This has been social media summer for me: rather than soaking up the sun, frolicking in the waves and dancing the sultry nights away with an eye to where the next Mojito is coming from, I’ve been soaking up the tweets, floundering in Facebook and blogging the grey days away, with an eye to my Search Engine Optimisation.
It’s been a steep learning curve – and an exciting one. I would never have believed I’d get so excited about being e-mailed with notice of a re-tweet, or get such a kick from a comment on the blog. It’s become all about the visibility, the reach, the influence, the followers…
I have to confess to getting quite hard-nosed and outcome-driven about it all. But I was stopped short when
talking to my highly valued friend and coaching colleague, Elaine Burke (find her at http://www.linkedin.com/in/elaineburke). Elaine started to talk about generosity and the importance of being generous with your materials and your knowledge. I immediately jumped in with, “oh, yes, of course, as a loss-leader” thinking in terms of growing a following and a market by getting your materials known. “No,” said Elaine, “I meant just being generous for its
own sake.”
I felt abashed and yet also excited. Connections started to be made in my mind, dominoes started to fall and cogwheels turn as I thought of all the material I had looked at in the last few weeks: words, diagrams, videos, ideas, reviews and tools that others had been generous enough to share with their online communities.
Links emerged for me between this generosity, so apparent within social media, and the idea of each of us as a curator of our own creative worlds. With iPods, we know longer rely on someone deciding on which music goes with which other music: we decide, we curate our own musical space. Then we share it for others to enjoy and adapt and make their own. With Flickr and InstaGram, we are all capable of curating and sharing an exhibition of our lives and passions for others to view, pass on and critique; we curate our own aesthetic space.
And with social media, and its inherent democratisation of so much knowledge, we can each curate our own libraries of information, picking what is relevant, and organising it in such a way as to make sense within our own unique workflow and social patterns.
This must influence us as artists and makers, as we look for inspiration within our social media communities as well as within our physical and inner worlds. How exciting to see others curate our work, incorporating it into their own lives and spaces.
Thanks to Elaine, I will seek to practise generosity for its own sake in my social media dealings – just as I take for granted that I can benefit from the generosity of others – and I will look with curiosity to see whether and how others curate my ideas into their worlds.
I know Michele would appreciate your feedback on her post, please leave your comments below.
