Likeability in age of the Internet

Watching a band do bad cover songs at a festival. Eighties band. Between the Romantics and the Go Gos and Bon Jovi the singer says. HEY LIKE US ON FACEBOOK AND TWITTER AND EVERYWHERE. Then they go back to playing. The drums are too loud and you cant hear the keyboards and they aren't even together. The singer stops again. HEY GO TO OUR SITE AND LIKE US. Then they play Prince and massacre a bunch of his songs.

And it gets me thinking because the crowd is in to them. I mean they are playing to families who just want some diversion and people will probably go like them and I would if I liked them. But I don't. I don't like them. They are a bad band.No soul. No talent. They just like being on stage.  Liking should say I like this. I approve of this. But we have people telling us to like them for Google Ranking and linking. A bit like friends on Facebook. Since when was friend a verb?

But the band plays on and they are even sponsored by a beer company and they have a trailer and they sell T shirts. And the singer stops again. HEY LIKE US ON FACEBOOK AND TWEET US AND LET EVERYONE KNOW ABOUT US. And then he destroys Pink Floyd. 

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher
 

The Effect of Social Media on Relationships

There is a new guy in your house now be you married or not. He hangs around waiting for someone to talk to him. He is always on. Even if someone forgets about him for a while it is amazing how fast he can be up and ready to go. And you may have just had a fight with your husband or wife and Mr. Saturday Night steps in. He is always fun. Always interesting. And his is chock full of information. It's like the guy sits around reading and he never complains.

And just like that he is at your dinner table. You are eating your mashed potatoes while he is munching on the steak and your wife is talking to him not you. Your husband is engrossed in a conversation with the guy like you don't exist. And you really don't since this guy moved in. He never goes to bed. You see your spouse up at night and the guy is in the bed! Enough is enough you point out but that just makes it worse. And the guy always has a light on.

Even when you travel he comes along. You think he would get a hint but there he is piping up with his funny little noises. Even when you make love the guy is flashing lights at you. He has no boundaries and the worst thing is you get the feeling your wife/husband/boyfriend/girlfriend would rather be talking to him than you.

Your only chance is to go someplace where the guy cant plug in. Maybe then he will get the hint and just turn off. Maybe then you can have a decent conversation. At least until he gets his batteries charged.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The PItcher...Sometimes a dream is all you have
 

Publishers and Social Media

I am doing a speech on Selling Books Through Social Media tomorrow and it occurs to me very few publishers really understand Social Media. Take Simon and Schuster who paid a guy six figures for his tweets that were supposed to be the ruminations of a guy on an elevator with the Masters of the Universe. You know Wall Street Guys. Problem. Turned out he lives in Texas and made it all up. But S and S will go ahead with the book of his tweet hits.

So that shows they don't get it. Social Media is ephemeral and not quantifiable. It is an effort to throw a pebble down a mountainside and see if you can get an avalanche going. But there is no certainty a pebble or a boulder will get the landslide going. Think of it as a Sonar Ping going out into the ocean and hoping it will hit something and that ping might then come back with information and maybe something that will lead to sales.

But to take the ping as evidence of a pending sale is wrong. The ping is the ping. And even if you have a million pings that does not mean those people pinging back will plunk down money on a book of tweets. The leap is mighty. But as the saying goes there is a sucker born every minute and that guy in Texas has to be laughing his ass off.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher....sometimes a dream is all you have

Social Media is Getting Pretty Rude

People over the other day. At one point everyone was on their phones and IPADs and no one was talking. It was a little pathetic and made me wonder why we bother. Lets face it what we are doing when we are on our phones and we are with other people is we are saying you know this just isn't very interesting. You are hoping to be bailed out by something your phone can give you...an email, text, tweet...something.

And it is getting worse. Parties. Dinner. Bed. I am sure there is someone who is having sex and responding to an email. Phones now disturb our sleep. I have been woke more than once from the boop of an email or a text. We no longer control our environment someone else controls it from afar and we really should just stop the pretense of getting together. Lets just shoot each other a text and call it. How many times do you say goodnight to someone in the lunar glow of an IPAD now?

