, that it listened to my podcast and summarized what it heard. But, of course, that is not what happened. I don’t know how it came up with what it came up with but there was no interpretive work done by the robot. And if I understand the purpose of this text, it is to draw the attention of the algorithms that suggest podcasts to people. That is, the AI chose words that would get the attention of some other AI and theoretically put my podcast in front of more people. It’s the robots talking to each other. If it gets me some clicks, is it okay to let it do that?
The thing that becomes so plain here is how promotional language is so formulaic and meaningless that an AI can convincingly do it. This is probably one of the most productive ways AI can be used. It can handle anything that is, essentially, a formula without too much originality required. It reveals the simplicity and emptiness of advertising copy. Lord knows I don’t want to write things like this. If AI can do it for me, why shouldn’t I let it? There are a lot of bullshit things I have to write –promotional text, artist statements, grant applications. I mean – for sure an AI could do as good a job of writing the bullshit for a grant application as I do. In fact, it’s likely to do a better job, as it’s not afraid to use self-aggrandizing words and ideas and could be programmed to tell grant readers exactly what they want to hear. If there’s one thing I am not good at, it is talking myself up. And, it would seem, if there’s one thing AI can be good at, it is talking things up. And, in fact, they could use an AI to read all these bullshit grants, too. One AI could talk up the artist and another AI could search for the words it wants to see, i.e. “read” it. Artists need not set down a single word.
Is it more important that I write a grant application in my actual voice or that I use the phrases that are likely to yield good results? A good grantwriter knows what those phrases are and you can bet they make sure to include them in their grant applications. Is it possible this whole exercise of writing grants for artwork might be bullshit? If an AI could do it better than I can?
I’m in the middle of writing a grant now and I am absolutely tying myself into knots trying to invent the right text for it. I could, even now, probably plug some of my usual arts project language in to some large language model and end up with something usable. I won’t do that but I’m not sure I shouldn’t.
It’s clear that the podcast AI has thus far rewarded me for the formulaic language it made up for me. I have three times the listeners that I did. (Maybe. Are those numbers representing real people or bots? Does it matter?) So, if an AI program can get me more podcast listens, who’s to say I shouldn’t use it to get some arts funding, if it saves me pulling a muscle (a muscle made of bullshit!) every time I write one? I am fundamentally opposed to AI doing artist’s jobs. I am incredibly grateful that the Writers and Actors’ unions have fought to keep the robots from taking their jobs. But I’m starting to see the value in AI for the bullshit part of our jobs. If the AI knows which words to use to get other AI to move me up the charts, I’m grateful. There’s no virtue in me trying to guess what those words are to try and game the algorithm.
I think about how writing “Congratulations” in the comments on Facebook puts a post in front of more eyes. If lots of people write congratulations, it increases those eyeballs even more. These descriptions seem to be a version of saying “Congratulations” on Facebook. It’s all just ways to game the robots, I guess.
Do I feel good about living in a world where we have to think about how we manipulate the programs of robots? I do not. But I acknowledge that the likelihood is low of a real human person stumbling upon my work by chance, without the help of some robots. As much as I am a little disturbed by the language a robot invented, I think I might leave it there, just as an experiment. I feel very weird about having an unattributed piece of language on a page about my work but it’s also very hard to argue with, probably because it didn’t come from a person.
To be honest, I haven’t paid much attention to all the hype around AI. As an indie artist in an unprofitable corner, I really couldn’t imagine a scenario in which it would be relevant to my life. But those bots are full of surprises. And AI is so trendy, it’s fixing to show up everywhere. There were rumors that Goodpods was readying itself to get investors and that AI is a thing big companies use to get the money people interested. Say you’re going to use AI and you get more cash! We’re probably all going to be wrestling with AI here and there now. Would I let an AI write a blog for me? Hell to the no. That’s for a person to do. And that person is me. But would I let it write my grant application? I might. (I mean, I won’t. Please don’t reject my grant applications because I said I might let a bot do it. I’m doing it, okay?) In a way, this all just makes clear what is bullshit writing, for which we can accept the work of a bot, and what is writing we need a human for, a face for, a voice for. Maybe a bot could do this. But it would be meaningless without a person behind the words.
And in the latest development over on Goodpods, my moral dilemma has taken care of itself. I guess they had enough complaints about their AI that they just removed it all. Now, where there was once a puff piece, there are the three questions that the AI previously answered. Now it wants me to answer them? I am unlikely to. Can I just type in what the AI wrote for me? I don’t think I have the self-aggrandizing stomach for it. Also – I looked at my nine new listeners and I’m pretty sure they are all bots. Their user names are things like GuestUser947 and such. So… nothing’s really been ventured here. And nine bot listeners are all I’ve gained.
