A friend recently sent me a link to the Amazon streaming page for my first feature film, All the Rage. At first I was surprised by the choice of image they'd selected. But it didn't take me long to notice that out of 5 stars my film is listed as having earned only 3.5
And, look, 3.5 stars ain't bad... unless you know that in most newspaper reviews the film got 5.
So in that context, I'm thinking: What happened?
Of course we know what happened. Not unlike a Roberts Supreme Court decision, the facts on the ground may not have changed one bit. Only the referees are different. Amazon merely posts the average of all the consumer posted reviews to the site.
Consumer-Only Reviews Support the Amazon Narrative. Amazon is God.
From one perspective—the business interests of a platform eager to remind us of its own hegemony—the choice is sound. No need to look beyond the feedback posted directly to Amazon by consumers just like you. Because as long as there's never a need to leave the site to help choose your next purchase, it gets just a little more awkward to argue with the fundamental Bezos belief: There is nothing for you beyond the walls of the kingdom.
But You Want Help Picking the Best Movie to Watch. And Consumer-Only Aggregates Are Not Very Helpful at All.
The Question for Those of Us Who Might Find this Alarming is: Are We Too Late to Claw Our Way Back to the Core of Who We Are?
And I have to say, since this episode aired in 2019 we've only drifted further ... Now, in an effort to encourage more of you to listen to this episode which I think is very important to know about, I'm going to leave this post to just this. The link plus a couple somewhat provocative statements.
Perhaps if you listen to this episode you will find a minute to post a comment here either arguing or clarifying my point by pointing to your own observations about all this. And we can start something akin to a sort of dialogue, though not dialogue in the strictest sense of the word because dialogue demand that two or more speakers are fully present for the natural human back and forth to occur.
Think about text messaging, even email exchanges. Not dialogue. Not by a mile. What do you suppose might be lost in this trade off -- we'll all stop having extended conversations and limit our communication to about a hundred characters hastily typed on a screen.
Beginning June 1, 2023 (and continuing with a new entry posted here each Thursday) I will be publishing a long and winding essay building an argument (brick by tiny brick) for a global decoupling from social media. It is my conviction that our very survival depends on it. And this series is my earnest attempt to convince you as well. I want to be absolutely transparent. I have no skin in this game, no business relationships of any kind with any of the platforms. Although this first set of entries begins with Facebook, this is not an argument against Facebook specifically but against every single platform that appeals to our human need for connection and exploits that need without concern for the detritus and misery it leaves in its wake. If you find these arguments persuasive I hope you'll keep coming back for more, feeling free to post your thoughts in the comments and share the posts with your friends. It is not lost on me: the irony of asking for help sharing via the platforms a clarion call for all of humanity to reject these very platforms. But tell me, how else is guy with an idea and no marketing budget to get the word out? In the end, long after you and I have said our last goodbye, I'm sure of this: word of mouth will always be the most powerful way for ideas to spread: when one person looks another in the eye and says: "Trust me." Thanks. - RT
A Thousand Cuts Death by Social Media: Intro to the Experiment
The piece goes on to attack Jennifer Garner for the recent revelation that she does not allow any of her three children to be on social media. The author labels Garner's embargo as "child abuse" which I think is a bit over-the-top. I mean, even if you disagree with the parenting choice, it feels like calling it "child abuse" is a stretch.
By this logic, would we then call Mormon parents who forbid their children from drinking alcohol and caffeine child abusers by virtue of the fact that they've cut their kids out of a life experience commonly shared by everyone else they'll meet when they go to college? Is the parent who decides that their kid will not be joining all the other kids on a Spring Break trip to Florida because she doesn't want her children to set foot in that state also a child abuser?
About a month ago or so, my business consultant Marcy Stahl told me about a new platform that provides virtually instantaneous transcription of Zoom meetings in progress as well as audio recordings of past meetings. [It's called Otter.ai ]
I wasn't sure whether I actually needed this service but the entry level subscription was inexpensive enough to allow me to sign up for a service I wasn't sure I needed.
As luck would have it, one of playwrights in this year's Self-Production Boot Camp which I'm teaching again for the Dramatists Guild Institute came to me with a request for transcriptions of each class. It's long been understood that some of us learn best visually, others learn best by participating in a group discussion and there are still others among us who will retain new concepts most readily when they're presented in written form.
And so thanks to Otter.ai I'm not only able to provide my students with a group discussion in class, a video recording of each class, my usual handouts and homework assignments but also now... for the first time in more than 25 years of teaching, I have the luxury of providing a written transcription of every word that is uttered in every Zoom class.
First I left Facebook. Then you convinced me that my bottom line depended on my return. Now I'm leaving Twitter.
Here's the inconvenient truth. Social media is fundamentally antisocial. And by that I mean the very architecture of social media does not support prosocial behavior. And when society is under threat of collapse, we all need (now more than ever) to find ways to access those parts of ourselves inclined toward acting in support of the needs of others first.
