I'm now wired into every one of the most popular (read: common) online social-networking/self-promotion/nonsense-posting-place thingamabob that a person can sign up for.
1) Blogger - This is now starting to be an obsession for me. I'm really wracking my brain for interesting things to note and write about life. A friend of mine (Laura Scott Wade) wrote me (on Facebook) telling me how great it was to see me blogging. That she tried to do it everyday, with varying degrees of success. That got me to try this everyday thing myself. We'll see how long it lasts, I'm really gonna try for it. Once the baby comes, it could go either way. Either I'll be posting more, or not at all.
2) Facebook - I can't live without this thing. All my friends in one place. When I'm mass notifying people, this is my go-to, and I have to keep a separate list of non-Facebook people so they're not left out of the loop. I've read some things about the evils of Facebook. Anything that is THAT powerful, that you're THAT dependent upon, that people who don't use it are almost ostracized, should not be in existence. That it's own popularity is its downfall. Seems counterintuitive to me, and like I said, all my friends in one place. It's better than email!
3) Twitter - I'm still getting the hang of this thing. I'm not really "getting" it. Maybe I'm not the right guy for it. I'm following very clever people with poignant things to say in 140 characters or less. And I'm really just using it as a status update like Facebook. In fact, I have it so that every tweet updates my Facebook status. It's fun looking at others' tweets, but I'm not really feeling myself contributing effectively and creatively.
4) My Website - This is a place for self love. Nothing else. Nobody goes here. Why would they?! There's just something about this that makes me feel like I've accomplished something in my life. I can't just have regular-old inner self-satisfaction. No, I gotta put it all down in a website and have it be searchable on Google. I'm not promoting anything, I'm not looking for work, I'm not selling a product. I just thought I should have a website. I think it's pretty.
5) YouTube - A sudden burst of inspiration a few months ago with the lipsyncing series, and all of a sudden, YouTube has gotten back on my radar. The weirdest thing about YouTube and the syncing thing is that some of them got onto a German blog site and became something of a mini phenomenon. I got thousands of hits literally overnight. I felt like the David Hasselhoff of lipsyncing for two days.
6) Flickr - I just restarted this after downloading the new app for the iPhone (more on that below). I'm still not sure when to put pictures here and when to put them on Facebook. Do I post them in both places?
7) I've tried other, not-so-common places like SoulPancake, the Cirque Tribune, ukulele forums, etc. Maybe I should give these places a better college try. I think these off-the-beaten-path places are more focused and niched and could actually shape myself as a person and as a performer more effectively. I can still swim in the public pools, but the water in these other places may have less urine in it.
I'm plugged into all these places, admittedly, only because I think I should be. It hasn't really sunk in as wholly satisfying or an important part of my existence. And the iPhone makes the immediacy of all these elements that much more strong. The iPhone may be the one thing that wrangles all six of these online places together, more so even than my laptop.
And as I've stated before in this blog, maybe I'm just doing this for my son-to-be. Maybe he can look to these postings, status updates, videos, pictures, and tweets and piece together some sort of inner wisdom (or purposeful lack thereof) that he can't get from me one-on-one. Or maybe he can eventually pick up where I leave off and contribute to some vast, electronic Slonina stream of consciousness. Or not.
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