Want to see what a bot wrote?
They may have deleted this bot-authored promo text but not before I got a screenshot!
This post was brought to you by my patrons on Patreon.
They also bring you the podcast version of the blog.
It’s also called Songs for the Struggling Artist
You can find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are on Spotify, Apple Music, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer, Bandcamp and Amazon Music.
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Filed under: business, Social Media, technology | Tags: business, Facebook, innovation, patreon, Substack, twitter
By the time I signed up with Patreon, I’d had about thirteen years of fundraising experience. Having started a theatre company in 2001, I’d explored all kinds of ways to fund our work. In the beginning, it was just writing letters and asking for help. (Weirdly, still the most successful method.) Then, as the internet became more integrated into our lives, we watched Charity Donor Portals come and go out of business and then crowdfunding kicked in. We ran campaigns on CrowdRise and Indiegogo and probably a few others I’ve already forgotten about. These were all for my non-profit theatre, not for me personally. These were funds which only rarely benefited me in a financial way. But in those days, there was not yet a reliable way to get support for me, as an individual artist.
I could raise funds for projects but not for my ongoing support, not for my writing, for example.
Patreon came along as a way for folks who were making things on the internet to get paid for the things. It was started by a guy in a band having trouble monetizing all those views his band’s videos were getting. So they invented a thing that would pay them for every thing they made – a song a video or whatsoever. It was also a way to create a support system. It meant a monthly dose of support rather than a new round of fundraising every time you wanted to make something. For me, the prime value was a system that I could explain to people who wanted to support me and then just let roll. The main value was that the system collected folks’ credit card details and charged them for me once a month.
In the intervening years, Patreon has shifted and changed in what it thinks it is. It added a membership model to its charge-for-thing model and now the charge-for-thing model is mostly a relic – a relic that I still use and is largely unsupported so I know they see it this way. There are a lot of glitches and I lose patrons all the time because of how complicated fixing a declined card can be. And it may not even be that my grandfathered account is a different model. I’ve heard of many other artists, with newer models, who have also had big payment issues. Whatever is behind the platform curtain, I have only one third of the income than I had last year at this time because of it.
I’ve lost two thirds of my income because of declined credit cards due to expiration dates or over-active fraud protection and Patreon does nothing to help keep this from happening or remedy it when it does. The one thing I need Patreon for is becoming less and less effective. Instead of making what they do more effective, they’re trying to expand and re-brand what they do.
Every few months or so, I get emails about new “products” and ideas and services Patreon is thinking about. I participated in a survey recently where it was clear they were considering rolling out a campaign where they pitched themselves as the place to “Grow your creative business.” They want to provide tools, education and stuff to help “creatives” do their thing. And I gotta say – first – I don’t think of my creative life as “a business.” Do I need support for my creative life? Yes. But it’s not a business. And I don’t need any further education or tips. I’ve taken all the marketing classes I care to. I do not need business tools. What I need is for someone to process my supporters’ payments easily, seamlessly and without too much fuss. I need someone to help my patrons when they run into trouble with that process and that is literally all I need. But in all the changes and fuss around new developments, those things get pushed aside.
I know I’m not a business person but it seems to me that a business would do well to do the business that they do, rather than focus on other stuff they might do. I think they do this to expand growth or something? To have something to say at a board meeting? I guess people don’t like to hear: “We’re doing what we do very well and collecting money as usual.” Boards probably like all the stuff like, “We’re trying THIS new thing.”
I think this particularly happens with these digital platforms since the “product” is so ephemeral. We’ve all seen the way Twitter is falling apart from all these new “products” and “improvements”, (bananas business decisions and leadership aside). I follow many climate activists and action groups, most of whom were at the march in NYC last weekend and Twitter didn’t show me a single tweet from the 75k strong protest. I joined Twitter to be able to see these kinds of news events in action and its current algorithm is hiding them? Twitter isn’t good for what Twitter was for anymore and it seems to get worse every day.
Facebook, too. I signed up for Facebook in 2007 so I could be in touch with my friends. Here in 2023, Facebook generally shows me the same ten posts from the same ten people, over and over again, with an endless scroll of “Suggested for You” posts and ads. I’m lucky when I actually see news from someone I care about. I have over a thousand Facebook friends and Facebook would rather show me Big Bang Theory news – a show I have never watched, followed by a list of my friends who read The Atlantic magazine. I assume it’s trying to get more data on me so it can guess how to sell to me better but….uh, I’m here for the friends? Facebook doesn’t do what it was made to do – what its success is built on.