My mother, Nechama Tec, embarked on the first comprehensive study of the Polish Catholics who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. In her first book on the subject, When Light Pierced the Darkness,she uncovered some surprising traits shared by most of the hundreds of Righteous Christians she interviewed. Turns out the usual categories by which sociologists would first embark on a comparative analysis of large groups such as religiosity, social strata, gender, etc. seem to have been largely inconsequential. Instead, she found some less obvious deeper qualitative traits that were shared by a majority of these individuals. And one of them was a pre-war established habit of prosocial behavior.
Stop to offer help to someone who appears to be lost, dig into your pockets for some spare change to offer to a homeless person on the street, rearrange your schedule to help a friend who's being discharged from the hospital...
The people who habitually (easily, casually, even unconsciously) consider the needs of others important and interesting just might save us all when the shit hits the fan.
Social media encourages us to look inward, not outward. And it does this for one simple reason.
I'm in the middle (well, probably only 20% of the way in if I'm honest) of a steep new learning curve around social media algorithms, Search Engine Optimization and the very powerful and quixotic (not-to-be-overlooked) chill of audience disinterest.
And yesterday I came upon this paragraph in a pretty interesting (albeit somewhat depressing) post I'll link to here.
In early 2017 I made the decision to #unfriendfacebook. I decoupled. I changed my profile picture to this.
At the time I thought I understood my reasons. It seemed to me quite indisputable that the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election had been handed to Trump by Facebook. ///HOLD IT! STOP THIS BLOG POST RIGHT THERE!
As I write that last sentence, there is a tiny voice in the back of my mind tap-tap-tapping for attention. And I have just interrupted this post to hear it.
It says:
Hold on there, Roland, are you sure you want to let your political position muddy the waters here? I mean, we are a country divided and suppose one of your students or potential students is reading this. With that little bit about the 2016 election, you may have just eliminated 50% of your potential target market.
Regardless of how one falls on the many sides of that strange interrupting worry, what concerns me most, and what I need to address here is the kind of landscape in which such a worry even makes any sense at all.
And by that I mean, an online world which through the powerful and slowslowslow moving and largely imperceptible forces of corporate interests has grown and continues to tilt further and further toward a kind of malignant embrace which play acts connection but at its core is really just pretty much always trying to sell you something.
Because if this blog is seen to exist to serve two masters -- my human desire to dig down to the truthand the promotional needs of my business-- aren't we fooling ourselves just a little bit? I mean, if we actually try to convince ourselves that these two impulses can live under the same roof? Without killing each other?
What do you do when you wake up one morning to discover that the world you've helped build is pretty much one enormous billboard?
As I thought about whether to move the RT Inner Circle to Patreon I had to stop and think about everything I'd been producing, presenting, performing or hosting over the past few years.
Would the offerings stack up and strike all of you as worth it?
Patreon offers artists a reliable revenue stream (albeit a modest one) by inviting members of the artist's sphere of influence to make a monthly financial contribution to the general health and well-being of the artist and by extension everything they create and offer to the world each year.
It's a tiered model so, those most casually affiliated contribute something you may hardly notice. In our case we set the lowest tier at a $3 monthly contribution.
$3 per month amounts to a little more than $.09 a day. Hopefully anyone who has found joy or value of any kind in any of my workshops or the Hear Me Out programming won't hesitate to join us.
I decided to simply keep the three existing benefits of RT Inner Circle membership as has been the case for free for all these years: subscription to the semi-monthly RT Inner Circle e-Notes, priority notice of contests and other submission opportunities and the exclusive RT Inner Circle Comp Ticket promo codes which allow you to pay zero at many of the online events I host.
This choice, I hope, sends a clear message:
That thing you were getting for free all this time now has a $3 price tag but no one is going to force you to jump on board. You can choose to continue in the RT Inner Circle without signing up on Patreon but I really hope you'll seriously consider enrolling at Patreon, thereby contributing to a community that chooses to honor the value of what I've been making happen for people with a small outlay of cash each month.
It's never simple when something you've been getting for free is suddenly protected by a Paywall. I remember the first time I clicked to read an article in the New York Times online only to be suddenly asked if I had paid for a subscription. It felt like a betrayal.
That's the last thing I want to make you feel. So, if you wish to remain in the RT Inner Circle and avail yourself of certain opportunities, announcements and bits of professional advice contained in the e-Notes and on the YouTube channel, no one's going to be policing you, waiting to stop you.
But, some of the things I've been giving away free of charge, like Wednesday Gathering, for example, have never been free of cost to me. So, in order to continue to drop in on the occasional Wednesday, all we ask is that you set aside $36 a year for the privilege. I hope you'll agree that that's negligible compared to what it means to you to know that the gathering is here. Because of course, the Wednesday Gatherings are not a writer's workshop, like the Roland Tec Online Writers Workshopin which an instructor (me) has carefully constructed a course in order to result in a specific result (your completion of a specific goal for your work over a six month period).
