Hi: I'm Doreen Marchionni (Ph.D. '09, Missouri School of Journalism). I'll be your intergalactic pilot on this journey through my dissertation. Send whiskey, please.
Author’s note: I intend to keep the language in this blog pretty clean, unlike in my real life. But there are a few salty words below, so I’m warning you now.
The New York Times’ obit on J. D. Salinger a week ago reminded us of the power of scarcity: The fewer stories he wrote and the less we knew about him, the more obsessed we became about him. Less supply, more demand.
I thought about that in the context of social media. I joined Twitter a year ago, but only anonymously and only to enjoy a few friends and comedians with the occasional joke about my greyhound’s gas or whatever. It’s a busy week if I post once.
After finishing the dissertation, I was burning to share the data. A blog seemed the best route, accompanied by a Twitter account in my name. But I was reluctant because there’s so much crap out there: self-aggrandizing posts, Tweets and status updates by douchebags at volumes unfathomable even to a former grunt newspaper woman.
I’m lucky if I have a semi-interesting thought a week much less 20, 30 OR 40 A DAY! Half the time I’m distracted by the mundane, like how the dog eats so little yet produces so much waste.
Much of the social-media excrement comes from some pretty famous people in my field, or those trying to be. I’m told I should follow them in hopes of getting noticed. But because of the non-stop volume of shit they pump out — retweets without comment or context, never-ending self-promotion, name-dropping — I have a hard time identifying with them. And they’d drown out the cool people in my stream. You just can’t follow webcocks.
So here’s to scarcity. Brevity. Keeping it real. Remember the scene in “Citizen Kane” where Kane posts his “declaration of principles” (yeah, I know, Hearst was a douche in real life)? Here’s mine to you:
- Less is more.
- No douchespeak.
- Still working on this one …
