Now that I have a working blog again, I might as well contribute to it.
Really, I’m surprised I haven’t been here more, since I’ve fallen away from social media almost completely. I mostly gave up the Time-Zuck (you know, Zuckerbook) several years ago because I got more interested in the Bird Site, and from about 2016 to 2021, it became a raging habit, even if I didn’t have a blue checkmark. At New Years 2021, the Bean Dad thing went down, and that really bothered me: I was a fan of one of that guy’s podcasts with a certain gameshow host. It reminded me of the old Car Talk show on NPR in a lot of good ways: just friendly, good-natured guys talking about interesting stuff. I was picking up lunch for my family at the drive-through, and scrolling through the sudden vitriol pointed at the guy, just agape. I haven’t listened to that podcast since, but I also decided to take a break from the Bird. That break lasted about five months, when, still pretty COVID-isolated, I got into it again for the rest of 2021. I felt duped, so I decided to go on Bird hiatus again around Christmas 2021, and this time it has more or less stuck, with a check-in or two. The last time I checked in was just as a certain billionaire was purchasing the site, and the panic among my contacts there sort of led me to believe that being off was probably for the best, so: app deleted. My first follow and follower there, and former teacher and now colleague, Wes Flinn, said he was thinking about getting his blog life going again (go check out his blog), and that may indeed be a good idea. At the very least, more intentional than everyone’s formerly favorite microblogging site.
And to both of the tech billionaires to whose sites I have given massive amounts of time, effort, and probably my soul to, I say, “I want my 2010s back.”
I don’t know what my life would have looked like since 2007 without social media: when it exploded in the late ’00s, I was teaching in rural Oklahoma without access to much of a classical music scene, to say nothing of a new music scene. Late in my graduate work, my advisor Don Harris told me that he was fairly sure I would keep composing, unlike some of his former students, but I’m not so sure how that would have gone without the connections I remade on Zuckerbook between 2008 and 2010. I got back in touch with a lot of people from my stints at Ohio State and Cincinnati. In some cases, they were people I hadn’t talked to in over a decade. A few of them commissioned me, a couple of others performed my music, and one, Dianna Anderson, did both. That site connected me to the outside world in a way that email and surfing the Net wouldn’t have, I think. I’ve often said that I have a composition career because of Zuckerbook, and I don’t really think that’s untrue. I’m lousy at keeping in touch.
I wasn’t able to replicate that on the Bird site. I would follow people, they would follow me. One musician reached out to me, and a piece resulted, but my DMs pointed in the opposite direction never really bore fruit. I don’t know if everyone was too busy talking past each other, or what. But, honestly, in my conductor persona, I can rarely do much for a composer who contacts me, whether they have a piece in hand or not: it usually isn’t a matter of whether I like their music or would want to work with them, but rather a case of just only having so many slots for new music in the season.
Speaking of keeping in touch, I’ve definitely been in touch with my relatives more, although not my parents, who saw social media for the steaming load of nothing that it is from the very beginning: I still have to call my parents. A few of them I discovered that I really wish I was able to have a deeper relationship with in person.
But a thing that was fun quickly became a thing I felt obligated to look at, and then it became something I just did without thinking about. We got smartphones in 2015 or so, and then I could sit on the couch with Becky in the evenings as we do and scroll through the social feed. I added the Bird site in 2016 when Noah’s first grade teacher said she’d be using it (spoiler: she had moved on to another app and didn’t use it once the whole year). But I was there through the 2016 election and everything that resulted from that, and the cool thing about the Bird site was that I was sort of in the bubble of musicologists, music theorists, and academic composers, for what it was worth, all trading pithy little lines and feeling more collective outrage than I can ever remember experiencing, all without the noise of the perpetual high school reunion of Zuckerbook.