We have all been to a restaurant with the couple looking down into their lap. They are not talking. They are not interacting. They are interacting with other people who aren't even going to have dinner. So maybe the people on the other end should pick up the tab. Anyway. It is getting strange. Soon we wont even have the pretense of getting together with our physical bodies.

I know lets have our phones get together and we can be in their palms. At least we would have their attention.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

Lady Ga Ga Stripped of 176 Million Views on Youtube...how pathetic

And so what does this mean? It means that even the ones at the very top are not immune to our national frenzy to get to the top and stay there. Here is a woman rich beyond belief with her allotment of fame more than most humans will ever get and yet she could not stomach the idea that she might fade. She has reportedly released songs for .99 to inflate her Billboard numbers as well. The mere thought she might not remain at the very top of the top drives her to manipulate Social Media. How pathetic.

In a time where our biggest horror is that we will not be immortalized in some way or we will not be noticed even our biggest stars cannot escape the schizophrenia of a culture gone mad. Because mad is the only way to define our overexposure and how we now peer into each others lives in the ever present drive toward commodification. Because exposure we assume equals fame and fame equals money if not only an escape from being one of the many.

And the horror is that we might have a mediocre life. That we might not be one of the Facebook chosen few who vacation in exotic places and dabble with the stars or at the very least are rich enough to upload pictures of our breathless lives. But of course we are doomed before we start as Lady Ga Ga is doomed.

Think  of Sunset Boulevard with Norma Desmond living in her decaying mansion in the twilight of her fallen star. The knowledge she would never be in the light again literally drove her mad. We should take heed and so should Lady Ga Ga.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher...sometimes a dream is all you have
 

Authors Have To Start Over Now

Watched Margaret Atwood on Charlie Rose last night before I fell asleep. Just what I need. The U2 of the publishing world who still can laugh from the mountain top. For her the old world of publishing still works very well. For the rest of the world it is over. The old modality of selling books has changed and is changing at such rapid speed that week to week makes a difference. The world of book giveaways and social media dunning is here to stay.

The New York Times had a piece asking the question if social media was here to stay for business. Yes is the answer. We have all become Internet slaves now. Everyone except the Margaret Atwoods of the world who are in fact from a world gone by. She even looks rarefied. And Charlie guffawing over the grande dam author makes you wonder how this world ever worked anyway. It worked for the few not the many.

The Democratization of selling books has allowed other authors to have some pie too. You can actually think about  making a little for yourself by selling ebooks. Before only the Atwoods got shelf space and mid list authors were shoved into the corers if they ever made it into the store all. So I went to bed with Margaret staring at Charlie like the sycophant he was and preening as any queen should.

But she probably will be the last.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

The Slave Labor of the Internet

You see her every day. She sits down with her cup of water and large green tea. Her eyes are red and her hands chapped raw. She wipes the table carefully and opens her computer. She pours water into her tea and wipes her hands with a towelette. From her wrists up her hands are pink. She is gaunt. Her skin sallow. She looks like someone who never goes outside. She stares at her screen and waits for it to boot up. She takes out a small sticky pad and a pen. She then leans forward and stabs the keyboard.

For the next eight to twelve  hours she will frown and squint at her laptop. She will make notes on her sticky pad. Then she will surf looking for God knows what. But she is looking for something. Some marketing firm somewhere is paying her for hits or swipes or likes or views or just data. It doesn't matter. When they built the atomic bomb there was a giant factory to produce enriched uranium. It required hundreds of women to sit at a console and move a lever all day long day in and day out. This woman sits for hours upon hours with her hand punching the screen. Day in and day out.

She takes a break at noon  and bends her screen forward then goes for a walk around the strip mall. Usually for fifteen minutes. Then she returns and washes her hands again and pushes up her screen and starts stabbing her keyboard. She does not move for another four hours. And you see her every day and she is not married and you know from her clothes and from her frugality with the tea and the water she does  not have much money.

