April 13, 2014 |
I confess I’m a late adopter of social media. I just didn’t get it. The whole idea sounded so “Miss Lonelyhearts”. And even now social media is not exactly how I socialise. Groucho Marx said, “I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.” What fun is joining some entity without a chance of getting blackballed and humiliated? I adore my friends, but I have about as many as I can handle and somehow the idea of some stranger “friending me” seems a little like assault. An assault by nerds.
You want a friend? Put it in writing on paper with a self-addressed stamped envelope and $50 for handling.
Midway on life’s journey I found myself in a dark party. Many of the faces looked familiar and they seemed to know me but I just didn’t know their names. I realised that I was socially saturated. Back in the old days we had a thing called a Rolodex and it held hundreds of cards, each one holding the name, address and telephone numbers of a person. I realised that the Rolodex in my brain was maxed out. From now on, to remember somebody new I’d have to forget somebody old. So why would I want to expand my social network? I mean, there are always people one wants to meet, just as there are people one wants to ditch and forget, but how many people can you really know?
People do seem to have different capacities for friendship and acquaintance, but even a Bill Clinton has his limits. In ancient Greece the people were known as the demos, and that was the governing body in their primal democracy, but the demos wasn’t just some limitless aggregation of people. The demos was defined as the number of people one could know personally. The ancients seemed suspicious of bonding politically with those they only knew from their PR. But in the 21st century we can’t seem to get enough acquaintances, friends, or what we now know as “contacts”.
I could never abide the word “network” when not referring to a bunch of TV or radio stations. It’s especially despicable as a verb. At some point in the 1990s people started talking about networking. People had networking parties where they didn’t meet people as much as they made contacts. Somehow thinking about networks, flow charts, demographics and affinity groups made me contemplate joining a cloistered monastic order for minutes at a time. I realised that I only wanted to meet people I didn’t want anything from and who didn’t want anything from me. Peers, we used to call them.
About 10 years ago people started asking me if I was on Myspace. When it got to be annoying, partially because I was curious, I joined. Myspace was annoying, and I didn’t pay much attention to it, but it did become somewhat interesting when it mutated into a platform for bands. It was a place to hear what new musicians were doing. But it was boring. Maybe more so because of its involvement with Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone. You know with names like that that it’s really Theirspace.
I went along quite content without belonging to an online social network. Everyone was talking about Facebook and how many followers they had. It all seemed boring to me until my older son, who was living in Korea, joined Facebook and began posting photos on his page. I had no interest in posting pictures, but I did want to see what was going on with him, so I joined under an assumed name. You’re not supposed to do that, but I posted a real picture of me, sort of in the dark. People found me anyway. I look at it a few times a year and I regularly get emails saying that someone has given me a poke. I remember when that meant that someone stuck a hypodermic needle in you.
An old friend of mine got addicted to Facebook. I’m not kidding. He was “powerless over Facebook”. Heroin, alcohol, hookers, I get – but Facebook? Yet it was true. I was attending a film festival and my friend was coming, too. It was in a glamorous, artistic place in the middle of nowhere, requiring a three-hour drive from the nearest airport. The day he was supposed to arrive we waited and waited. He showed up the next morning. He had rear-ended somebody in his rental car. Eventually I wormed the truth out of him. He had been Facebooking when the vehicle in front of him stopped suddenly and he totalled his rental. He was maxed out on friends at 5,000 (apparently Facebook once felt that one couldn’t really have more than 5,000 friends, as if friendship was really at issue, but the limit has since been lifted) and my real-life friend had begun romancing some of his followers. Fucking followers! Today he’s in a 12-step programme, although I don’t think there is yet a specific e-addiction programme.
Facebook and Twitter are the perfect places to meet stalkers.
When Twitter came out I didn’t pay it any attention. Stupid name. Who wants to twitter, as in chirp like a bird? But maybe I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions. Actually, I think my friend Richard Prince might have invented Twitter with his Bird Talk 20 years ago. Tweeting is bird talk and the stuff Richard wrote in this format is just like the best stuff one finds on Twitter – cryptic one-liners and twisted aphorisms and beat koans.
“The best images have sensations of unreality, illimitable vastness, brilliant
light, and the gloss and smoothness of material things.” That’s 134 characters. Perfect. “Pornography is a political form of fiction. It deals with how we use and
exploit each other in the most urgent and ruthless way.” Right on the money, 129 characters. “I like consenting to be part of a dynamic mechanism in an artificially
contrived situation. In other words, I like to play the game.” Again, that’s 134.
