Learning to Live

First there was 360. I remember so many nights when friends and family from different locales would gather to read, comment, laugh, cry and share life in general across the WWW. We were all learning about virtual family and friends. It was used; it was misused. It was us being us, naughty or nice.

I was a writer by nature. Poetry, prose, proselytizing, testifying, you name it. If it had letters to words to sentences to ideas, I loved to do it whether I was good or not. I found a venue for my script in 360. “My space” was also a popular social venue, but it was too edgy and problematic for my tastes. Obviously many others agreed and 360 was filled with opinionated but reasoning, intelligent and creative human beings from across ideology and space.

I love to compose photographs. With a journalistic background of many forms, I found myself posting photographs regularly which attached me to other photographers, both professionals and hobbyists. There were forums and contests and journals. Some of the photography came with writing; some came as is. Some was stunning, purist revelation of life with its pros and cons. Some was contrived and silly, nouveau, cliché, photoshopped. We were all discovering and we put up with other, pretty much, regardless of our bent.

There were art communities. I posted my art and began a website for my studio that I connected to my page. It was a refining, revealing association. I was stuck in reality, but I was learning to live vicariously. I was learning about virtual relationships. I was learning to love virtually and vicariously. What an awesome, stretching time of discovery. One professor in a developing nation actually got people physically together on neutral soil. How I wished I had known and gone!

But 360 became commercial. It left us and then it died. We were devastated. In the waning days we discussed where we would go. It was like the pogroms of northern Europe. We contacted our people, we packed our bags and like the people of Anatevka, we met, blessed each other and sadly, unwillingly, drug our behinds to other social endeavors.

Most of us landed at an up and coming venue called Multiply. Familiar faces on the avatars, room for old habits and associations quickly made us feel this -though different in landscape- was not such a bad home. It held promise. We learned, we adapted and we accepted our new virtual life. We had virtual word and photo contests, we shared artwork and collaborated on creative ventures. We fought, supported, chose sides or not. We had a virtual international art gallery started by a man who was a retired Forest Ranger and had developed a business from his photographic hobby.

And we spent hours learning about each other, laughing, dreaming, sharing. We'd truly found a new home. And then we got the word: Multiply was going to become an online business site and would no longer support social pages. Again?!

The new kid on the block was Facebook. Though most of us would end up there, most of us realized it would not have the depth of creativity and thought that we had pretty much cultivated as a group in 360 and Multiply. Many of us would diversify our social interaction. We searched out creative venues communicated where we were going and left less sad than aggrivated this time. There would be no cohesive mass migration as there was to Multiply. People were shot off in various directions to find a new home and a few followers for their serious social interaction.

Over time those who did reconnect at Facebook would accept its shallow application of virtual friendship. It grew larger, more diverse but less intimate and connected than the old abode. Those who wanted to share their creative efforts did so, however, we were living minute to minute in our own individual world. Yet there was interaction and people could hope it would develop into some layer of depth.

Enter the like button with it's diversification and a huge push to make that an all inclusive interaction tool. Enter commercial pages that moved huge chunks of advertising from the sidebar to the center. Enter emojis, memes and gifs to take the place of well thought out comments and compositions.

As I think of it, I remember my short foray into professional journalism. I was working for a local news paper as a photographer and copy writer when a huge push for holiday ad production was announced. It was never my intent to become an advertiser, I had worked in ad production and didn't like the bulk of it even though I understood the money it generated. Dutifully I took my prescribed stack of oversold adds and got busy.

After the holiday, I returned to shortened field hours and a stack of advertisements to produce. I paid a less than happy visit to my supervisor and ended up with the guy ultimately in charge. He looked me in the eye somewhat sympathetically and said, “You're a talented writer and a good photographer, but that's not what keeps the paper afloat. These clients want you to do their adds and they pay our salary, if you get my drift. If you can keep your ads done, we'll try to give you more field work.”

Shortly after that conversation the paper was bought by a media group. Things changed even more, and they offered to keep me on in ad staff. I ended up moving out on my own, doing freelance photography and eventually going back to college to get a degree in art education which totally redirected my career. I don't regret that in the least, but I always will remember those words with a degree of sadness and loss of innocence.

I know the social media meets a creative need, an interactive need, but that's not really what drives it. It doesn't pay anyone's salary and that's what we have become. Someone wants to become rich, someone has to pay the bills.

Sadly, I find these days that my heart is distancing from the 'social media' scene. I want to write, I want to be read and I guess I'll always search for a place to do that. I look in to see what my family and friends are about because I do care and they are mostly physically distant, but the cryptic nature of memes and electronic substitutes for response doesn't really give me much information about or interaction with family. I fear that social interaction can't really survive, even if 'social' sites do, because we have resorted to letting someone else speak for us, feel for us, be real for us.

It leaves us introspective instead of interactive, divided instead of diversified, skeptical instead of knowledgeable. Mostly it wastes our time and isolates us. For now it's what we've got. I guess we shall have to learn once more to live in our own little world the way we did before social media connected, expanded, contracted and distracted us.