With no small degree of alarm, I noted that I had failed to write on my blog since 2nd January. Having been told by social media experts that it’s vital to blog often (daily if you can) I’ve nurtured a nagging fear for a few weeks now that my brand will have suffered… my online presence immeasurably lessened… my career blighted… my time on earth wasted. O, prodigal me!
When I could be bothered and was much more exercised by boarding the social media train, I had anticipated this, and with due neurotic forethought was wise enough to set up numerous strategic feeds onto my various twitter accounts so that I wouldn’t even have to seek out the latest pearls of wisdom for eternal on-line presence and brand equity; why, they’d come right to my iPhone.
Well, the black dog being what it is, I worked myself into a frenzy of not giving a proverbial, and hence my online coma. Deep down, I knew I had the damage–limitation in hand because none of my search processes, auto-alerts or RSS feeds actually showed any sign of national mourning or even mild community alarm that I had disappeared – like Jeremy Spencer vapourizing from Fleetwood Mac’s honeyed breast, practically in the arrivals hall at LAX and joining the Children of God.
It’s been a healing and humbling process, I can tell you. Not a soul could be found to care one way or the other about my doing a Reggie Perrin with my online brand. But more tellingly, I assuaged any feelings of guilt by offering in mitigation to my conscience that I found myself without anything to say! My cardinal sin was allowing that fact to prevent my saying anything.
Have a thought, Baldrick. Thinking is so important
“The average company on Twitter is looking to be something more than a content pumping machine”, quoth our voice-of-authority. In isolating an admirable corporate social goal of being a happy (…content…) device (…pumping machine…) for displacing liquid or sludge from one place to another, the Grail of digital dominance that has so long eluded me and countless others of my old-school-writing-of-comprehensible-journalism-and-opinion-for-the-masses way of thinking was delivered to me: social media’s raison d’être is to peddle shit. Eureka!
I can substantiate this…
My tradecraft is founded on basic knowledge of, and respect for, English usage. Whether or not the author in question in this case intended to write “…content-pumping machine…” or not is unclear. The point is, she didn’t. And with the modern day-deluge of information, the reader will have moved on – either disillusioned, misinformed or both.
I subscribe to several freelance websites – People Per Hour and Elance among them – and daily (or hourly if I can be bothered) jobs are posted like this: Wanted… world class journalists with by-lined portfolios to contribute seminal content for my website… $2 per 500 words; Need 9 articles for blog series on ****************, wide experience and knowledge required… $30; Long-term writers needed… diversified subjects.. tight deadlines… perfect English… outstanding communications skills… $1.5 per 500 words… The examples are legion.
And while the absurdity of these people’s expectations is plain to any sensible producer and consumer of valid writing, nearly all of these posted jobs attract a string of aspirant Pulitzer-candidates willing to turn cheap tricks for coins down the filthy back-alleys of the web. Invariably too, they’re in the ‘developing world’, so not only does it devalue educated, considered or meritorious writing, it will spawn new generations of writing business –transactors who deal in dime store-journalism, literature and opinion. And ultimately, the output isn’t intended to illuminate – or even be understood by – men, women and children, but by search algorithms. The market for crap is voracious; the brokers are indefatigable in sourcing it; the crap-creator/sellers are ready, willing and accessible.
And so, here are some more pointers to assist you in your dissection of the smelly cadaver that is social media hubris:
– The vocation to write well is supplanted by the rush to churn out (poor) content – and in volume
– The reference library-space of the web has become a platform for the egos of less-than-mediocre bloggers
– The information pulp-mass leaves audiences with ever-decreasing time to mine / evaluate true information
– The rise in 3rd world-writers WILL devolve English into a stunted, sclerotic miscarriage of the mother-tongue
– Gifted writers, journalists etc. WILL desert the profession out of need to pay the mortgage
– The Arts & Humanities that bequeathed logic, poetry, classical argument, discourse WILL succumb to the inevitability of automation & process, and be rendered down to the binary basics by the new class of Po-faced, joyless, mediocre and parsimonious pumping machines (mightily content they will be too).
Walking through this proposition to its longer-term conclusions, one can see future generations, not just of people bereft of the inclination towards original thought, creativity or creating new literature, but also of politicians, leaders, teachers and artists who are no longer capable of thought, innovation, passion or joy.
The science of SEO and the dark machinations of Google+ and their ilk is clever stuff. And in a context of greater humanity will more than likely be the shape of things to come. But what must trouble us all is the question of how able humans are to ride the beast. Is it akin to giving whisky to the Indians – sorry, Native Americans? And will the effects be as cataclysmic?
In my pre- pre- prequel Star Wars-like vision I was pleased to see a kind of intergalactic force for good; like The Empire before it went bad. And The Empire was charged with keeping peace and decency safe, and one of its mightiest sanctions was the granting of blogger licences. Among the qualifying criteria were the proven capacity to be legal, decent, honest and truthful (ring a bell?); the sentience to transact written product for reasonable money; the ability – if not the desire – to resist authoring and endorsing nonsense; and ideally the instinct to shun making claims like having a ‘passion’ for writing and/or social media that is in reality a tendency toward the sociopathic.
Talk / words are cheap, so the saying goes, but they’re actually becoming worthless. Another saying goes actions speak louder than words… Well, our action on this subject has already become inertia. And we’re sleepwalking into a realm of automated art and processed emotion.
In the final analysis, the ultimate optimist in me clings to the conviction that if the desire does indeed exist to be more than a content-pumping machine in the context of social media etiquette, then the only question one MUST ask oneself before posting anything must surely be… what? There’s a clue in the image. Perhaps you think differently.
Let’s be hearing from you.
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