If Social Media is High School I need a Guidance Counselor

My wife is an introvert and I am a misanthrope so in this age of social media that means she is often AWOL on common forms of communication and I am hostile.

SmartBlog on Social Media has a recent post on 10 tips for social media introverts. This trips off some dissonance for me. I had hopes that social media meant that I didn't need to worry about the pretty people and the nerds might win.

For the love of Kurt Cobain's shot-gun blasted ghost can't we all just enjoy flying our individual freak flags rather than using the creative power of social media to conform?

Here's what they say:

1. Pick your playground. Decide how you want to position yourself on the social media platforms you wish to participate in. Do you want to keep your professional and personal lives separate? Position yourself for where you want to be.
2. Wear the uniform. Stake out your name on various social media platforms. If you have a common name, consider how you will distinguish yourself. How will you brand yourself on social media? Think tag lines, background colors, photographs, videos and links.
3. Realize that you’re not alone. On each platform, find your family and friends for personal interactions and customers and colleagues for business engagement. Reach out to them on these platforms and personalize your communications. This is an easy way to develop a social media tribe and catch up at the same time.
4. Mind your manners. Social media is small talk on a public online platform that has a very long memory. Remember people’s birthdays to show you care. Comment on people’s walls, the social media equivalent of chit-chat. But don’t overshare — even your mother doesn’t want to know everything you’re doing.
5. Learn the lingo. Remember how the cool kids had their own verbal shorthand? So do social media networks such as Twitter. It’s just the social media version of pig Latin. Also, note that some social media platforms allow many-to-many communications in addition to one-to-one and one-to-many.
6. Join extracurricular activities. Like in high school, here’s where the action is. This is the path to joining the in-crowd. Among the places to look are Facebook fan pages, LinkedIn Groups and Twitter Chats. Here, I strongly recommend #UsGuys and #TweetDiner since they’re welcoming to new members.
7. Share your knowledge. Like helping others during study hall, here’s where you can contribute to the community and show what you know. While no one likes a show-off, social media networks have the goal of sharing useful information and entertaining content. For example, provide insights on LinkedIn Questions and Answers, or add your feedback on ratings and review sites like TripAdvisor.
8. Pay it forward. Get over yourself! Social media’s about the community, not you. To this end, help others with targeted information, retweet other people’s more interesting tweets, and comment on other people’s blogs. Also, think about recommending former and current colleagues, staff and bosses on LinkedIn.
9. Be the star of your social media story. Use videos and photographs to build an online version of yourself that’s more engaging and outgoing. Invite others to engage with you and your business.
10. Make a date to get together. Unlike all of the above-mentioned actions that you can do from the comfort of your desk, this means actually getting out from behind your computer and meeting people in real life. Use MeetUp to find other like-minded people and activities that are fun and helpful to your business. Meeting your social media buddies face to face is a great way to strengthen relationships.

In fairness, these seem like good ideas to play nice on the 'net but what if High School was a time where popularity seemed elusive and bred contempt? I guess if you are like me then you will have to wait for the 10 tips for social media misfits.

Twitter Vs. Solitude: Unpopularity as Mental Health

In a recent Rolling Stone interview Bob Dylan quotes Scipio as an explanation in how he so ably has disconnected from the rat race, "I'm never in such good company as when I'm alone." I admire Bob Dylan and Scipio but since I am neither a poetic nor military genius I've struggled to reconcile this truth into personal habit. Yesterday however I realized that the source of my life-long angst has been an unwillingness to accept that sometimes being alone is the only way to ensure good company.

I've pulled my mind apart by concerning myself between false choices of popularity and integrity. I can't blame myself too much. I chose the theatre for my first profession and advertising for my second. Both industries enable people-pleasing as a competitive advantage. I'm just now seeing however that my valuation of popularity as a security towards happiness is a fallacy. I've never been so unhappy as when I agree with the crowd as a means to be agreeable. In short, people pleasing sucks. I feel phony, afraid and unsure.

But, we seem to live in a world where the pursuit of popularity is burning on ample oxygen and to avoid it is to invite the anxiety one feels when ostracized from the herd. Twitter filled air-waves capitalize on tweets as a self-esteem currency where people long to be followed. Yet, I find myself reacting as a reclusive paranoid amidst this socialized narcissism. Mostly because I think that popularity has little to do with insight or intelligence. I was the kid beaten up on the playground due to late onset puberty and an astigmatism that led to coke-bottle lenses in welfare frames. Growing up poor and unattractive creates a longing for and distrust of the popular kids. I see in the twittering twits the same bullet-headed aggression. The instinctive tweeters fail to consider the possibility that tweeting too hard can often contradict their own self importance.

Bob Dylan again, "It's peculiar and unnerving in a way to see so many young people walking around with cellphones and iPods in their ears and wrapped up in media and video-games, it robs them of their self-identity. It's a shame to see them so tuned out to real life. Of course they are free to do that, as if that's got anything to do with freedom. The cost of liberty is high, and young people should understand that before they start spending their life with all those gadgets."

In the battle of Twitter vs. Solitude I'm starting to lean towards the latter. It's happier knowing that the ideas and experiences I hold are intrinsically good because I have the capacity to hold them. For me, socializing them leads too often to the unintended but predictable conclusion towards consensus. Everyone wants to be aware of what everyone else likes to ensure that personally held likes will not create uncomfortable dislike. Like-mindedness masquerades as mindfulness in a culture that values mass-appeal and I'm starting to find it disagreeable.

I don't do this without angst. I want to be the popular kid. I want to be well loved and mediate my personality via the most viable social media but, deep down, I have to listen to the still small voice that responds to the invitation, "You can follow me on Twitter" with, "Why the fuck do I want to do that?"

