To Beat the Band

Just a few short days after I returned from my youth camp venture in Ohio I was asked would I please participate in a local church's VBS program. Despite having little inclination to resume my career as a youth worker, I agreed to assist in the musical accompaniment of two songs that the children would be learning. The first practice was about what you'd imagine; the kids were fairly loopy and had only the most incidental familiarity with the lyrics and the motions that were supposed to go along with them. At the second practice the VBS director, flanked by three boys with PPCC-issued hand drums, approached me and asked if I would please help “lead” the boys as they “accompanied” me in the percussion section. Turns out that these three musicians were not so much selected based on their drumming skills but more based on their unwillingness to do anything else. On the final day of VBS, all the parents arrived early to see their children perform the songs that they had been learning all week. I had mentally resigned myself to a posture of, “Just let this happen and don't worry about it” so when the first song managed to wobble its way to the chorus and the drums finally dropped, I wasn't overly shaken by “BOM! PLONK! PLONK! PLONK! BOM! PLONK! BOM! BOM!” The pianist, generally accustomed to even-toned choir directors and heritage hymns, looked over at me in barely concealed horror. I just stared stoically into the distance, doing my best to maintain a clean, simple beat. In the end, it didn't really matter much. Parents is gonna clap for their kids no matter what.

I don't (yet) have a Twitter account and I have historically used RSS to “follow” folks' tweetmailings. Over the past year, Twitter has forced me to reconfigure my RSS client a few times and on June 14(ish), Twitter dropped RSS support altogether, delivering another blow to an already under-appreciated propagation tool. I've read a few articles that suggest that Twitter is in fact replacing RSS as a propagation tool and that strikes me as being too bad. With RSS it's easier to delineate between a column on literary criticism and a photograph of what your roommate had for breakfast.

Speaking of the subtle evolution of the social technology landscape, I was speaking with a friend a few weeks ago and it came up that Facebook is not the jam. This will no doubt be exactly no surprise to most of you, but I hadn't really thought about it before. Facebook's “Face ID” function practically begs users to tag each other but they don't. The photographs and referential one-liners are all pouring into Facebook second-hand from Instagram and Twitter. Most of what's being committed directly to Facebook is some brand of political indignation that's too heavy for Instagram and too long for Twitter. Mobile computing is turning Facebook into a CNN comment section.

Happy August!

-Ryan