The drive toward endless growth is likely to kill the original impulse of the company. Patreon doesn’t make supporting an artist (or creator) easy anymore and Facebook doesn’t show you what your friends are posting. These companies are going to “innovate” themselves right out of business.
Eventually other companies will do the things they used to do. I can get Ko-Fi to support monthly payments to me, Substack might pay me for writing and someone is bound to invent a better Facebook soon.
What if the Levi Strauss jeans company was suddenly just not that interested in jeans anymore? What if they were like, “We’re really into sundresses now. Forget jeans. We only want to talk about strappy cotton sundresses. No jeans for any of you.”
I really don’t want to start all over with new platforms but when the old ones start “innovating”, they are usually jumping the shark and even if we don’t close our accounts, we will spend our time elsewhere. Apparently, I still have a MySpace account (maybe I have two?) but I haven’t visited there in over a decade. (I tried to log in just now but I don’t even know what email I was using when I made that account.) I don’t know what MySpace is trying to do in 2023. Did they innovate themselves out of relevance? I don’t remember. I just stopped going there because it didn’t serve my needs. I suspect Facebook and Twitter are both headed that way and I’m worried that the same is going to happen to Patreon. The stakes are higher there because it is significant source of income and support for me – even if it’s only a third of what it used to be – I’d be at a significant loss if it innovated itself out of existence.
This post was brought to you by my patrons on Patreon.
They also bring you the podcast version of the blog.
It’s also called Songs for the Struggling Artist
You can find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are on Spotify, Apple Music, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer, Bandcamp and Amazon Music.
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Filed under: Gen X, technology | Tags: fandoms, Gen X, Internet, Kids News, podcast, stans, youth
At some point in my youth, my school brought in these Kid News Shows that we would watch at the start of the day. Logistically, I don’t know how this was possible as we were still in the AV cart era and there surely weren’t enough TVs for all the classrooms. Maybe it was a weekly experience? I don’t know. But I remember these kid reporters. They always seemed a little absurd to me, like, they were playing reporter and taking it all a little too seriously. It felt a little like dressing up a pet in a costume and then making it read the news. It was kind of cute and also a little off.
I was listening to a podcast recently that brought those Kids News Networks to mind. It’s a podcast about internet culture and is very much not made for me. I listen to it because, sometimes, it can explain internet mysteries I am just too out of the loop to understand. Mr. Beast, West Elm Caleb, BYU Virgins, etc – these are all things I have (sort of) learned about. I like knowing things. I’ve listened to this podcast for a couple of years and this is the first time the Kids News Network came to mind. I think it’s because they have settled on some standard questions for their guests and those questions make it clear that they are not speaking to me or anyone in my generation or older. It’s kids talking to kids, I guess? (Except, of course, they are not kids. They are full grown adults with their own apartments and this podcast is their job.)
The first question that they will henceforth be asking all of their guests is, “What is your first internet memory?” Inevitably, these answers take the interviewee back to their childhood. They begin with things like, “In the third grade, I snuck on my family’s computer…” I don’t know how I, a Gen X-er, would answer this question. I heard a lot about the internet before it became available to me and even then, it was in little bursts. I’d been anticipating email for years before we finally got it at my college for my senior year. I had a scintillating email exchange with a guy at another college that had been set up by a mutual friend. Is that an internet memory? Not really. I got a Hotmail account in the late 90s – which was about all I could manage because I was mostly on the road. I finally got a computer that could connect to the internet in maybe 2000? None of these are like…”oooh, the impact of the internet” kind of memories. I think this is because I was an adult when the internet became a thing I had access to. Maybe others in my generation have better, more fun memories – like those who were into computers and had modems in the early days – but mostly, you’re not going to get good early internet stories out of Gen X.
The second question they ask on the Kids News Network (Sorry. That’s not fair, it’s ICYMI.) is “What was your first fandom?” I am intrigued by this question because of all the assumptions baked into it. It assumes that everyone they speak to will have been a part of a fandom of some kind and not just one, either. I have been thinking about this fandom situation for a while now and wondering about why the generations after us are such…uh…Stans.
I have been fascinated by how unironically the generations after me have loved what they love, for some time. Before I started thinking about fandoms, I had noticed how almost every Millennial had read and loved Harry Potter as a child. It seems absolutely foundational to their whole generation. There is not a book that everyone read when I was a kid. There is not a movie we all saw and there was not a TV show we all watched. There were things a lot of folks saw or read or listened to but we liked what we liked and for the most part we didn’t form our communities around those things. The only fandoms I can think of were Deadheads and Phishheads. For the most part, our communities were local and connected to the people we had access to nearby.
