Social Media Has Officially Landed. Now What?

It’s been coming to this — real-time Facebook-and-Twitter livin’ – for as long as anyone can remember.  We’ve dreamed of a world where we can touch base with anyone we know instantly, effortlessly.  And now we have it.

Isolation as a concept is now about as relevant as an REO Speedwagon album.

Feeling happy?  Let everyone know.  Feeling down?  Same.  Weave your existential minutiae into a tapestry of approachability.  It’s fundamentally human.  And humans dig it.

Clinical causes aside, is there really any excuse anymore for loneliness?

The “elitist” cultural order — the one that presumed differences in, say, the quality of novels or pieces of art — is history.  In its place is a let-your-hair-down hoedown, the most egalitarian forum ever devised.  It is inclusive and uncritical.  And it is having an unapologetically hilarious time.

Tweet.

www.twitter.com/wampusmm

Social Media Abhors a Vacuum

Artists, time to get a little sun.  Draw a breath of fresh air.  Wear a jacket and use sunscreen, but open yourself to the elements.  Social networks on the Internet — now a greater draw than porn — are where the audience lives.  These denizens do not wait to be told what to like or who to listen to.  They decide.  And they are accessible.

There is nothing more quaint than magazines or TV.  Somebody crafts a message, packages it, and distributes it — and we simply receive it.  Without responding.  Without engaging the source of the message in a conversation.

It’s so 20th century.

The tools of social media are maybe the most egalitarian ever devised.  They are expanding social circles, challenging perspectives.  They are changing the nature of relationships.

The role of the artist is to communicate, to inform, and sometimes to amuse.  As it turns out, those go better with friends than with strangers.

You care about your friends.  They care about you.  Maybe you have something for them today.