The Bobby Rock Newsletter #74 (9-3-22) - Social Media Madness!
The Bobby Rock Newsletter #74 (9-3-22) - Social Media Madness!
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Viva Las Vegas, Everyone!
Checking in from Sin City on a Saturday morning. As always, thanks again for clicking in. Let’s jump right into this week’s edition...
In This Issue:
- The Here and Now: Checking in with an in-the-moment update from the road, Las Vegas-style...
- Social Media Madness and the Mind/Body Connection: I wrote this piece twelve years ago and all concerns are still warranted! Scope it…
- It’s Quotable: Some wise words from a few centuries back that we would all do well to heed today...
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In This Moment… from Las Vegas
Just played a show at the infamous Golden Nugget last night, which has become an annual affair for the Lita Ford camp. It remains quite a fun gig, and it’s still amusing to kick it in the glow of the venue’s rat-pack history, and to hang back in “Frank's room,” contemplating all that has shifted in the decades since “Strangers in the Night” echoed through the theater.
As many of you will recall, we recently lost our brother, George Marshall, who was our Lita Ford tour manager, soundman, and everything-else guy. George and family moved to Las Vegas from New York several years back, so there was a notable crackle of sentiment and emotion in the air last night as both his family, and tight-knit gang of Vegas friends, all came out to the gig. Show highlight? A cover of Deep Purple’s “Burn,” where our guitarist, Patrick Kennison, played George’s ’72 Les Paul. It was quite a night!
Pic by Michele Doucette Webb
Here’s "St. George," messing around at a recent photo shoot, days before his transition. We miss you, brother!
Pic by Teddy Allison
For more on our beloved St. George, scope out BR Newsletter #60 here: https://www.bobbyrock.com/pages/the-bobby-rock-newsletter-60-5-28-2022-transitions
And here’s a post-show pic, with audience. Notice the addition of keyboardist Michael T. Ross on the right. He always hits with us when we play Vegas, as he’s a resident here. But he will be joining us for our LA show tomorrow.
Speaking of which...
This afternoon, we will be heading back to LA, in preparation for the annual Backyard Bash “block party” mayhem in the parking lot of the Rainbow on Sunset. Life is good...
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I recently ran across a blog post I published over twelve years ago regarding “this whole new“ social media thing. In the piece, I was expressing all of my initial concerns about how much mental bandwidth social media—and this newer brand of high-octane technology—were occupying in our daily lives. With the exception of the MySpace mention, everything else in this article seems to be holding up, loud and clear! Check it out:
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Social Media Madness and the Mind/Body Connection
(Posted on the original Bobby Rock Blog, July 19, 2010)
Okay, I’ll admit it. I’ve yet to really embrace this whole social media thing. Yes, I have the various accounts; Facebook, Twitter, MySpace. But I’ve yet to send a tweet, and I’m horrible at getting back to everyone who sends me messages on the other two. Truth is, I have really mixed feelings about it all, and this has led to today’s blog posting.
First, let me say that I have no inherent ill will towards any of these mediums. I recognize all of the undeniable good that they can offer, both personally and professionally. And I also recognize that these mediums represent the “new way” that many prefer to connect with those musicians, authors, and artists that they admire. And in the same way that I feel like it is our obligation to try to get our work out to folks in whatever form they prefer to receive it, let’s face it, social media is another viable form… even if it’s just to let people know about the work. So, yeah, I know I probably have to warm up to the concept of social media and find my groove with it.
Still, here are three fundamental observations/concerns I have about the whole thing that I wanted to throw out there to you guys, especially as it all relates to the mind/body connection, as well as one’s creative life:
The Clutter Factor
As a general week-to-week practice, I always try to find those valuable pockets of nothingness… those stretches of time in my life where I can embrace a little empty space, even if it’s for only five or ten minutes. This is where so many of those cool, creative inspirational nuggets emanate from. And I’m not just talking about the formalized practice of entering the Sacred Space (as we discussed some months back in an entry here). I’m talking about simply finding a little room in your day to ponder, reflect, decompress, and just be in the moment, unattached to anything in particular that might be demanding your attention on any level.
