Just Tweet NO!

I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts on my power walk today, and the guest host in the latter half of the show brought up an interesting concept that was only preferably related to the show’s topic.  Specifically the guest host does nothing with social media.. No twitter, no facebook groups, no personal blogging.

The guest host went by the name of Jason Mantzoukas, a somewhat popular stage and screen personality.  This of course flies in the face of traditional belief systems that personalities, what is in effect human brands, absolutely needing to have a social media presence to be successful. The theory is is that you have to build up a community to promote your work.  A belief that I have subscribed to and implement vis-à-vis this very blog.

Fortunately my power walks tend to be a little bit longer and that has allowed me some time to reflect on the impact, or lack of impact, for Jason of not maintaining an active social media presence. I have concluded that there is some value in what he’s doing, or not doing as the case may be.  The  value directly relates to the modern implementation and benefits of technology. Technology at it’s purest form is an accelerator which ultimately leads to the fact that social media accelerates the development and direction of our work. In my case the work is writing but it could be anything, it could be the work that you do in your professional job, it could be work that you do with a hobby like painting.  It could be work that you do in creating a film or music that you put on soundcloud.  Your community will provide input and it will change the direction of your creativity if you engage your community. It’s the very same concept used by Anthropologist who argue that just by studying a culture you impact the culture.  

What of course gets lost in all of this is the slow burn in self-discovery. There are simply  some things that take time to develop organically in any creative endeavor.     By not having a social media impact or conversation there is a greater chance that you will have the time to reflect and change your work based upon multiple inputs as opposed to just the feedback from the cloud.  Ironically this is a theme in my thinking that started with my visit to the NC Writers  Network  meeting.

I think there is value in this concept of stepping away from social media and slowing down the feedback loop.  I thought that there was so much value in it that the first thing I did was run home and write a blog post about it to share with my community.

Hmmmmm, now that I think about it, maybe I need to reflect on this post a little bit more?