One Way Vs. Two Way
The beauty and the power of social media is the ability to be social. To interact. To have a conversation.
In the old days, you made something and you sent it out to the world and you wished it well and Godspeed, little one. And you never knew or maybe didn’t want to know how it all worked out.
Media was one way. Force fed. You eat what we tell you to eat. Or you don’t.
But this one way dynamic did more than shape distribution channels. It shaped a mentality. It told artists that the job was getting you, out there in the world, to pay attention. To listen up, Goddamit. The job was speak loudly and say something interesting but don’t worry so much about listening. You were looking for receptors not transmitters.
Artists sought and seek fans. And of course I do as well. People to pay some attention. But its more than that now. Because the beauty of all these tools like Facebook, Twitter, blogs (and really comments on blogs), is that its more than just a one way thing. At least it should be more than one way. It can be. There’s now an ability, on a broad scale, to connect and communicate with fans and treat them like, dare I say it, people. To interact. To conversate. Know what I mean?
Look at the way John Mayer uses Twitter. Listen, I’m not the biggest fan of the guys music, although I do think he’s got some chops. But he doesn’t treat his “status” as some uni-directional stream of force fed pre-digested marketing speak. It’s actually him. And he responds. He writes back. He is involved in the conversation. This feels authentic. It feels like there’s an interaction happening that wasn’t possible before. A two way thing that erodes the distance and distinction between a “speaker” and the “listener”.
Some might say the true meaning of life is the ability to make real human connections and that is the real power of social media – the ability to scale that connection in a digital context. (Ed note: insert gratuitous comment from old media elite snarking “what happened to just having a cup of coffee with someone”. Yes. Gratuitous.)
And so in that sense, this two way interaction is part of the mystery behind all of our fascination with the Internet and with all of these tools. Not just the power to speak at a lot of people cheaply, but the power to speak with a lot of people cheaply.
So when you see an artist using the tools just to broadcast that one way steam of pre-digested gobbledy-gook, don’t you feel like they missed the point somehow? I suppose the counter-argument is that they’re focused on doing the thing they do – writing songs, painting canvasses, writing books – not necessarily managing this bogus online community.
But I suppose I just like the possibility that all of these things represent. I dig the interaction. The conversation. The back and forth. Comments. Re-tweeting. Not just calls. But responses too.
Don’t just talk at me, bros. Talk with me. Its more fun that way.
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