We liked stuff – some of it passionately but we didn’t necessarily group up around things. I’m trying to imagine who I might have been a part of the fandom for – maybe Crowded House? Or Suzanne Vega? Like, I really loved Tori Amos when she emerged on the scene but I never went to a concert and I would have been embarrassed to be as public about my interest in her as I’ve seen Millennials be. We’ve all heard of the power of KPOP fans and Swifties by now. It’s a thing. I loved Duran Duran in my youth but I was not a Duranie and no one I knew would have claimed that status, even if they were crazy for Duran Duran. Fan clubs were a mail order experience and I didn’t know anyone in one. Fandom is absolutely mysterious to me. And I suspect this is because of the internet.
I think the folks at Kids New Network ask what their guests’ first fandom was because that’s the way they formed communities as children. Identities were formed on-line in fan spaces. You found your people in your favorite show’s chat room. (Or something – I literally don’t know!) It’s a very sensible question for people younger than me and it may explain a kind of uniformity of taste that has tended to happen in the last twenty years or so. If you get your community from people all liking the same stuff, it makes sense that there is a kind of value in conformity, in bonding together over a band, for example. In my formative years, no one loved anyone as uniformly as Beyonce is loved by her generation. Madonna was very popular and I loved her too – but she was equally loathed as she was loved. If Millennials decide they love you, get ready because eventually they will all turn up. (Not really, I know but it seems that way from here certainly.) Is Gen Z the same? I don’t know. You’d have to ask the folks on the internet culture podcast, I guess.
I suspect that this fandom arts culture that we have now is entirely driven by how things developed on the internet. It is internet-based love and community. I find it fascinating and also foreign. It’s a curious sensation to feel so outside a conversation, to be able to understand all the words and begin to realize how different our generational realities can be. Hearing about generational commonalities around the internet and fandom makes me feel our differences in a way I don’t often think about. There’s just something about it that makes it feel like I’m learning about a new trend on the Kids News Network.
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Filed under: art, economics, music, Social Media, technology | Tags: Adventurous, algorithms, Elvis Costello, Indigo Girls, International TV, music, Netlfix, playlist, popular, shuffle, songs, spotify, Top Artist, Top Song
At the end of the year, Spotify sends everyone (with an account) a summary of their year on the app/website. They’ll tell you your Top Song and your Top Artist – that is, the stuff you listened to the most. Sometimes it’ll assign you a personality based on this information. One year they told me I was Adventurous because I “listen to non-mainstream artists 100% more than the average Spotify listener”. Aside from the suspect percentage, I liked this personality assignment. I like to be seen as adventurous. (Handily, this year, Spotify told me that the personality of my podcast listeners was The Adventurer, so I guess we all have something in common.)
But I’ve realized that this yearly accounting of my listening habits is only an effect of the algorithm that runs the thing. It’s given me some insight into how a lot of algorithms work and, given how dominated our lives have become by algorithms, how our cultural moment tends to work. I’ll explain.
The last couple of years, I’ve been creating a playlist at the start of the year into which I put all the music I want to make sure I remember to listen to. I called last year’s playlist “New Moment” – probably because I called the playlist the year before “The Moment.” “New Moment,” by the end of 2022, had 42 hours and 30 minutes of music in it. (I was a little overly liberal with the “Add to Playlist” button in 2022.) I generally just hit shuffle and let it make me a randomized radio station full of things I was interested in hearing. The 2022 list began with four Lake Street Dive albums, three Stromae albums and a LOT of bossa nova. It also featured seven Indigo Girls albums because I realized I wasn’t really up to date with their catalogue so I wanted to catch up. Sprinkled around all these albums were single songs I wanted to get to know.
However, even with 42+ hours of music, I noticed that the shuffle function tended to play me the same handful of Indigo Girls songs. I found it odd, though I did appreciate that it got me to learn the lyrics of some of their more recent songs. But I did wonder why this supposedly random shuffle function returned again and again to similar material, especially given how much there was to choose from.
It wasn’t that I had more Indigo Girls on that list with those seven albums. There were nine Elvis Costello albums (for similar reasons) and in my year-end sum-up, he didn’t even make the top five artists. Who was number one? The Indigo Girls, of course. Now, I love the Indigo Girls and have done since I first heard “Closer to Fine” in 1989 but in 2022, I hardly ever purposefully pushed play on their music. (Exception: “Prince of Darkness” because I was learning it for the podcast.) The fact of the matter is, Spotify chose to play me the Indigo Girls over and over, even when I started skipping them, and then Spotify told me they were my #1 Artist in 2022. Did Spotify select them, purposefully, to be my top artist? I doubt it. I suspect the algorithm, which, like most algorithms, privileges popular content, played some Indigo Girls and played it again because it had been played before and before we knew it, these songs were the most popular on my list. Spotify created that popularity, probably out of the algorithm’s formula that continuously weights popularity. Meanwhile there are so many songs that I would like to have heard in this playlist, songs by people who never had a top 100 hit or a top ten album. And those songs that Spotify never played me might never become popular since they weren’t popular in the first place. Spotify is unlikely to be promoting those unpopular songs anywhere else, given how “adventurous” I am. Spotify likes popular music and makes it more popular.