And sometimes she just sits there and stares out the window. Her only interaction is the dead lifeless imagery of the screen. There are now thousands  like her. Maybe millions. People doing the slave labor of the internet for a buck.

The PItcher...the story of a dream

 

The Nuttiness of Social Media

Is it me or did social media just take another step into the insane asylum? Nobody knows what is going on really anymore. In the world of selling anything your game plan is to network network network. The problem is with the interconnected world now is you could be marketing condoms to your mother in law and never know it. I have seen pictures I have taken of my dog end up on the internet. How I have no idea. But with the next generation of uber connectedness and everyone from Google to Facebook trying to out media each other we are the guienna pigs.

I mean you take selling books which is a full time job and requires enormous amounts of energy savvy and just plain luck. You post something and you tweet it and your facebook it and you google plus it and you are pretty much done. What is weird is your own phone goes off and lets you know you just posted something to your site. So now you are marketing to yourself. Forget privacy issues. What is privacy anymore anyway? I mean I appreciate the NSA is monitoring us though data mining but I would just tell them, save your money with your Prism computer and go on Facebook...everything you want to know is right there.

Add Amazon to the mix and now you have a perfect storm. Everyone is trying to figure out what will really drive book sales and the authors are in the middle posting, blogging, tweeting, skyping, surfing, writing, harassing, networking...basically going crazy. Dare to turn off your computer and go back to the stone age. Or worse yet risk eating beans.

So here is to the nut house of social media. Truly the inmates are running the asylum.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher...Junior Library Guild Selection

Sold down the river by Social Media?

You better think twice as you post your life to Facebook or search away on Google or post on AOL. Although I don't know who posts on AOL anymore. But we now know that the business of information has a nefarious side. It is not all for marketing which is obnoxious in itself that we are tracked for our habits and likes and dislikes and just about anything else  Internet conglomerates can tag us with...but now we know all that data was turned over to the government.

Now there are denials but I don't know who is buying it. Facebook and Google claim they just found  out about Prism. Hmmm. The NSA seems to be saying that everyone turned over the info, Verizon, Facebook, Google and so that means that all the innocence of us just giving up our data is now a real shot ourselves in the foot scenario. We just cant give ourselves away fast enough to these companies and now we know this info was passed on to the NSA.

Now you can say well it is to stop terrorism. Ok. Then keep shoveling out the info and rest assured you just let the government know more about yourself. But if you don't like the idea that your info is being piped to a third party then you better think again. What really should happen is a tech barrier between us and the Social Media Companies. Something like a toll booth. They pay and we get to decide how much they get...for a price.

Can anyone say take back our identifies?

www.williamahazelgrove.com
 

The Twittering Author

I talk a lot of smack in person. I can launch serious about politics or social issues but my preferred verbal mode is to shit around and spar and goof and on just about anything that is not serious but more like verbal gymnastics. Highly enjoyable but not much insight especially in 140 character bursts. But I do post. I'm a writer and that's the way I express myself through sentences and paragraphs with a beginning middle and end. It's just the way I'm comfortable in twitter land.

Not so with other authors. They talk directly into the twitter feed. They are comfortable shooting out 140 character missives to other people and responding. I really don't think I have anything valuable to say in 140 character shots except to talk smack and who wants to hear that? But others do. Others can say what they want in a quick blip and then they are done. I guess it comes down to what kind of writer you are and how comfortable you are pulling back the curtain.

In Anne Trubeck's piece in the Sunday Times she cites authors as being in two groups, the ones that cannot let the veil down and the others who want the feedback twitter provides Also there are sales. Sales Sales Sales. Publishers don't know if twitter gets people to read books or not. The logic would go something like, well he seems like a witty tweety fellow, I wonder what his book is like. Ah, but you have to stop twittering to go get that book and for many of us twitters we are already on to the next tweet.