I joined Twitter because I wanted to see what it was. Tweeted twice, then didn’t tweet again for 11 months, until one of my magazine editors told me to. He said if I wanted to get traffic on my website I had to tweet and he was right. I signed up for Twitter under a pseudonym. This time it wasn’t a name similar to mine with hidden motives – I stole my handle from the Restoration poet, playwright and court intriguer John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester, who is the subject of one of my favourite films, The Libertine with Johnny Depp. I don’t feel bad appropriating Rochester, as the title has been extinct since 1753. I feel more like Duke Ellington or Count Basie.
It turned out that I love Twitter. It’s like a convention of stand-up comedians, haiku poets, narcissist celebs, fawning fans, cranky cranks and press agents both pro and am, and somehow their collective buzz is like taking a poll of the public and an encephalogram reading of the collective unconscious simultaneously. Your demos is as big or small as you want and everybody’s only as good as their last few tweets. If you get sick of somebody you “unfollow” them.
I could never write a diary. It doesn’t pay. Writing is my job. Once my mother asked me why I didn’t write to her. I said it doesn’t pay. But now I can write a diary on Twitter. One day at a time. It still doesn’t pay, but I get followers. Just like Jesus. Or Gandhi. Or Pam Anderson.
The social network that creeps me out is LinkedIn. It’s not like a friend; it’s like a stalker. I don’t think I actually joined LinkedIn but they keep acting like I did. It was the same story as Myspace, Facebook and Twitter. I wanted to see what it was all about, and I initiated joining but then, before pulling the trigger, I began to suspect that if I joined they would rape and pillage my address book. I know that they say that you have to push a button for that to happen and, hey, you have to read the TOS (Terms of Service, stupid. Aside to myself). But no, I didn’t do it. I’m not LinkedIn, even though fantastic job offers just might come my way.
Hey, I can’t have strangers rooting around in my address book. I’ve got James Franco in there. Kate Moss. And Ezra Miller. And John Lurie and David Byrne and Bryan Ferry and the Major League Baseball National League MVP. And Ricky Powell, the fourth Beastie Boy. Albert Oehlen and Marilyn Minter. And a couple of pot dealers and some fly girls. And a lot of old Madonna numbers that don’t work any more. I can’t link you to that shit.
But almost every day I get an email saying that somebody wants me to join their network on LinkedIn. Even people you would never suspect of being LinkedIn, such as Genesis P-Orridge and Miles Aldridge. And I don’t think they even know they are doing it. I bet they didn’t read the TOS. This is my definition of a cult. I wanted to start LinkedOut, a social network for people who want to be left alone, but it turns out that somebody has that name. Guess who? LinkedIn. Same thing happened when I wanted to start AssBook.
PS Here are a few of my favourite personal tweets for autumn. Follow me @lordrochester.
Nov 22 @RichardPrince4 sent me a Zapruder film still with an insert of a dragster doing a wheel stand. I said, “Huh?” RP said, “If JFK had a faster car… ”
Nov 22 On the other hand, I’m pretty sure Valerie Solanas acted alone.
Nov 15 A$AP Rocky rhymes “Ann Demeulemeester” with “Visvim be the sneaker”. Most dangerous rhyme since Lou Reed’s “peculiar” and “sewer”.
Nov 6 I just proposed Nuremburg Trials for architects at the Design Leadership Summit. They all laughed but I mean it.
Nov 6 Mass-produced cars are great. Mass-produced clothes turn you into a car.
Nov 1 Kate Simon on Lou Reed – I looked in his cabinet the evening I shot him with John by the Christmas tree, he had a lot of Bee Gees cassettes.
Oct 22 I keep watching Homeland. It’s really compelling. The Mossad should really do more TV.
Oct 22 Just invented a word: incumbetent. Use it for politics or sports.
Oct 18 I just read in Eric Fischl’s humble bio Bad Boy that Warhol, Basquiat and Haring all died young because they threw food at him at the Odeon.
Oct 16 NYTimes welcomes Banksy to NYC! They missed out on SAMO, Futura, Lee, Keith Haring, John Fekner etc. Guess it’s Banksy’s prices!
Oct 15 Just watched World War Z. The scene in the economy section of the plane looked familiar.
Oct 5 Government #shutdown? College football just doesn’t seem the same without the F-16 flyovers.
Oct 1 I’m going as the government for Halloween.
By Glenn O’Brien