Our social media posts work this way, too. The way to have your post be a hit (be it on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and beyond) is to have it already have a high number of clicks. The way to have more people see your news is to have had people see your news before. Those algorithms weigh previous engagement more heavily than anything else.
I think this makes for an increasingly less interesting world. If we can only see what is popular, we are missing some of the most interesting songs, people or art. It’s how we end up with a highly polarized art world. It’s why there’s no middle class left in music (or art, or theatre, or film, or dance or…). You’re either Taylor Swift or no one. Bands who had hit songs years ago, who get a million listens on Spotify don’t make any real money for those million listens – because to get real money for Spotify, you need at least ten million listens. 300k listens is about $80. And the system encourages the imbalance. I feel fairly confident that if I’d had Taylor Swift on my New Moment playlist, the algorithm, leaning toward its most popular songs, would have quickly made her my number one artist in 2022. These algorithms are actually pretty stupid, even though they seem smart.
For example, Netlfix’s algorithm has worked out that it can get me to watch its International TV programming without much effort. They flash me a group of older women doing heists in Poland and I don’t need to be advertised to twice, no sir. But despite its having figured that out, it’s only ever as smart as the previous show I watched so if I’m watching a Korean romantic comedy, it’ll show me nothing but Korean romantic comedies for a while. I like to switch around to try and confuse it but it never works. And, of course, it’s only showing me the most popular of its offerings, thereby reinforcing its own patterns and hits. I don’t have another way of finding International TV so my viewing is entirely dominated by what Netflix has already found to be popular. It’s essentially self-canceling its unpopular shows by only pushing forward what’s already popular. And the thing is – I’d love to watch some unpopular stuff. I’d love to see something from countries that I don’t know a lot about. I want to see things that are beloved by small handfuls of people – not just the megahits of wealthy nations. But the algorithms aren’t built that way and over and over again, they show us the things that other people like, leaving interesting beautiful things to languish in obscurity. A world of only popular things is very dull and I think a little dangerous. Please, technologists, if you can’t break us out of the popular stuff, can you at least make a setting where we could choose to try less popular stuff? I think it would help tip things back to a more reasonable world. Next year, I want my top artist to be someone none of us has ever heard of before.
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Filed under: technology | Tags: meeting, Resting Bitch Face, Resting Smile Face, smiling, Zoom
The thing about Zoom for me is, I usually end up on the floor crying after the meeting is over. It’s either that or a migraine. I couldn’t tell you exactly why. There are a lot of reasons a human mind might respond negatively to this experience. Could be the cognitive load, the slight asynchrony, constraints on mobility or the many other documented reasons Zoom can be challenging. But all I know is, taking part in any Zoom, be it party, reading, rehearsal or meeting, will result in either sobbing on the floor or lying in the dark with ice on my head. It’s just what happens.
And yet, I realized in a Zoom the other night, to the outside observer, I look like I’m very happy to be there and seem to be an enthusiastic participant. I’m not trying to appear so, I promise you. I don’t know I’m doing it. I think I’m surely revealing my aversion to this activity but then the facilitator will call my name and ask me to speak. I think because I’m smiling.
If there’s anything I hate more than being on a Zoom, it is speaking on a Zoom so I think to myself that I must try not to smile in Zoom meetings any more. But I don’t know if it’s possible. Partly it’s just that I have Resting Smile Face. (This is the opposite of the famous Resting Bitch Face, something I can only dream of achieving.) It’s also that, in a social setting, I fall into a kind of automatic pattern that I might just call The Space Heater. The way I deal with most social situations is to turn up my inner heat. I just kick out warmth. (This is one of the reasons to invite me to your party. I will heat up a corner, for sure.) In person, this is tiring but also very stimulating and rewarding. I genuinely like meeting people and having friendly conversation. But in a Zoom, rather than feeling charming and sociable, I feel clumsy and ill at ease. I look comfortable and happy while I’m kicking out all the heat I have and yet below my friendly exterior, as evidenced by my post-Zoom response, I am clearly treading treacherous water. I don’t feel it while it’s happening. If I did, maybe I could stop it. I think I’m just trying to survive a situation that is extra challenging for my brain and one way that I survive is by turning up the charm or the smile or whatever and then once it’s all over, I find myself weeping on the carpet for no discernible reason.
