I'm not a genius at using social media! In fact I was completely bored with Facebook and did not understand why being "liked" on Facebook meant anything to anyone. To me, "everyone", and "everything they do", is much more nuanced and complex than what is reflected in a thumbs-up or thumbs-down icon click-count or friend tally. All I could think of was the Roman gladiators getting the signal.... not a pleasant thought. I find more value in one face-to-face conversation than in a months' worth of Facebook postings.
In fact, I deactivated my Facebook account the day before the big IPO for principled reasons: I didn't think my personal information needed to be bought and sold for the advertising feeding frenzy that is expected to unfold as Facebook attempts to monetize their grossly overvalued IPO. I don't mind seeing billionaires created from idealized investment scenarios, but where is the value to the people who are supplying all of the free analytic data about what they "like" or "don't like". Have we all been reduced to this one-dimensional level of intellectual assessment? Are we sure this data is even accurate or relevant?
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| bye bye pot-o-gold.... |
All those virtual friends did not seem to be doing anything interesting on Facebook, but on blogs, there seems to be a lot of interesting "collecting" of data, photography harvesting/cataloging, and sometimes some good opinion-making. Some blogs share good original writing, original graphics-arts, tips-and-tricks, etc. In other words, there is real content. Sometimes you can find personalized and intellectually sincere contributions in blogs; so I'm sticking with blogs for now to get my curiosity fix.
Then there is Twitter. I do have a Twitter account @kpaul99, but I have no idea how to express myself correctly in 140 characters. All I hear about is the people that get in trouble for saying stupid things or sending stupid images. I see the little Twitter widgets in the bottom or side of a web-page, but I don't see anything more than people sending a Tweet to their followers to look at the web page.... huh? I thought that was what Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc., was for. I don't need people to notify me what to read, especially content on the web. Tweet that!
OK, I'll concede that a couple of days ago I did find some information via Twitter by searching for the word "violin". This gave me a list of Tweets from some well-known violinists and self-promoted artists that exposed me to some interesting people that I had not heard of before. That search also led to me start to follow some of these violinists and artists. This led me to learn about Mark O'Conner's announcement for his violin method publications, and interesting artists like Zoe Keating, who does cello "looping and layering" performances (she supposedly also has 1.3M Twitter followers, and people buy her albums as a result).
Maybe I need to get "with-the-program" and Tweet: "Please collaborate with me online!" everyday, and then beg people to follow me on Twitter until they say yes. Why? Because so far the online music collaboration thing is not working out as well as I had hoped and dreamed, even though I am passionate about the possibilities of sharing original music composition and music production efforts via the web.
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| Indaba Music |
I've tried to use Indaba Music for the last two and one-half years to find musicians to collaborate with, but I don't want to be the "project manager" and drive the recording project, and/or beg other people to record with me. I just want to jump into a group of people that will put equal effort into a project and share a common vision about the music they want to produce. I want to be invited to a project based on my existing output available on the web for everyone to hear. I know this is a lot to expect, because in the real world, we have to self-promote every day to get access to the portals of success, or get someone's attention who may be already distracted by everyone else (on Facebook).
Now I am not discounting the finished projects that I have been involved in on Indaba (we did publish two albums on iTunes), but after our "project leader" got back to his real-job photography projects, the group activity dwindled and finally halted. While we had a strong project-leader, we seemed to have some success. The lesson here is that online collaboration takes a strong leader to bring other people into activity, and just like the face-to-face world, the work does not get done without very dedicated and inspired people. Of course paying people up-front for their output will get production going faster...(Thank you record-companies for at least doing this for some people; some musicians are living the dream).
Indaba Music is fantastic for people who want to join "remixing" contests they offer, but if you just want to jump into an awesome collaborating group for a recording project, it will take a lot of persuasion, patience, and persistence to get something going. I don't have that much steam at the end of the day.
I still believe that online collaboration is great for musicians who have a day-job and can only afford part-time investments in their music. I believe that record companies should audition and hire more "studio musicians" via online submission sites, as there are many musicians who can record their individual tracks in their own home studios, and submit for mixing elsewhere. I'm sure this is already being done with full-timers, but what about the part-timers?
I really do admire the people who can successfully "socialize" and make connections via the web, but for me, the reality has not met the expectation. My expectation has been that I could find musicians who have their own steam and shared vision to create music via online collaboration. I'm still looking for these collaborators, and hopefully someone will read this and send me an email, a Tweet, or something else.... You don't even need to "like" me on Facebook; just collaborate with me. Thank you.
P.S. Somebody will dig this out of the Google archives someday and laugh at the naivety. Until then, you can buy my 2012 album on iTunes. Since this is blogspot, we can still "socialize" on Google+.
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| Don't be... |
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