CSotD: Exactly
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I really shouldn't praise Sandra Bell Lundy for today's Between Friends. It should be a well-worn path she's treading.
But it's not, and it's one I find myself on, which of course makes it even more likely that I'm going to praise it.
Still, why isn't this a more common theme?
Like most people, Sandra is younger than I am. She's just sending her youngest off to college as I'm watching my eldest granddaughter go through the same process, which, yeah, means that she is roughly the age of my kids.
So she's not quite a digital native, but neither has she entered into that period of dotage in which cartoonists feel that it is clever to be clueless and to make jokes about saggy bluejeans and kids obsessed with them dagnabbed intertubes.
Like the narrator in a song that was a hit before she was born, she recognizes that "there's something happening here, but what it is ain't exactly clear."
I know from talking to other cartoonists that she and I are not the only ones going through what Kim is going through here. The social media explosion is not only coming at us faster than the speed of thought, but without clear instructions and without a lot of clarity of coverage.
In my case, I'm finding things out mostly by trial and error, and I'd like some explanations that didn't assume I already knew the answers.
Nor am I naive enough to believe every barber who says I need a haircut.
But that leaves me flailing around without a whole lot of credible advice.
Like a lot of my cartoonist friends, I'm in there pitching. I'm just having trouble figuring out how they call the strike zone in this league.
I did, for instance, separate my personal and professional Facebook pages, as Kim suggests. Or at least I tried.
I already had a separate page strictly for CSotD.com, but the page where I kept in touch with cartoonists and fans of cartoons and fans of dogs like mine and people I had worked with and my children and my grandchildren and my siblings and my high school pals was becoming unmanageable.
I thought it would be easy to split them: I'd just set up the new page and then invite the cartoonists and cartoon fans from my personal page to "friend" me there.
Which promptly got me blocked from sending out friend requests because the volume of requests indicated that I was obviously spamming. And they locked up my page until I agreed to cancel all those invitations.
But there's more to it than that. When I first set up the new page, I had posted an explanation to the cartoonists and cartoon fans about the switch from my personal page, asking them to come over and "friend" me there, and I got a pretty lukewarm response.
Which means one of two things:
1. They all hate me.
2. They don't see the stuff being posted. Which could be due to Facebook's system of sorting and hiding posts, or it could be because they set up Facebook pages because they heard they needed to have Facebook pages but they don't actually tend them.
That's three possibilities, yes. And, while I'm not entirely discounting #1 and I think #2 is probably a large factor, I also strongly suspect that (implied) #3 is in there, too.
Here's what else I've learned about new media through experience:
CSotD has been mentioned on Reddit a couple of times, and, when that happens, it results in a sudden, massive surge of hits for about 36 hours, with absolutely no resulting boost in page visits thereafter.
Which could mean that people come, look and decide they hate me, but I think it actually means that Reddit users have the attention span of a six-week-old cocker spaniel, and are every bit as bouncy.
Though if you look to find out what bounce-rate is, what you learn is that it's all your fault, and that the solution is to simply package your message, your mission and your graphics in a way that better appeals to six-week-old cocker spaniels.
This makes me sound like one of those befuddled old gaffers who thinks it's clever to be clueless, but what I'm saying, rather, is that we're not all George Takeii, reaching for massive clicks through quick laughs.
That's his mission, and he does it very well. It's not mine.
The big trick, I think, is to stop trying to achieve those results without adopting those methods.
Which is to say, if you want to give small intimate concerts for people who care about music, don't be jealous of those who fill stadiums by singing vapid, catchy pop tunes.
Do you want to be Margaret Atwood, or do you want to be Danielle Steele?
What are your goals? Be honest, be practical. And, by the way, there's nothing wrong with being Danielle Steele if that's who you want to be. But there's a lot wrong with bullshitting yourself.
Anyway, I'm less interested in fighting that battle than in pointing out that much of what is said about social media is hype, and, while I recognize that hype is also something that has been with us always, that doesn't change the fact that there isn't a lot of dependable information out there.
Thing is, the fact that TIME Magazine is fading like Echo, barely heard and only able to repeat the words of others, should not obscure the fact that TIME always repeated the words of others and was always invested in a race to make its editors, writers and readers feel like they were part of whatever was new and hip and happenin'.
New media platforms. Same media story.
So maybe there's nothing new under the sun, because there was never a shortage of people who went to TIME and Newsweek to find out what was new and hip and happenin', which, after all, is what killed the scene in the Haight.
My advice for cartoonists who take pride in their artistry is to be content with building a solid-if-modest on-line audience of people who dig what you're trying to do, and to put out collections for them to purchase. Don't wait for your syndicate to do it; find out who is putting out credible, quality collections on their own and ask them for advice.
In other words, for all the new media out there, nothing much has changed, and there's a reason the story of the Little Red Hen has survived hundreds of years and thousands of interpretations.
(Speaking of new collections, here's one now!)
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