12-21-2018, 05:22 PM
(This post was last modified: 12-21-2018, 05:30 PM by RiverNotch.)
*What* social media? This is social media. So's /r/poetry, though I haven't bothered to visit that. And youtube, to a lesser extent also spotify.
Anyway, idk if there are any real solid literary critics that focus on poetry over in youtube*, although that would be fun to watch. I do watch a lot of critics there, but it's mostly for popular media, like video games, movies, and pop music. Part of it's to do with the clicks, but part of it I think is the medium itself -- youtube, being an audiovisual medium, is better suited for analyzing things that are also audiovisual, so of course the most poetic things I've watched relate to hip hop.
Spotify as a medium for music is generally iffy. There's no real curation there, and the company seems to be rather shady when it comes to promoting certain artists' music (Drake's latest album is still fresh on my mind). A lot of the music there is really oriented towards clicks, moreso than in youtube, where a lot of the critical channels i subscribe to understand their fundamentally niche appeal. Soundcloud is really just aural soup, a lot like pre-1960s radio: if you wanna look for the poetic stuff there, even when looking at genres that have a propensity for that like hip hop or folk, you need an external curator, like Greil Marcus or Robert Christgau.
And then there's the media you're probably referring to, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Twitter I don't think is a good place for the sort of poetry that would be worth posting here, alhough it can get very poetic. I think, but I don't frequent that place nearly as much as a lot of folks, those who advertise themselves as poets on Twitter *and* use it mostly as a medium for disseminating their poetry are probably not very good poets -- usually creators who use Twitter use it for discussing, well, their lives, when their next book is coming up, etc. As a poetic medium, it's more like a comedy club, a witty stage play, or even wisdom literature: the poetry comes in the way certain exchanges involve really witty repartee, like whenever companies trie to out-meme each other.
I genuinely don't know that much about Instagram, but from my understanding it's a lot like youtube, too, in that the focus is less on the words and more on the pictures. So more likely than not whatever poetry is on there is gonna be bad, or at least the trite sort of stuff that would be valueless without the picture to which it's attached.
As for facebook, it's pure trash. There are some pages that are solid, like the whole Humans of New York series, but it's really all about 'connecting people'. Which means it doesn't really connect people at all, only masks of people, and oftentimes that could mean people finding themselves in soundboards all too unhealthy for them, hence the whole fake news dilemma. It isn't like this site, or reddit, or even youtube, where having an actual focus other than the selves we want to present to the world means that we can actually moderate ourselves. It's more like a reverse 4chan, which with its complete anonymity allows for folks to be completely unrestrained, to be their true trollish selves.
* - although i hear some folks here have released yt vids?
This means that on facebook rare is the person who wants to express anything too complicated, anything too contrarian, for fear of making a bad impression on others. I tried posting some of my stuff there long ago, and of course much of them weren't very good, but all the folks were either 'oh, this is very good!' or 'oh, who the heck are you really?'. no one really comes there to read, not unless it's something they already have an opinion on. there's nothing critical about facebook, even when all one's friends are critics. it's trash.
Anyway, idk if there are any real solid literary critics that focus on poetry over in youtube*, although that would be fun to watch. I do watch a lot of critics there, but it's mostly for popular media, like video games, movies, and pop music. Part of it's to do with the clicks, but part of it I think is the medium itself -- youtube, being an audiovisual medium, is better suited for analyzing things that are also audiovisual, so of course the most poetic things I've watched relate to hip hop.
Spotify as a medium for music is generally iffy. There's no real curation there, and the company seems to be rather shady when it comes to promoting certain artists' music (Drake's latest album is still fresh on my mind). A lot of the music there is really oriented towards clicks, moreso than in youtube, where a lot of the critical channels i subscribe to understand their fundamentally niche appeal. Soundcloud is really just aural soup, a lot like pre-1960s radio: if you wanna look for the poetic stuff there, even when looking at genres that have a propensity for that like hip hop or folk, you need an external curator, like Greil Marcus or Robert Christgau.
And then there's the media you're probably referring to, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Twitter I don't think is a good place for the sort of poetry that would be worth posting here, alhough it can get very poetic. I think, but I don't frequent that place nearly as much as a lot of folks, those who advertise themselves as poets on Twitter *and* use it mostly as a medium for disseminating their poetry are probably not very good poets -- usually creators who use Twitter use it for discussing, well, their lives, when their next book is coming up, etc. As a poetic medium, it's more like a comedy club, a witty stage play, or even wisdom literature: the poetry comes in the way certain exchanges involve really witty repartee, like whenever companies trie to out-meme each other.
I genuinely don't know that much about Instagram, but from my understanding it's a lot like youtube, too, in that the focus is less on the words and more on the pictures. So more likely than not whatever poetry is on there is gonna be bad, or at least the trite sort of stuff that would be valueless without the picture to which it's attached.
As for facebook, it's pure trash. There are some pages that are solid, like the whole Humans of New York series, but it's really all about 'connecting people'. Which means it doesn't really connect people at all, only masks of people, and oftentimes that could mean people finding themselves in soundboards all too unhealthy for them, hence the whole fake news dilemma. It isn't like this site, or reddit, or even youtube, where having an actual focus other than the selves we want to present to the world means that we can actually moderate ourselves. It's more like a reverse 4chan, which with its complete anonymity allows for folks to be completely unrestrained, to be their true trollish selves.
* - although i hear some folks here have released yt vids?
This means that on facebook rare is the person who wants to express anything too complicated, anything too contrarian, for fear of making a bad impression on others. I tried posting some of my stuff there long ago, and of course much of them weren't very good, but all the folks were either 'oh, this is very good!' or 'oh, who the heck are you really?'. no one really comes there to read, not unless it's something they already have an opinion on. there's nothing critical about facebook, even when all one's friends are critics. it's trash.