To this end, I often try to eliminate or scale-down certain activities and distractions, thus freeing up some more potential nothingness time. So when contemplating any kind of daily routine for maintaining social media stuff, we now have more accounts to log into, more messages to respond to, more things to comment on, and, in general, more content taking up space on our “hard drive” (brain). And when you consider this in the context of all the other things potentially eating away at our time, like phone calls, text messages, e-mails, Internet, TV, etc., this leaves even less time to just be, to engage the Grand Nothingness.
No doubt, I’m sure there’s a happy medium here somewhere. But where social media is concerned, I think we would all do well to run our own check and balance system as to how much time we spend juggling all of these accounts vs. keeping tuned into trying to grab some quality nothingness time here and there. Personally speaking, I really don’t think every spare moment has to be spent engaging a lot of what we wind up engaging in these mediums.
Virtual Moment vs. Actual Moment
Another thing to think about is this; it seems like so much of what we deal with in social media is sort of a second-hand experience… the virtual moment vs. the actual moment. For example, when someone posts “I just finished dinner with friends,” there are two sides to that experience. First, there was the actual, in-the-moment experience of having that dinner; the time, place, circumstances, backstory, conversation, the sensory experience of enjoying the food, the reflective nature of eating, the before, during, and after. The actual experience. But once you try to tweet about it, or commit it to a one-sentence Facebook post, it now becomes a virtual experience, one big step removed from all that it was in the moment.
Now, on one level—fair enough. In a way, that’s what writing is… the author’s attempt to convey an actual experience to the virtual reality of the reader interpreting what you’ve written. But, it just seems like with the sheer volume and general nature of all of these “reports” and “updates,” we are simply consuming more data, without the benefit (in most cases) of experiencing any sense of enrichment as a result. We become bottomless filters to an endless barrage of bits of information that is so massive in scope, we are incapable of extracting much meaning from it, even though it could have had meaning and relevance to the original experiencer.
Circuit Overload
This should scare the shit out of most every person who earns a living sharing creative “information” in any form, because it essentially means that your audience could be so weighed down with data, that they have considerably less room on their “hard drives” to fully digest and experience what you do. Seriously.
I remember seeing a news item a couple months back where researchers were suggesting that folks nowadays are not “properly processing” tragedy, because the modern information age blasts us with so much of it, so often, we don’t have time to fully assimilate one given event before the next one hits our consciousness.
And isn’t this true of so much of what we see online these days, artistically? There really is some remarkable art, writing, and music out there, immediately accessible to all, and modern technology—spurred on by the viral aspects of social media—offers an efficient delivery system for it. But, are we giving ourselves a chance to fully digest and experience it? Or, do we quickly gulp it down, tweet the link, then forget about it five minutes later when the next cool thing hits our inboxes?
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Anyway, I feel like this whole rant has been somewhat rhetorical. I have no concrete answers, ideas, or suggestions about any of it. But once again—let me emphasize—none of this is meant to be an across-the-board criticism about social media, and it’s hopefully not simply more data for you to consume. It’s just a little food for thought that we can all take into those precious five or ten minutes of Grand Nothingness… once we’ve checked all of our accounts!
Thanks for listening –
BR
You can catch the original post here:
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In the years since I wrote this, there has been a lot more science corroborating the essential concerns I discussed, and some excellent books addressing the issues and answers of optimally navigating tech. A couple of my favorites would be Indistractible by Nir Eyal, and, of course, Deep Work and Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport.
For the record, I love technology and feel like it can be an absolute enrichment to our lives… so long as we are intentional about how we use it every day. As for social media, I’m afraid I never did quite warm up to the concept. Sure, I still do all of my own posts, but I’m still not so great about reading comments or, well, scoping out pretty much anything else on these apps if I can help it. But I do what I can because I know that this remains one of “my peeps” preferred ways of keeping up with what I do. Beyond that, if I didn’t do what I do for a living, I don’t believe I would even have any social media accounts, to be honest. It’s just not the style of communication/information platform that ever really resonated with me.
All of which leads us to…
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It’s Quotable
"Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
This bit of 18th-century wisdom is as relevant now as it was when Goethe first said it. I’ve always loved this quote because it reminds us to be mindful about where we are directing (arguably) our most valuable commodity: our attention. And as the above article suggests, much of our attention can often get derailed into that which would firmly reside in the “matters least” category!
Let's give it some thought...
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Thanks again, everybody. Connect next week! Until then, BR
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