This last Zoom I was on featured 126 other people, though maybe only half of them had their cameras on. (I had mine on only because, if it had been in person, it might be called a Networking event so I figured I should go the whole way, given that I was required to be there but then my wi-fi kicked me out of the meeting and so I switched off the camera, though I wouldn’t say my experience was any better without it.) The other people I could see didn’t necessarily look like they were having a good time but when they spoke or commented in the chat, they were very enthusiastic and their notes suggested they were enjoying themselves. Maybe all those RBFs were actually having a marvelous time while I LOOKED like I was having a marvelous time but was on my way to the pit of existential despair. Or maybe they were actually miserable and doing a great job convincing everyone they were having the time of their lives in the chat. There were a lot of good actors in the group, I know.
Before Zoom, I was not fully aware of how often I was smiling. It is so much my default, I do not consciously catch how ubiquitous it is. The director of a play I was in years ago had to coach me to stop smiling while playing the cranky villain character. His theory was that I was just so happy to be onstage, I couldn’t not smile. Which might be true. But also – it’s not just onstage, I guess. When I think I’m smiling, I’m actually just turning up the heat – the little smile is just my resting face, I guess.
This explains why the people with the clipboards and the vests are always coming at me saying, “You look friendly.” Because I do. (Doesn’t mean I’m going to stop for you, though.) The thing is – I guess I do look friendly and I suppose I actually AM friendly (unless you’re one of those clipboard people then I’m definitely not). But it doesn’t mean I want to talk on a Zoom, I guess is what the issue is. Do not mistake a resting smile face for a person who is dying to speak on a Zoom. I’d rather just skip ahead to the crying on the carpet portion of the evening. Thank you. And if (God forbid) I should ever be in a position to lead a Zoom, this is a lesson for me, too, to not assume a smile means an extra willingness to speak or participate. The smiler may just be a space heater.
This post was brought to you by my patrons on Patreon.
They also bring you the podcast version of the blog.
It’s also called Songs for the Struggling Artist
You can find the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are on Spotify, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer and iTunes
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Filed under: age, Gen X, technology, TV, writing | Tags: Acting, actor, ageism, Generation X, Logo, mermaid, PDF, Sutton Foster, TV, wood nymph
Because I’d read some interesting criticism/praise of the TV show, Younger, I decided to check it out, despite it NOT being a Spanish TV show. (Truthfully, I have expanded into TV from France, Colombia, Italy, Germany, Brazil and Turkey at this point, so it’s more like: despite it not being an international period drama.) The premise is that a 40-ish year old woman pretends to be 26 so she can get a job in publishing. She’s played by Sutton Foster who is, according to Wikipedia, currently 46 and was not quite 40 when the show started. In other words, Sutton Foster and her character are definitely Gen X.
The show’s premise is basically one big set up for “She’s so old and doesn’t get it!” jokes – with the occasional “These crazy kids today do WHAT crazy stuff?” I know for sure that this show was not made for me. Or any Gen X women, really. It’s a show called Younger for younger people and that’s probably why I didn’t have much interest in it when it came out. But the stuff I read said that it had an interesting take on ageism and feminism so I thought, sure! Somehow I managed to get through a few episodes – weathering the jokes about this character (her name is Liza) not knowing anything about hashtags or how to Tweet. (Twitter, founded by a Gen X man, btw.) But then I watched an episode that made me exclaim, “Get the hell out of here.” While my mouth hung open in astonishment for a while.
Liza (the forty year old pretending to be twenty six) calls up one of her friends from her book club in her previous 40 year old life and Liza tells her she’s going to send her a PDF. And this 40 year old woman from the suburbs in New Jersey (which is not an island with no access to civilization, btw) says “What’s a PDF?” Get the fuck out of here. Actually, I watched this scene again to pull an image for this piece and it turns out she doesn’t actually say “What’s a PDF?” she says, “A what?” So I remembered the subtext, rather than the actual line. But still – it is heavily implied that she does not know what Liza is talking about.
Find me a forty year old woman who has lived in a privileged place in America who does not know what a PDF is. I’ll wait.
It’s going to take you a while.
Good luck.
Like – PDFs have been around for as long as the younger Millennials have been alive. It made me think of this Old 97s song “Longer than You’ve Been Alive.” Come on. “What’s a PDF?””A what?”
It is just such a stupid joke and I can’t understand why the Gen X-ers on the show didn’t speak up about it. It’s like someone asking “What’s an email?”