I'm beginning to see popularity as sugar on my tongue. A tasty rush that has little nourishment.

I'm starting to prefer the uncomfortable but more durable option of becoming a majority of one.

I wonder if doing so will provide the insight to recognize my own idiot wind or the courage to face down an army of elephants.

Facebook Melancholia

FaceBook Melancholia: (DSM III 296.32 2.0) A mood disorder triggered within one who opts into the Facebook community. The mechanism of disease is activated when one realizes the digital immediacy offered by Facebook is inconsistent with the physical/emotional intimacy long-lost friendships once promised. This disorder causes mixed feelings of joy, sadness, regret and gratitude. Clinical trials -have shown that some Facebook-Melancholia-sufferers risk an onset of depression but elevated depressive symptoms associated with Facebook Melancholia are usually resigned to specific ethnicities, most notably the Irish.

I am suffering Facebook Melancholia.

The damn social network triggers off a hell of unintended memories.

Memories are dangerous and lively things, as my friend Paul Luikart noted.  He cites, in his blog, Stephen Hawking's concept Background Radiation, "a kind of radiation that's ever-present out there in the blackness of space . . . left over from the big bang," and what kind of individual background radiation we all have. What kind of memories hang behind the lives we live?

My Facebook Melancholia creates critical exposure to my Background Radiation.

Jason Stamp friended me yesterday. He and I performed Pinocchio together during Christmas Break at MSU in East Lansing, 1989.

How did 20 years happen?

A social network back then was a case of Little Kings shared with friendly theatre freaks.

I try to tell myself that it's just the endless Chicago Winter and the fact that 30 degrees (F) feels like spring but I know it's something else.

How did twenty years happen?

The stubborn Midwest cold that ignores my gripes is the same bitterness Greg Mills and I would grumble about when we woke at 7 AM in the Bush I era to make our Pinnocchio call time at the Fairchild Theatre. We would crunch through the frozen snow towards the basement studio where Greg would play Tony one of the bad kids taken away to become a donkey by Jason Stamp's Coach-master and I played Spruce the Wood-Elf - a conceit invented by John Baldwin our director to allow for Pinocchio's magical growing nose.

We trudged hung-over towards the theatre where 4 shows full of grade-school kids would be waiting. We urged each other on with the promise of hot coffee and donuts. We would grunt like caveman weathering a glacial creep keeping each other's spirits up during the morning walk.

Greg: (Crunch of snow) Coffee.

(Crunch of snow)

(Crunch of snow)

(Crunch of snow)

Me: (Crunch of snow) Donuts.

How did 20 years happen?

I now have 386 friends according to my FaceBook profile and with each new friendship request I feel like Hamlet, Act III in the midst of a digital Denmark muttering, "To friend or not to friend . . ."?

The status updates create the most longing (coincidentally Jason is going to get his wife donuts). Self-pity and regret creep in and I'm alone on this social media parapet Booth-like wrestling the Dane's mortal coil.

Arthur Schopenhauer simplified Hamlet's soliloquy as our state of being, " . . . so wretched that complete non-existence would be decidedly preferable," yet, "there is something in us, however, which tells us that this is not so, that this is not the end of things."

I meet old friends up close in posted photos and 25 random things and the knowledge of what once was tightens with my memories of what I imagined would be.

There is a lyric by Paul Westerberg on his Mono disc in a song called 2 days 'til tomorrow that reads, "From a distance you look peaceful and so far away up close . . ." Westerberg wrote that tune among others after a 5 year silence and a nervous break-down. He was making good from the bad left over when his major label record contract and promises of being the next big thing flamed out. He put it together in his basement alone probably in the middle of a Minnesota Winter not unlike the Dante hell of a Chicago January.

I've brought Westerberg's sense of intimacy to my relationships. I credit this lesson to my Pop. The Old Man would wax stoic over Altes Golden Lager (Fassbier) when things got a little hot between him and my Mom. When the Old Lady needed transparency to quiet her anxiety and avoid the blackness of rejection, Pop would meet her confusion with a cigarette-choked mumble, "You figger it out."

I never thought I'd miss the people I left behind but I do. I hear my Pop's choked laugh, "You figger it out."

Facebook contains a dangerous amount of background radiation. Mary V posted party pics from 1993 and at once I realized that the "grunge era" was an era (and it is gone). I noticed the page-boy Eddie Vedder bob on Rob and wondered if his colleagues at Bell & Ross now would forgive him such an "Evenflow" doo.

This stuff has a half-life. There's Danny my theatre company partner and my favorite actor (now in California); Kate in full riot grrrl dress (now back in Detroit); Keegan (famous now impersonating President Obama on MadTV); and Randy (gone to the next life God bless him).

The boys' sin in Pinocchio was to stay young forever in the land of play. Boys who strive after the land of play become donkeys. To crave youth makes one a jackass.

I was a jackass back in that time with these friends. I would play a head-game and measure myself against my favorite men's defining age. I didn't do this to set goals but instead did it in the hopes of slowing time through nervous rationalization in the hopes of telling myself I could yet be somebody, someday.

At 22 I told myself that Dustin Hoffman was 30 when the Graduate was made, and at 30 I told myself Raymond Carver was 40 when he finally was published, and when I woke unemployed at 40 this year I told myself Shaw was nearly 70 when he landed his Nobel Prize.

I try to buy time like this and I realize I am just an ass.

How did twenty years happen?

Facebook Melancholia is no fun. I miss my friends.

Being up close so far away is not that peaceful.