Philthy Conversations with Artists

Chatter

There is a fashionable, sexy, and dangerous idea threaded through Web 2.0 marketing.

The idea is this: you can sell a product online by blurring the lines between your personal and professional persona. In fact, the Web 2.0 gurus say this is the only way to attract and keep an online audience these days.

And they’re right. Social media consultants like my friend Bud can get their company’s name out there while becoming a recognizable, hip persona on the internet.  This doesn’t happen if Bud’s ‘Budness’ seems contrived. And so he blogs, writes articles, concepts videos, tweets, and let’s us know when he’s inspired, interested, annoyed, and sick with the flu. I like and respect Bud, but I had to unfriend him on twitter because he had so many tweets he buried the less frequent tweets of my other friends.

And there is Jason, another one of my public friends, someone I met online when he participated in my 2007 poetry celebration (send me a poem, I’ll send you a book) at NinaAlvarez.net. Now we’re friends on facebook, twitter, and he nudges me to keep the poetry coming, which makes him awesome in my book. But like Bud, he tweets and tweets and tweets, from work, from the bar, from the road. He shares likes, thoughts, interests, observations in 140 characters or less. And they keep coming and coming and coming.

And then, there’s me.

When I was driving from New York State back to Florida last May I tweeted all the way whiile I simultaneously listened to my Web 2.0 Marketing Live podcast and took notes on a post-in note pad taped to my steering wheel. It was lonely on the road and it was a nervy, heady thing to write down “try beebo, jaiku, and squidoo” on my cell phone, then send them out for my microblog readers to be enlightened by.

How transparent is transparent?

When I got to Europe in July, it slowed down. My cell phone service didn’t work across seas and I often forgot to actually go to twitter to update. I kept up on my facebook postings though, especially during those weeks when I was alone and lonely in Paris.

After a summer in Europe in which I spent 30-36 hours online for work plus another 10 socializing, and after 6 months of unquestioningly merging my writing personality with my work persona, I started to realize that I felt both ragged and blocked. I found myself carefully weighing everything I said at my personal blogs and often choosing to censor myself. My professional persona became more important than my personal persona, and this wouldn’t be a problem if I could have admitted it to myself. Instead I was still writing posts that seemed honest but were actually just the right blend of what was real and what I believed others would believe was an acceptable interior life for a marketing guru-in-training.

The Difference Between Protecting and Censoring Yourself

There are things I’ve written I won’t post on my blog…things that I choose not to share. This is normal. This is healthy. But those decisions should be made on their own terms, not because I am afraid of Nina Alvarez, fiction writer, and Nina Alvarez, marketing writer, coming to some sort of clash online.

If you are an artist and also a designer, a writer and also a copywriter, and you put most of your work online, it is vitally important that you think very carefully about you job. Is it the kind of job where the two can merge? These days, companies want their talent to already have an online following. It adds credibility and interest to their projects. But what happens when you want to write or make art that questions, subverts, attacks? The truth is that it still doesn’t look professional to cry out to the heavens, to throw one’s hands up, or even to sound your barbaric yawp from the rooftops of the world.

So, what does it mean then, when we say we are merging the personal and professional?

I started NinaAlvarez.net, Phantomcity.blogspot.com, and PhilthyArt.com because I needed some way to speak authentically to the world. And when I started writing for Artspan as Chief Editor no one EVER asked me to change any of that. But here’s the thing: Even though no one ever asked me to curb these things, it still happened. It happened inside my own head.

Silence

The last week of September, seven days before my flight from Paris to back to Philadelphia, my lap top crashed. For one week I had no email, no facebook, no perez, no youtube, no surfing, not even itunes to listen to my audiobooks or music.

The silence, as they say, was deafening.

I had been a good traveler, or so I thought. I’d walked from my apartment in Montmarte to the Seine at the center of the city many times. I’d seen the important museums; gone out every day to my boulangerie for pain au chocolat; discovered La Marine, my favorite cafe overlooking the canal Saint Martin; even had a brief romance with a spanish guitar player that started through a window. But it wasn’t until that damn computer gave up the ghost that I realized I hadn’t actually been in Paris.

Without my community of friends to sustain me through our online chats, I was forced to wander the city for days and look for connections. I craved contact and had to open myself heart and soul to the people around me. The half-life the internet had been supplying me with me was suddenly cut off. I had to begin to once again cultivate a real life from my real life.

Those last 7 days I made 3 new incredible friends and shed tension I’d been holding in my body for half a year. Frustrations I didn’t even know about were being sloughed off. I realized, as we only do after waking, that I had been half-asleep.

The Balance Between Chatter and Silence

Now, in Florida, still making my living by writing for the internet, and even more isolated than I was in Europe, I’ve found myself back in this troublesome role. It is not a simple matter of bad and good, right and wrong. I reach my audience through the internet. I get jazzed thinking about viral videos, social networking, and the power put in the hands of writers and artists through websites, blogs, and a bit of creativity. I keep up with friends across seas on facebook. Thanks to social networking sites, know on a daily basis what Amanda W., a girl I hadn’t seen since we were 12, is doing. Everyone that was ever important to me has come back into my life through Facebook and Myspace.

But when I look back on these months, what will I remember? A computer screen?

We remember moments in the real world: a touch, a friend’s face, a conversation, a surprise, the feel of a book in our hands, the sound of the ocean or street, the sunset. The changing and unexpected face of each day.

But, since I must spend a certain amount of time online each week, I try to make it efficient, clear-headed, and enjoyable. And for those hours in which I’m doing my own unpaid work, like writing this blog, I try to challenge myself to move ever closer to fearless authenticity.

And when I am working on a novel or short story, I turn off the internet. I’ve even taken to sitting down with a notepad and writing freehand when I am feeling screen-drained.

I still like to twitter and post on facebook frequently. Some lonely, frenetic part of me cleaves the idea of the internet as a party that is always going on. But the truth is, it isn’t. We’re all in our little rooms on on our cell phones sending messages to a party that we’re not really at. This doesn’t mean it’s all big fake. Communication is telepathy, as Stephen King says in “On Writing.” I’m writing this at 2:30 am on November 25, 2008 in Largo, FL and you, wherever and whenever you read it are in conversation with me. I’m speaking to you and that’s real in its own important way.

But for 4 years I’ve done less relationships, less kissing, less sex, less walks, less laughing, less drinks, less sunsets, less books, less looking someone in the eye, less paying attention, less listening, and less dancing because of this screen and this keyboard. It may be a matter of balance, it may be that I have to walk away altogether. Althought to walk away altogether would mean I’m walking into that long sunset alongside the print version on the New York Times. And no one wants to be put out to pasture at 30 or 157.

So, until my work or my environment changes, it’s a matter of balance. And it helps, it really does, just to tell one’s truth outloud. But that brings us back to square one.