Do You Want Them to Remember You Tomorrow?

Last night, Amber Naslund and Christopher Penn were having a Twitter conversation about the experience of re-reading books. Their dialogue included this (abbreviated) exchange:

• Christopher: “The very best books read [like] new every time you pick them up… You’d swear new pages got added.”
• Amber: “Some [books] need different contexts and lenses I guess.“
• Christopher: “It’s also what you are ready and capable of seeing.”

Which is true. What you read (or watched, or listened to) last year, or ten years ago, is still the same media if you read it again tomorrow. But you’re different. The experiences you’ve had — and the other media you’ve absorbed — in the interim have affected your personality, philosophy and point of view. So even though the books, movies and music don’t change, we do.

And that changes everything.

Sure, the Greeks Had Sculpture… But If They’d Had YouTube…

In May, YouTube claimed its users upload 20 hours of video every minute — and that number is growing.  Which means no matter how much media there is in the world today, there’ll be immeasurably more media created tomorrow… and the next day… making it increasingly impossible to sift through the white noise and find the stuff that matters to you personally.

But how much of that media is designed to last?

It took the Greeks months (and sometimes years) to sculpt art from stone.  It takes your nephew 30 seconds to film a skateboarding stunt on his cell phone and beam it around the world.  Thousands of those statues have survived for centuries, providing billions of observers with a window on the world.  But how many YouTube videos will you remember next week?

Or, better yet: why should you?

“If I Have to Watch The Lion King One More Time, I Will Cut a Bitch.”

When I was in art school, we had one English class.  The instructor was not used to teaching art students, and she became perplexed by our obsessive tendencies to re-watch the same movies and cartoons over and over again, in order to understand how (and sometimes why) they were made.

“I don’t get why anybody would watch the same movie twice,” she said, honestly confused.  To her — a non-artist — the act of viewing a film was a passive experience, while to us it was part of our immersive education.  But she was also making a case for the numbers: with so much media being produced in the world, why watch anything twice?

Which raises the all-important question: why is anything you make worth anyone else’s time?

Love Me, But Do It Fast

As a social media creator myself, I’m perpetually conflicted: I’m torn between the desire to create something that’s valuable to both myself and an audience, but I’m also aware that the act of creating something new implies that I think what I make is going to be worth someone else’s time to read (or watch).

Isn’t that presumptuous of me?

I’d wager that most social media creators think so, which is why so much of what we make is short and / or bad.  In our rush to momentarily capture your attention, we value immediacy over quality.  We seek views instead of feedback.  We don’t have time to learn from our mistakes because we’re too busy making new ones, perpetually hoping that amid those errors we’ll stumble into a winning streak that lasts.

It’s hard to argue against that mentality.  Audiences and trends evolve so quickly that the extra day you spend crafting something may be the day that damns it to irrelevance.  Better to throw something together now, despite its shortcomings, and hope that an audience will like it enough to stick around and watch you grow (and, preferably, buy something to keep you from starving).

Not that you can’t produce something relevant in a short period of time.  Nor is every sprawling epic worthwhile.  But it’s hard to create an experience that lasts when you’re only interested in creating one that temporarily distracts.

Tags: art, audience, history, perception, pop culture, Social Media, Sociology