One of my aphorisms: An artist lives to express his dreams, a businessman hopes to express the dreams of his customers. Like with everything else there is a degree. To what degree are you prepared suppress yourself? If any social entity is a set of mental formulas and people seek to sooth their confirmation bias, you must listen to the “customers”. Most people talk themselves into the illusion that they can have the cake and eat it too. I don’t believe it.
This is why the advertising economy sucks more than the communism. Your survival depends of pandering to the collective on a much deeper level than the top down communism ever imagined. The central flaw of the Internet is that following Google it adopted the advertising model where worshiping of the confirmation bias covers the WWW like the snow cover Antarctica. The decimation of the creative class inevitably follows. It’s a massive fake-out, instead of the libertarian promise there is the sea of conformity, the global party-think, “plus” the phantom of individuality.
This idol worshiping is something I was never good at and I now must deal with the consequences. My first act was to cut all the “salesmen” around me like the toxic gluten. So far it has been a massive personal failure. This includes my ramblings on this website. Brooks might be an idiot and his book is undoubtedly shallow but his publishing handlers write a pretty good copy, indeed we are a “social animal”. Some of it is internal and some objective. But if the words don’t convert, they don’t exist. And there is only one form of conversion, as long as people discovered the verbal magic. The words must turn into the tangible “assets”. As you know I reject the quantitative approach to this formula. It’s stupid to count the readers or the “hits”. But one must face the complete blackout and the implications.
Further reading:
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I just sampled this interview on the WSJ,which I understood only in part. (tumbler, bitly, all these new names.)
http://online.wsj.com/video/betaworks-ceo-google-doesnt-grasp-social-media/A479ADF4-526C-46AF-A759-4BBAEF4DAAB1.html
I imagine there are others out there like me who do not understand social networks and how they are being used other than in trivial ways like telling your ten friends your dog had puppies. The impression I got is that blogs in general are a loosing proposition in terms of demographics. Except for maybe a 100-500 blogs all the rest have no substantial readership. Any opinions on the trend towards social networks?
ej, I exhausted this theme under this tag: http://benatlas.com/tag/social-media/
There is a temptation to discard old medium, i.e. books are dead or paper books are dead, etc. Well, they are not dead for me and this is ultimately what matters.
The creative process is audience independent, albeit this path is painful.