Sometimes the best way to learn something is to dive in headfirst and see where it leads you. I guess you could call it immersive learning. This was the approach I initially took with social media.
I started on MySpace first...back when people used to actually use it as a social media platform. To me, it seemed like a more modern AOL. Every service it provided could be found elsewhere, and in a much better platform. The only real thing I noticed is that a few ex-girlfriends contacted me for the obligatory "Oh my gawd, I was thinking of you and wondered how your life turned out" conversation. We would exchange four or five messages, and then I would never hear back from her. I wasn't sure what the promise of social media was supposed to be, but I knew MySpace didn't seem to fulfill any type of promise at all (other than to annoy me).
I briefly joined Friendster only to find that it was populated exclusively by 13 year olds and thus was useless for my purposes. Facebook, which at the time was for university people only, seemed a better fit, one which surely be less frivolous than MySpace. Little did I know that Facebook would open itself up to the world and descend into silliness. When I started to become bombarded with Farmville requests and the like, I knew Facebook's days were (for me, anyway) numbered.
I joined Twitter on the recommendation of a friend. I liked it immediately... It was much less frilly than Facebook, and I found the user group to be more prone to intelligent conversation...or being intelligently silly, which was equally good. So I set my Twitter feed to automatically post to Facebook and concentrate on the former. However, as I had more friends on Facebook, I had to still interact with each site.
Along the way, G+ and Ello popped up, but while I liked each better than the other options, neither had enough of a user base to let me escape Facebook (whose interface, games, quizzes, and other ephemera made it an increasingly annoying place). So I was still stuck regularly visiting a place which annoyed me.
A few months ago, I noticed another drawback. I realized that I had been abandoning my longer writing. Actually, I've known this for a while, and I have made several attempts to restart my blogging...but it wasn't until recently when I realized my social media was to blame. Instead of thinking things over before writing, I was blasting off quick tweets. I was focusing on editing for clarity and brevity rather than exploring my thoughts. Convenience was beating out introspection (which was one of the main reasons I started the blog in the first place). Not only that; I've also found myself spending way too much time on social media, time which could be spent creatively...and its not like the social media made me any more social in the first place.
So it's time for a change. A few weeks ago, I bought my own domain (www.themikedubose.com) and tied it to my blog. I set up the blog to automatically post to Twitter (which then automatically posts to Facebook anyway). I redesigned the blog to be more of a "one stop TheMikeDuBose stop." And I starting transitioning from tweeting back to writing.
So this is how this is going to work. I'm now posting my musings as blogs rather than social media blasts. You will still be able to get them via Twitter or Facebook if you wish. I'm going to cut down on my Twitter and Facebook visits, so if you want to interact with any kind of expediency, either hit the comments here or e-mail/text me. Stuff on my music will still go through Reverbnation and then to Facebook, but since Facebook only distributes 5-10% of my posts to my followers, I'm going to treat this blog as the main center for my music and post stuff here first.
New year. It's also a time to streamline.
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