What’s up with Social Media?

Social media?

Many of my posts so far have hinted at a phe­nom­e­non that has  increased pace of change in the world lead­ing many to won­der often doubt­fully about it’s role in day to day life. Much of the doubt comes from those who are mys­ti­fied by tech­nol­ogy and can’t imag­ine how tech­nol­ogy can help them.  Since the phe­nom­e­non I am talk­ing about is tech­nol­ogy based  but it is and will effect the way we live our lives far more than we can imag­ine now. Tech­nol­ogy and specif­i­cally the web has been seen in the not to dis­tant past as an iso­lat­ing influ­ence on our cul­ture, caus­ing us to lose touch with the world around us as our inti­mate cir­cle of friends shrinks. There have been fears of a grow­ing social alien­ation espe­cially in the iGen­er­a­tion as we have tried to under­stand the mean­ing of Face­book, MySpace etc. Not even a year ago I really didn’t see the point of Face­book but that has changed.

Start­ing to converse

Of course the phe­nom­e­non I am talk­ing about is Social Media. A recent arti­cle in the NY Times by Clive Thomp­son  dis­closes the true nature and value of Social Media both to our rela­tion­ships and to our busi­nesses. It also hints at the role it can play in cre­at­ing community…something we col­lec­tively seem to be long­ing for. Joseph Jaffe in his book Join the Con­ver­sa­tion talks about the changes in the mar­ket­ing world that are occur­ing as the result of Social Media/networking espe­cially as it has has­tened the demise of adver­tis­ing as we used to know it an event which has long been over due.

Iso­la­tion moves to connection

Before I go into how all this should con­cern us as artists let me con­tinue with the thread brought up by Thompson’s arti­cle and Jaffe’s book by brin­ing in another player t he guy who pretty much star ted it all, Mark Zucker­berg the col­lege stu­dent behind Face­book. You see a cou­ple of years after he launched it he real­ized it’s major prob­lem was the time it required for users to stay up to date with their friends…so he set out to fix it. Overnight, he set up what has come to be called the news feed that works very much like RSS sub­scrip­tions per­mit­ting friends to basi­cally “sub­scribe” to each other’s updates. The next morn­ing saw a  major revolt when users began log­ging on to their Face­book pages. They flooded Zucker­berg with e-mails want­ing the old sys­tem back. But Zucker­berg knew his audi­ence well within a cou­ple of days every­one was happy. The pri­mary point of con­tention was much the same as today when non– social media users as”why would I want to know every time Joe eats a sand­wich and what kind he is eat­ing?”  or “why should I care if he broke up with his lat­est girl­friend?” Well it turns out  that they ulti­mately did want to know those tid­bits and they found that know­ing them cre­ated a dif­fer­ent level of know­ing their friends…kind of like hav­ing them in the same room.

Ambi­ent inti­macy at work

Ambi­ent Intimacy

What they were expe­ri­enc­ing was some­thing social sci­en­tists have called ” ambi­ent inti­macy” it is in essence sim­i­lar to the feel­ing of close­ness we have when we sit across the room from some­one and watch their quirky mum­blings, or ges­tures. Indi­vid­u­ally such actions have lit­tle mean­ing but lumped together over time they start adding up to a descrip­tion of the person’s mood, their inner work­ings. If you are an unabashed peo­ple watcher you know what I mean! Friends found them­selves much closer when they met because the time dis­tance had shrunk, they were able to con­verse as if they had just seen each other…in short they knew more about what was occur­ring in each other lives and how it effected them.

Facebook,Twitter and the tools for conversation

Face­book is no longer the only game in town, last year Twit­ter broke the sur­face fol­lowed closely by Friend feed. Both of these ser­vices offered one thing, a way to stay in touch a way to be closer to each other yet remain far away. Both ser­vices are what has become know as “micro-blogs” lim­ited by the amount of text that can be writ­ten they have become a way for peo­ple in a par­tic­u­lar cir­cle to stay in touch and more impor­tantly to widen that cir­cle or have dif­fer­ent cir­cles for dif­fer­ent lev­els of acquaintance.

So last year when I found out about Twit­ter I joined but really didn’t get it until the last few months. Cou­pled with my Face­book tool­bar for Fire­fox I now get reg­u­lar lit­tle blurbs that pop up on the bot­tom of my screen when­ever one of the peo­ple I am con­nected with has some­thing to say. That very action has allowed me to get to know what used to be pretty close to com­plete strangers. As a result, I have sev­eral poten­tial part­ners for work­shops or sem­i­nars each hav­ing a strong skill I am lack­ing in. I hinted above about com­mu­ni­ties, again this is one of the things social sci­en­tists have found occur­ing more and more as a result of stay­ing con­nected with each other. And these com­mu­ni­ties are no longer lim­ited by geog­ra­phy. Fam­i­lies like mine that are spread across the globe can stay con­nected and in each oth­ers lives much bet­ter than an hour phone call every cou­ple of months.

Artists Twit­ter?

So…how does this help us as artists? Well, in a nut­shell it pro­vides us with tools we didn’t have avail­able even as recent as a year ago. Fur­ther­more, it has along with Tivo has played a major role in the demise of tra­di­tional adver­tis­ing. It has essen­tially changed the way we can help our clients and patrons by giv­ing us the means to develop and main­tain con­ver­sa­tions that are based on a many-to-many model instead of a one –to-many model. It has empow­ered our clients and patrons to con­verse with us and us with them around what we offer and how we deliver it, it allows us to focus more on them and them  on us. As a result, artists can develop net­works of clients/patrons every­where they go and they can stay in each oth­ers minds so when an artist trav­els to an art fair their local fol­lows know to show up and also know what trea­sures await them.

For the fear­ful these tools are a threat because they nag at their self esteem, bring­ing judg­men­tal demons, but they also remind us that our suc­cess ulti­mately depends on us and our abil­ity to adapt and grow. An exam­ple of the strength of these net­works hap­pened to me last week some­one on my Twit­ter feed saw one of my posts and com­mented on it…the world is indeed chang­ing as it shrinks the rev­o­lu­tion is here and we are it!

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