As I said, before launching on Patreon, I thought it might help for me to make a comprehensive list of all the things I'd offered the community since the start of this pandemic.
If you're one of the dozens of folks who've emailed in frustration at not being able to locate a project, deadline, video, schedule or anything else related to a Roland Tec enterprise, you're in luck. As of today, you need only ever remember one address.
The other day I was chatting with a friend who is something of an expert in the field of SEO or Search Engine Optimization and all things WWW-related. And a fact of life of our brave new online world just sort of spilled out and I'm embarrassed to admit, although this fact of life or fact of internet architecture is apparently common knowledge to anyone posting content online, I had somehow never heard or read this fact.
Blog posts should be written around a set of search terms and the search terms should be carefully selected through research into the most common search terms in the topic about which you're writing. Apparently this is the way people who do not already know you and your blog will find their way to you.
When your posts have been carefully constructed around a curated set of key words and phrases designed to attract the right people to your blog, i.e. the people most likely to find it interesting and worthwhile.
Here's the very first post which now strikes me as a little wet behind the ears and possibly somewhat blind to the vast tundra that the internet can be to the writer who posts from the heart without even a moment spent considering how people might find their way to you.
In a way, then, this blog has been floating in the shadows, only entering the field of vision of the people somehow connected to its contributing authors. Maybe that's why what began as a group blog eventually dwindled down to pretty much me posting 90% of the time.
Were the other E.C. Authors simply not getting enough bang for their buck? I wish one of them had told me.
Since I founded Extra Criticum in May of 2008, I have simply been writing about whatever thing struck me as important, odd, amusing or troubling. The most thought I ever gave to search happened once I'd finished whatever post I was working on when I'd stare at that empty box and come up with about a dozen key words to enter which I assumed would assist the Google bots and any other search engine creatures to find the article based on... what I thought it was about.
My new play A Nagging Feeling Best Not Ignored(which I'm currently performing on Wednesday nights) grew out of the January 6th insurrection. My last film, We Pedal Uphill was my very personal attempt to make sense of the climate of fear which seemed to take root in this country in the months and years immediately following the September 11, 2001 attacks. The first play of mine that was produced in New York, Bodily Function, grew out of an offhand remark made by a midlevel corporate executive about workplace morale and bathroom breaks. The comment was delivered casually, almost cynically over a brunch with friends in Boston. Maybe the fact that the man who made the comment was not a friend of mine but rather a friend of friends, kept me from asking a pointed follow-up question. And so for weeks afterward I was haunted by the values behind his remarks. And eventually found my way to a play about a woman who has reached the pinnacle of success in her career yet somehow finds herself not quite feeling what she always imagined she would.
For whatever reason, there usually is some kind of thorn or confounding riddle at the center of the scripts I write. I'm drawn to the details of how human beings cope. We are uniquely creative and optimistic animals most of the time and how we manage to overcome, work around or stumble through life's towering obstacles is, I think, where the most vivid storytelling lies.
So it shouldn't have surprised me to find that my latest play, A Nagging Feeling Best Not Ignored has left some audience members feeling a kind of emotional whiplash. The piece is a kind of attempt to capture something of the tenuous relationship to truth and reality we find ourselves swimming in these days. And so the man at the center of the piece is, to put it mildly, an unreliable narrator.
It's difficult to know what to believe as he leads us from one assertion to the next, not much of it able to be held by the same single reality of one person's life.
It turns out that after an hour of very dark laughter, distortions of the facts of our reality and the tension of an audience holding one man's future in their hands through their vote at the end of the show, people need a few min. to process what they've just been through.
And you told us as much in the feedback offered online after the first three performances.
Post-Show Process Conversations Led by Leading Thinkers in the Fields of Psychology, Government, the Arts, Sociology, History and the Law.
I'm performing my latest play Wednesday nights in July at 8PM, EDT. It's a solo Zoom show because it's all about these past two years -- pandemic isolation, January 6th, social media, Zoom, fear and a social fabric's frayed edges. And believe it or not, it's also funny. Well, funny and dark. That's kinda my M.O.
Here's what audiences are saying. Oh! And if you have any intention of seeing it, you only have two more chances. Last performance is July 27th. I don't want you to miss this one and I have a hunch you might not want to either.
As we enter Year 3 of the early 21st century pandemic, it's understandable why we might all long for nothing more than a life outside... outside the walls of Zoom.
The last couple years were dominated by stories of loss -- loss of income, loss of job security, loss of essential routines, loss of friendships, confidence and, of course, the worst loss of all: loss of life.
But scattered here and there, tucked behind and alongside the wreckage lie some unexpected gifts.
Recent Comments