And I told them so much… stuff just put out there for the public to see. My kids’ early lives are largely documented on Becky’s Zuckerbook account, and I don’t know how I feel about that. Most of my 30s and early 40s are on Zuckerbook and the Bird. I became middle-aged on social media (disclosure: my mother says I’ve been middle-aged since preschool). I don’t know if my history is a motherlode for some data mining bot, but it’s there, ready to be used to shape my consumer preferences or to try to influence my vote, or train facial-recognition AI. I don’t know why someone as paranoid as I am about being watched even got pulled into it as fully as I did (I joined Zuckerbook in 2007 because a commissioning ensemble wanted to be able to connect me to their members during the composing process). It was all fun and cool and interesting and titillating… until it wasn’t.
We’ve all been there, probably. I remember the moment I really started to think that TV wasn’t worth my time anymore. I was cleaning up at the end of art class in eighth grade, in 1989 or 1990, and I wound up standing at the sink next to a girl I had a crush on. I asked her if she had seen Friday’s episode of Family Matters, and she sneered and replied, “Why would I watch that crap?” I didn’t quit watching TV, but I started to feel a little more jealous of the time I was spending with it, just in time for high school, when more interesting things were starting to make demands of me anyway. For a few years as an adult, I lived alone and didn’t have a TV. On a rare visit, my brother noticed and said, “Oh, you must get a lot done.”
I loved email when I first got online. I didn’t really know that there was much more to the internet than that when I got started. The time my friends and I spent writing serial epic adventure stories parodying everyone we knew was precious, and we still talk about it when we get together: but it was also time I could have been in the practice room, or socializing in real life, or exploring the city. At one point, I got onto Trombone-L, a listserv, and would spend hours each evening engaging in the world of the trombone with–who? I have to say I can’t even remember.
So social media isn’t my first rodeo with overconsumption of screen-based stuff. And there may be something about the screen. My trombone teacher in middle school once told me that, growing up in the 1940s, he was never all that interested in radio, but that he found television’s pull extremely difficult to resist when it came along. At the very least, I’m not the only one (isn’t that what the great lesson of the Internet has been: whatever our interest or neurosis or kink or secret obsession is… we’re not the only one).
One of the social media projects that I’m proudest of was the Cleveland Composers Guild Piece of the Day. From March 2020 to March 2022, I scoured the websites and social media accounts of our members and found a different piece to post each day to the Guild feeds. I even helped some members get pieces out there that weren’t posted anywhere else. It kept the music coming from our group when we were somewhat limited in what we could do live. I’ve only gotten thank yous and positive feedback about it.
My experience of Piece of the Day was different, though. During lockdown, when I had time on my hands, it was something to do. Listening to people’s music was a way of staying connected to the world of new music. That progressed through most of 2020 and 2021, when I was primarily working from home. Eventually, I made a spreadsheet, and realized that a daily appointment to find a piece and post it wasn’t always possible, so I would work ahead. Making daily posts turned into a weekly moment to pre-load and schedule the posts. By the end of 2021, I wasn’t even taking the time to listen to the pieces I was highlighting–I just needed to stay ahead of my last post so I didn’t have to worry about breaking the chain. It was a grind, and it was a discipline. And the number of likes and comments and the rest were usually pretty small, vanishingly so. As much as it was a part of my routine, it had become just so much noise and shouting into the void. So, after talking to my fellow officers, I ended Piece of the Day. Everyone was effusive in their gratitude, but now, most of a year later, no one has really said that they miss it.
And so much of social media–especially the Bird site the last couple of years–has felt like shouting into the void (as much as this blog is, too, so there, Web 2.0!). I can’t even remember the last time I looked at Zuckerbook in any kind of serious way. Oh, once in a while I’ll follow a link there or get pulled in by an email about someone making a post, but it’s more satisfying to live my life IRL, even if it makes my world seem smaller.
Because of all that time! What could I have done with all that time I gave those two sites? How could I have been a better husband, father, Christian, composer, conductor, teacher? I’ve become fatter, tired-er, and worse at trombone. Can I really blame social media for that? I don’t know, but it didn’t help. What could I have done with all that time? What could all that mental energy and attention given to the people in the tiny glass rectangle–most of whom I’ve never met, will never meet, or haven’t talked to in twenty years–where would I be without it?
I suppose my job in the rest of the 2020s is to live out the answer to that question. I may have lost the 2010s to a couple of billionaires, but it doesn’t have to keep being that way.