Social media does break down the isolation of the author and some don't care for it. The big guns tend not to twitter or if they do it is some sort of mass PR twitters. I don't know. You have to find your comfort level and do what you do. Me. I like letting people know my thoughts and maybe they get a kick out of it and maybe not. Then I go talk smack. Or write another novel.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Hemingways Attic (surviving as a writer)

Our Tacky Age of Social Media

Social media is tacky. It is our personal billboard, the billboard of yesteryear with the lawyer telling us that bankruptcy is the way or the triple XXX truck stop with GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS. We would see these billboards from our car and wonder what type of people would respond to such garish enticements. Bankruptcy, triple XXX. Really? But now we know, we would respond to those billboards and we prove it every day on the Internet. It is the age of tacky.

Anothy Wiener is just another casualty of our twittering reality. We now advertise ourselves to others in ways we would have never dreamed of or condoned. Jump into facebook and behind the pictures of Aruba or the vacation in Switzerland is a self advertisement for the Fantasy Life. We now advertise ourselves to others and present our lives or our version of our lives to others and this brings the glow of braggadocio to our cheeks as we hide behind our screens.

We now sell ourselves. Anthony sold himself as the hip congressman to a twenty six year old and went down salacious avenue to see what he could drub up. Why not? Social media gives us the vehicle so we can all act like prostitutes and then turn off the computer and go about our everyday life. But social media has a dark side and the Andrew Brightbarts of the world are the perfect vampires. They look into the underbelly of our tweets and posts and our comments and they find the worst of us. Now our letters and furtive phone calls of yesterday are sitting in cyberspace, waiting to destroy our lives.

The only way social media works is by self promotion. We all have cellphones so the communication gig is only a small part. Social media is the high school girl or boy saying the dirty words and then taking it another step by saying the dirty act. We ride high in our reflected glory that comes back in comments and posts and tweets and pictures and videos. The humdrum life has been amped up along the lines of the cheap thrill of pornography and lasts about as long. Because the dirty secret is social media mostly plays to an audience of one and the fantasy we are playing to millions fades with the screen turning to black.

Ultimately we are left withe pathetic bits and bytes of middle aged men with their shirts off or women with their computer cams that are all the more tawdry when exposed as the hubris of politicians or celebrities. Social media is the final democratization of a culture with not enough celeb to go around and so we tackily post our own bios and our own pictures and then our obits. Mostly to no one, but ourselves 

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in July

The Dark Side of Facebook

When I first got out of college I got a job selling WATS lines for the phone company in Chicago and one of the perks was I could go up to the "Switch" at all hours of the night and walk past the tech guys and put on headphones and plug into a million conversations. I would even take dates (what a loser right) up to the switch and give them a pair of headphones and we would listen to the million voices talking into the analog void. It was amazing to think that each voice intertwined with the other represented a human,but it was also scary in a way because it trivialized each voice until it no longer represented a human, just a sound wave zooming through a huge trunk line.

Fast forward to Facebook with it's strange access into the million voices of our creation and after you get past the hype and the pictures then you end up with the obnoxious guy oin the train or the coffee house who won't stop his conversation about his kids, his family , his sex life and you are part of it. Facebook pledges to give us all a new way of interacting (so says Newsweek) and maybe it will or is it just that weird social network thing taken it's logical movie fueled zenith that will eventually end up like Myspace as a feeding ground for child molesters and porn stars--another footnote to the early days of the Internet.

But Facebook's dark side is it makes something out of nothing and by contrast knocks everyone else down to nothing. Take the couple who crashed the White House all under the guise of getting their pictures on Facebook with the President. Their ten nanoseconds of fame came and went and was cataloged into the cyberstream along with everyone out crying out for attention. Zuckerberg's prototype was rating girls on a primitive site that preceded Facebook. Then Facebook became the domain of colleges and one could make a case maybe it should have stayed there. Is Facebook really that different from the primitive girl rating site and arent we all rating each other by the life we paint in cyberland?

 We have already been privy to conversations we never wanted to know where people complained about their husbands or wives only to find out they were sharing it with the world. The Social Network is a great movie in the story of the creation of Facebook and we know that it resulted in a twenty six year old becoming a billionaire. Isnt that really what Facebook is all about? A billion dollars to hear the million voices at the switch?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January