I shall apologize in advance, Constant Reader, as this is a particularly half-assed blog post. I spent the past week preparing an outline for a potential future product, and sending out submissions for other scripts, so my time has been fully occupied with tasks that aren’t the least bit interesting to read about. I didn’t even get to do the whole “Barbenheimer” thing. So I do feel as if I’ve let you folks down, asking you to read a whole post about I have nothing to post about. I feel especially bad for the people who receive notifications about this blog through Twitter, as they’re receiving a whole tweet telling them that there isn’t anything to tell them.
Of course, I feel bad for (almost) anybody on Twitter simply because it’s Twitter. (Fascists don’t count. Take that, fascists.) And I take some comfort in the notion that I can’t possibly do a job as incompetently as the folks currently running that site would seem to be doing.
I’d be content to simply gawk at that company’s death-spiral along with the rest of us, and that’s exactly what I’d do if I were in a different profession. But actors and writers have had it drilled into us for the past decade and more; we have to have a presence on social media. Nobody’s going to take the risk of hiring us unless they know we have a built-in audience, and the metric we’ve decided to use is the number of people we’ve convinced – through a carefully curated feed or straight-up emotional blackmail – to follow us on one of these sites. Since a tweet, once tweeted, is available for all to see, and anybody can choose to follow us, that specific website has become the metric of choice. If you want entry into the highest eschelons of the theatrical professions, if you want to prove you can bring the box office, then craft is helpful – but by gum, you’d better know how to tweet.
Except tweets are “X”s now, and Twitter is ridiculous glitchy, and the conversations therein have grown ever more nightmarish. In that sense, it’s a rather accurate reflection of the country at large, but I digress – the point is that more and more people are fleeing to greener digital pastures, abandoning Twitter to only the most rabid of Muskovites. (Or Elongelicals. There’s a few choice nicknames making the rounds.) Eventually, even casting directors will realize what the rest of us have come to understand – that Twitter as a gauge of talent or marketability simply has no value any more.
But I’m sure that, rather than comb through the slush file or spending their evenings attending gritty off-off-Broadway showcases (if those are even a thing anymore), the gatekeepers will simply ordain a new social media site to take its place.
And I have no idea which one it will be.
So for the first time in the history of this blog, I’m throwing it open to you, Constant Reader. This blog has a comments feature; most of the time it just accrues the spam I clear out every week, but you could theoretically use it to tell me I’m awesome. (Please tell me that. I’m an actor and a writer; I crave approval.) If there’s a specific option amongst the plethora of new social media sites which you find works best for theatrical activity, feel free to sing its praises in the comments.
Maybe I’ll see you there!