Like, sure, there are people who don’t know but you’d be hard pressed to find one in our society. It’s just part of the fabric of ANYONE’s life here. Even the folks who don’t have access to a computer or the internet.
“A what?” I do not know how that actor said that line with a straight face! Acting! Obviously. I applaud her, really, because you wanna guess how that actor probably got the text for her audition for that part from her agent? Yes, my friends, she surely got those lines on a PDF. She went in and auditioned for a part where she had to say “A what?” about a PDF, with the assistance of a PDF. Her contract was probably a PDF. Her first copy of the script for the episode once she got the job was probably a PDF. I’m saying this woman did an amazing job pretending she didn’t know what something she uses on a daily basis is. It’s like someone saying “What’s a fork?” It makes sense if it’s coming from a mermaid or an alien from space but for the most part everyone knows what a fork is. So my hat is off to the actor. And honestly, in watching it again, I can see how she’s playing it a little ambiguously, as if she just didn’t hear it, or got distracted. It’s subtle but I bet that’s how she got through it. So kudos to her. But the writers of this show…come on, people. Come on. Were there no Gen X-ers among you? Must be no.
Now – is this important? Not really no. It’s just a dumb ageist joke. But something about it really gets under my skin and I don’t think it’s just how lazy it is – (that good old “old people just don’t understand computers” trope). It might, in part, be the lack of specificity that gets me mad – that 40s means old and old means dumb about tech. But so much of this way of thinking is garbage. The head of the team that invented the PDF is 81 years old. I heard a podcast, recorded via Zoom, in which a 90- something actor talked about looking up his fellow actors on IMDB. I bet he gets his sides on PDFs, too. The old people and computers trope is dumb for everyone but especially for Gen X. Gen X grew up with computers. And not these user-friendly point and click computers either. I learned Logo in school. I spent hours trying to tell a little triangle, called a turtle, where to go. The notion that someone in my generation would be flummoxed by a PDF is just ridiculous. But even if it wasn’t a Gen X suburban mom, if it were a Baby Boomer suburban mom, it would be just as ridiculous. Our world runs on PDFs now. Anyone with access to the internet deals with PDFs on a daily basis – for birth certificates, for medical records, for taxes, for literally every thing you need a document for. It’s a stupid joke – but also an absurd one.
Was there a time in my life that I didn’t know about PDFs? Yes. Before they existed. There was a world where none of us knew what a PDF was because they were not invented. But this show is not a time travel show and does not take place in 1990. And while we’re at it, who are those Gen X suburban moms on TV? Like, I’ve never seen anyone my age like the suburban moms of TV. It’s like a type that only exists in film and TV and somehow remains the same regardless of the people in the roles. Have these women ever existed? Are they just figments of the TV imagination? Like maybe since they’re not really real real people, they live in a world that has no PDFs – so this mythical suburban mom is not so weird. It’s like if a wood nymph asked what a PDF was. We’d have a lot to explain to her. Because she’s from another (fictional) world.
Maybe Middle Aged “Suburban Moms” are like that. When they show up on TV or in news stories, we can just think, “Oh those fictional characters again! Like a mermaid! You never know what they’re going to say!”
Do I know people who live in the suburbs? Sure. Are some of them moms? Yep. But no one is like this weird beige archetype. The Gen X moms I know are more like Pamela Aldon’s character in Better Things. Complicated. Cool. And they sure as hell know what a PDF is.
I’ve been thinking and talking about PDFs for days since I saw this episode of Younger. I know more about PDFs than I ever did before. I got nostalgic about the days when you had to update Adobe Reader seemingly every time you opened a PDF. I watched a very compelling story about the early days of PDFs. I learned some of the history. If someone asks me, “What’s a PDF?” They will not only get an incredulous face but also an earful. But then again, anyone who doesn’t know is probably something like a mermaid and it’s going to take a lot of explaining to get them up to speed. There’s this thing called a computer…
This post was brought to you by my patrons on Patreon.
They also bring you the podcast version of the blog.
It’s also called Songs for the Struggling Artist
You can find the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are on Spotify, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer and iTunes
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Filed under: community, Social Media, technology | Tags: Facebook, Instagram, Internet, Reddit, Social Media, twitter
In the throes of my grief, I thought I’d just go along as normal, just get on the internet, see what’s what. You will be stunned to learn that the internet did not make me feel any better!
Over and over, I turned to the internet and over and over, it did not help. Not Facebook, not Twitter, not Reddit, not Instagram. Shocking, I know.
None of those things could do the heavy lifting of distracting me or providing comfort. Of any kind. I do not know why I turned to them, except that it has become habitual. Also, I guess I don’t have websites I just visit for fun or whatever anymore so the internet is no longer a series of places to check out, but weird social media plazas that I visit regularly.
