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I really liked his thoughts on this. While I understand social media is a powerful form of promotion, its not the be all end all, there is more too it, especially when you do something outside of social media that you are promoting. The part about going for the little applause was great, you get hooked on each tweet, each video, each blog post and its performance in regards to audience reaction, instead of the entire body of work you've created. It has the ability to chop your "art" into micro bits, because it has got to fit inside the constraints of social media. In a way you become your product, it sounds like he stopped being a musician and was selling John Mayer on Twitter, it wasn't about the music anymore. Which is kind of hard to stop doing, because its what the majority of the internet audience wants. Jeri Ellsworth made an interesting statement about the electronics/hacks she creates, the audience likes the simple ones, and don't care much about the much more technical and in depth videos she creates. The audience to some effect seems to be only interested in the short and simple. Which I would imagine, if John Mayer spent all his social media time, talking about music, and music theory, and the kind of things you would think someone would want to know from a talented artist, I doubt he'd have the followers. Where as, if he sticks to the one liners, and small talk, its vastly more popular. As for the mental changes is causes, I fully understand this. I've read a bit about how the human brain changes according to how it is use. And also, when I was still blogging, I noticed an interesting change in myself. I started consuming the world in a "how can I blog this" sort of way. Anything even remotely interesting that happened, instead of me enjoying the life experience, quickly turned to, how can I phrase this on my blog? The short time I was on Twitter, I found I spent more mental capacity, sorting through my thoughts to Twitterize them, than on the actual thoughts. If you're famous for social media, that is great. If your a musician, author, electrical engineer, etc, it has the side effect of changing how you think, and then how you create, if you focus on it too much. |