I don’t really use any of these places in a personal way anymore. Most of them are where I put arts or career news, or occasionally promote the blog or podcasts. When big things happen, am I meant to put out a personal press release on my social media? Should I say something about what had happened? I do nothing personal on Twitter, Reddit or Instagram. But a lot of my personal friends are also my Facebook friends and it’s where they share their news – so it is confusing. Also, I have over a thousand Facebook friends. I did not really want or need a thousand condolences. I thought it might make sense just to skip it. After all, in the first few days after the news of my brother’s death, all I wanted was to just pretend it hadn’t happened so I hung around Facebook, watching all the people go on about their lives as if there hadn’t just been an enormous earthquake in my world.
But then I started to make my way out of the denial stage and into something just as sad but realer. There is something so terribly clarifying about this sort of grief. It was just so clear what did me good and what did not. Hugs, good. Social media, no good. Not bad, necessarily – just not good.
I have thought this before. I’ve known this. And yet these weird tools have somehow become so ubiquitous in my life, I find it hard not to engage with them. Now I have to relearn how to be, not only without my brother – but also, without my old crutches because they are useless in this scenario.
I’ve found it challenging to write anything of substance while riding the roller coaster of grief but managed a little fantastical interlude about saving my brother with a time machine. I was wary about sharing the news of his death on Facebook but I figured that since Facebook typically shows my blogs to only a handful of people, I could probably covertly share the news to a handful or people without too much fanfare. It didn’t really pan out that way, though.
In the past year, when I posted a blog on my personal Facebook page, I got a handful of views, around 2 or 3 on average. When I posted this one, Facebook boosted it up to 331. This led to 50+ comments on the post and almost a hundred likes. I suppose I had a sense that Facebook might be programmed to promote a death post. For a while there, in the past few months, it felt like my feed was exclusively death announcements and ads. I chalked it up to my age and a time in our lives when we tend to lose people. But now I realize that death drives engagement so the algorithm is trained to seek it out even when it’s not obvious. I said nothing about the content of the blog post in my description in the feed but now I realize that the algorithm is likely trained to respond to words in the comments like “loss” and “condolences.”
Is it good to hear from friends in a time like this? Absolutely. But like the stream of Happy Birthdays on one’s special day, the comments do tend to blend together after a while. I found I had to be very deliberate about how I took them in so I didn’t lose the individuality of each person who kindly took the time to comment. Meanwhile, direct messages regardless of the medium did not require such diligence. Texts, emails, even cards in the mail. These things opened up conversation or gave me something to touch and look at instead of feeling like I was fording a river of condolence.
Then Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp all disappeared for a day and the crash and the whistle blowing that proceeded it seems to have prompted many of my Facebook friends to leave the platform. Some are migrating to Instagram (not sure I get that one, it’s the same company) and some are migrating to Twitter and encouraging their friends to join them there. Over on Reddit, everyone gleefully watched this crash and then Reddit went down for a day or two. Despite all the ways none of these platforms make me feel good, this migration does make me think about why Facebook, in particular, has a hold on me. First and foremost, most of my friends are there. I go where my friends are. I moved to NYC because my friends were here and I got on Facebook because my friends were joining. I want to be where my friends are – full stop.
The problem with Twitter is that while some of my friends are there, Twitter never shows them to me. I see endless posts for political analysts and public figures but only once in a blue moon do I see a friend and they rarely see me. And while it was weird as hell to be discussing my brother’s death on Facebook – there was not even a like on my blog post about it on Twitter, where it gets auto-shared, and there’s not even a way to share a blog post on Instagram. It’s all very weird and confusing. Because while the Facebook river of condolence was overwhelming, it was an outpouring of kindness and support in a time when it is needed. It is nothing to sneeze at, even if it’s challenging to take in.
Facebook has squandered so much of its potential by turning a place that used to be cool, full of our friends, into a political cesspool whirling around relentless advertising peppered with people’s saddest moments. Is it any wonder folks are leaving? It’s just not fun to be there anymore. And it used to be. Really! Is it awful? Of course. Are we prepared to do without it? I’m not sure. We need an alternative and I don’t think Twitter is it.
Also – we’ve tanked all the other ways we used to let people know about things. We don’t have everyone’s phone numbers. We don’t have their mailing addresses for our show postcards or life announcements. Facebook has become the town square where we tack up our announcements for passersby and somehow there’s no better way to get out the news. And that doesn’t make me feel good either.
I see, though, in the saddest moments, that there’s really nothing the internet can do. It is clear, again, that it is not the place to go for comfort. That place is actual people, with actual bodies who can actually hug you.
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